Back off nuclear precipice, allies urge
Dialing down verbal violence could ease U.S., North Korea away from potential disaster
The prospect of a catastrophic conflict on the Korean Peninsula is so alarming that U.S. allies and China urged President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to soften their rhetoric and start a dialogue to find a diplomatic solution to their standoff.
Several steps are possible to go that diplomatic route, including a halt to incendiary threats, recognition that North Korea is a nuclear-armed state and a freeze on further nuclear weapons and missile tests by Kim’s regime, experts on the crisis say.
None of those steps would be easy, as Trump underscored Thursday in declaring that his warning to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea perhaps “wasn’t tough enough.”
His harsh comments triggered the biggest one-day drop in stocks since May.
But Trump said he was open to negotiations to try to bridge a huge gap between his goal — that Kim give up his nuclear weapons — and the North Korean dictator’s insistence on retaining them as an insurance policy against being overthrown by the United States.
Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush tried diplomacy with North Korea, but the regime reneged on agreements to curb its weapons programs.
Although diplomacy is risky, analysts said the two sides can make these moves to try to go down that road again and avoid military conflict:
Lower the rhetoric. “The more we threaten, the worse the situation is going to get,” said Jenny Town, assistant director of the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Neither side has backed off the flame-throwing talk.
“North Korea better get their act together, or they’re going to
The federal government confirmed 2016 as the planet’s warmest year on record, according to a report released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The combined influence of long-term global warming and a strong El Niño early in the year led to last year’s all-time record heat, NOAA said.
While El Niño is a natural warming of Pacific Ocean water, man-made global warming is caused by greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal.
The amount of carbon dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases, in the atmosphere climbed to its highest level in 800,000 years, the report found.
The report also noted other signs of a warming planet in 2016:
Greenhouse gases were the highest on record.
Sea-surface temperatures were the highest on record.
Global upper ocean heat content were at a near-record high.
Global sea level was the highest on record.
Antarctic had a record low sea ice extent.
Known as the State of the Climate, the annual report is prepared by more than 450 scientists from more than 60 countries and published in conjunction with the American Meteorological Society.
It’s the most comprehensive annual summary of Earth’s climate.
The U.S. alone endured 15 separate weather or climate-related disasters last year.
At a cost of some $46 billion, it amounted to the second-highest total since 1980, when the records began.
The report comes just days after President Trump officially informed the United Nations of his plan to remove the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, which the U.S. joined in 2016. Trump announced his plan to withdraw on June 1.
A separate study published Thursday found it is “extremely unlikely” that 2014, 2015 and 2016 would have been the warmest consecutive years on record without the influence of humancaused climate change.
That study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters, said the likelihood of seeing three straight record-breaking years without the effects of climate change is “no greater than 0.03%.”
“With climate change, this is the kind of thing we would expect to see. And without climate change, we really would not expect to see it,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University and lead author of the study.