Global Warming: A Real Problem?

Jeremiah Magan Managing Editor

Despite the fact that Fullerton set record high temperatures for the month of March, people still have a hard time believing that global warming is real. The weather patterns are rapidly changing and becoming more extreme all over.

The tsunami in the South Pacific, Hurricane Katrina and the unseasonable heat in late winter and early spring are all signs that the weather is just going to continue changing.

It will change in such a way that this place we call home will no longer be inhabitable by those that helped ruin it.

Delusions of infallibility the human race has of itself aside, we are the ones to blame. We waste our natural resources and deny any involvement, or try to pass the blame onto someone else. When presented with an opportunity to reduce any further damage to the environment and try to delay the inevitable, we scoff at the alternatives and poke holes in the only solutions we are presented with.

The nation as a whole does not know how to feel about the prospect of global warming. Some people tend to believe everything their favorite politician tells them, so depending on what color they favor most, their feelings on the situation will follow. Democrats tend to believe that global warming is a true threat and Republicans believe it is all just hippy-tree-hugger nonsense. There are, of course, exceptions in which a politician will go against the grain of their party and switch sides.

While it may be just propaganda, there are those that believe that former Vice President Al Gore padded some of the stats and embellished some of the facts in his Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Some believe it was to increase the impact of the issue and cause more people to see the film. Others believe this is Gore's version of a scare tactic that he will use to get himself into the oval office. After all, who better to help the nation make changes towards healing the environment than the man that brought it to their attention?

What it all comes down to is the fact that America is one of the leading causes of global warming, we consume and waste more natural resources than anyone else in the world. We need to start doing more than just watch movies and talk about global warming, and actually get up and do something to fix the mess we've made. Alternative fuels, renewable energy, and natural resource management are what we will need if we are to survive as a species.

Andrew S. Lay Editor-In-Chief

Global warming has recently taken the center-stage in the political debates and controversies leading up to the '08 presidential election. This is most notable in Al Gore's controversial documentary " An Inconvienent Truth."

One such issue that still bogles my mind, and readers can ask their parents about this, is that in the '60s and '70s scientists were absolutely positve that we were returning to another ice age. This theory was as widely accepted as the global warming scare. What I'm trying to say is that the more scientists try to predict the constantly changing atmosphere, the more they find that it is, of course, unpredictable. Just ask your local weatherman.

Just recently a team of female scientists attempted a trek to the South-pole in order to bring awareness to the impending doom global warming promises. Oddly enough what they found were temperatures less than 50 degrees below zero. In fact, they had to call the expedition off thanks to severe frostbite. The temperatures they found were far below what other scientists had predicted.

The scientific community's response was that the most important thing to remember about global warming is that it is unpredictable. How can they possibly predict that global warming is such a threat if it is so unpredictable?

The only thing that I find consistent in the scientific community is that they are consistently inconsistent. They speak volumes about themelves every time they promise a specific reaction and it fails.

The recent trend in science is that just about everything wrong with the weather is due to global warming. "Objectivety is completely skewed when scientists research while looking for a specific result. They simply see what they want their research to show.

It is just scientific speculation, and the panic is all for nothing.