The Way I See It #2

The way I see it, global warming is real. As real as the liquid crystal display you're intuiting these colored pixels on. As real as the clothes you are wearing (or for my more free-spirited readers, the clothes in your drawers or closets). As real as the fingers you're typing or clicking with. Real real real. Read me again. Global warming is real. The globe is warming. Earth is getting hotter.

The way I see it, global warming is real. So is global cooling. That's just not happening right now...not quite yet. When I was a high school senior studying biology, I was lucky enough to a have an associate presenter come and give the tried and true "An Inconvenient Truth" presentation. The real deal. One turning point of their presentation, some cold hard fact the presentation relied on came in the form of a graph, mapping the average approximated yearly temperatures for Earth for the past, say, many years. Tens or hundreds of thousands of years. The graphs was very informative and very easy to read. Temperature versus time. It conformed to a very simple path... plainly-put, a zig-zag, deviating from a given medium, parallel to the x-axis. The presenter carefully led the graph up to the present day, noting the highs followed by the lows, and so on, and so on. until she reached the last high...a smidgen higher than most of the earlier highs. I hate to be blunt, but these really were cold hard facts. I don't plan on explaining any further...I'd hope I don't need to.

The way I see it, this sort of thing is silly. Very silly. Excessively silly. Just like the vast majority of all the other measures we see propagated in the fight against global warming. I can't really make any grounded statement against such measures; my argument was going to be that all we really need do is never forsake the normal counter-measures against pollution and waste that we seem to never afford what their convenience deserves. Turn off the light when we leave a room? I'll just have to turn it back on later. Ride the bus across campus instead of drive? Then I'd have to see other people. Recycle everything I can instead of commit it to a perpetually deteriorating, possibly to be burned off landfill? Nah, my recycle bin doesn't make quite as good a basketball goal as does my trash can. I'm no environmental imbalance analyst, but I'm fairly sure I can intuit a lowering of carbon emissions and a step "against" global warming from all of those. If global warming is something we're supposed to be fighting in the first place.

Keep in mind, like I said, I'm no analyst, and I can't really make any grounded statements. It's just the way I see it.