Global Warming and Worldview

In February 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “concluded for the first time that global warming is unequivocal and that human activity is the main driver." Despite this only 13% of Congressional Republicans think human activity is contributing to it. Few Americans doubt global warming is real, but about 30% think it's 'just an evolution of nature' - human activity playing no role. Ok, great. So it's ok to ignore it because it's natural? Well, no.

Is it ok to ignore a hurricane? How about the flooding of our coastal cities? How about global famine due to extreme drought? How about the death of billions? Global warming, no matter the cause - be it human or "natural" - will cause significant changes in our weather that will result in all of these things happening. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has recently published a report authored by climatologist Aiguo Dai stating amongst other things that "most of the western two-thirds of the United States will be significantly drier by the 2030s...that the United States and many other heavily populated countries "face a growing threat of severe and prolonged drought."  It's not just that our air conditioning bills will go up. Global warming will cause an interruption in food production worldwide - just as a start - that will affect all of us - and it will happen much sooner than you think.  You don't get to ignore global warming because you've decided that it is being blamed on humans by a bunch of whinny liberal soft-headed hippies that want to implicate progress and would have us all return to living in grass huts.

Global warming is real. If we don't do something about it there will be a global catastrophe in our children's lifetime, perhaps in ours. And here's the real kicker - we will need to completely change the way we interact with the world if we are to survive this. We're not going to be able to protect our families with walls, or underground shelters, or a super-powerful military machines. A unilateral search for security will simply not work. The problem is global.  There will be no shelter behind walls.

To survive global warming we will have to learn to think in a new way. As never before, the future of each of us depends on the good of all, worldwide. It will require decades of cooperative international effort to solve. We cant simply scoff, stopping at denying that mankind has caused it. We have to join in a worldwide effort to temper it's devastation. And to do that we have to become citizens of the world.