Posted on March 22, 2006
Recently, there has been a vigorous and emotional debate in our nation regarding what, if anything, should be done about global climate change. Members firmly entrenched in our oil-and-coal-addicted society may not appreciate it being pointed out, but the earth is undergoing rapid and startling changes to its climate faster than predicted, and the vastly overwhelming majority of scientists have reached a consensus that carbon dioxide produced by our industries and transportation services are a significant contributor to these changes. Some of our own citizens and politicians don’t want to take the necessary steps to curb emissions, and instead choose to ignore the scientific evidence and changes occurring all around us. Many people seem to believe that because global climate change cannot be proven outright, it is not happening. But science never states anything with absolute certainty; it only looks at the probability of something happening. In this case, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a world coalition of scientists, has determined that there is at least a 90 percent probability that human activity is causing global warming.
Our nation is in denial. Although our president has made repeated claims that he cares for the environment, Bush refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol on emissions reduction, making the United States and Australia the only nations to decline ratification. President Bush cites economic concerns as the reason for abstaining from signing the protocol. Bush’s decision is unwise, however, because if current trends continue, there may not be an economy left to protect. Famed scientist Stephen Hawking once stated that because of global warming, we might not survive the next thousand years, and our planet “might end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulfuric acid.”
At this point, anyone touting the opinion that humanity will easily “adapt” to what it is doing to the earth and continue to progress unaffected is probably either misinformed, aligned with an organization profiting from the destruction of the planet, or has a vested political or economic interest in covering up and distorting the facts.
While adaptation to the changes happening around us will be necessary to some degree, this idea could easily mislead people into thinking that mitigation of greenhouse gases is not important. How well would we be able to adapt to drought, famine, rising sea levels, and increasingly disastrous weather phenomena? All one needs to do is look at the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina to see how difficult it is going to be for humanity to adapt to global climate change.
Even if draconian measures were taken immediately to completely curb the emission of carbon dioxide, the rapid warming the earth is experiencing would not subside for decades due to the long-lived nature of carbon dioxide. It may be too late to avert this global catastrophe happening all around us, but we must at least try to minimize it.
The first steps of this effort are beginning to take place. Realizing that the Kyoto protocol is not enough to stop global climate change, Britain recently drafted the Climate Change Bill which will cut the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions by 60 percent over the next 43 years. Prime Minister Tony Blair called the bill “revolutionary.”
Other nations are finally taking responsibility for the welfare of our world, and the United States must follow. The only rational way to do this is to take action now. Politicians lacking in scientific understanding must stop saying that we should do nothing about global warming because we aren’t 100 percent sure that it exists. Instead, it is time for them to start actually listening to scientists, who know far more about the matter than they do.
Taking action means being honest with ourselves, and with our situation — a situation which must no longer be denied or ignored. Global climate change is not a conspiracy, and it is not an issue that exclusively concerns politically leftist-leaning citizens. Our species is in the midst of a great and terrible thing that we have wrought upon ourselves, and we are left with the burden of correcting the matter, or we risk becoming a brief cosmic memory.
Steve Borowsky is a sophomore biology major.
