A plea for the environment: Don't simply turn a blind eye to the facts - Strange Brew

The threat of warming from carbon dioxide emissions seems to be too distant to actually change our weather and raise ocean levels. Have you really noticed much change in these past few years? Rain forests are so far away - and who really cares about them anyway?

It seems that in our isolation within the boundaries of N. Charles St. and University, the vast majority of students have lost sight of worldly environmental issues. Students turn a stiff shoulder of apathy to global problems that will one day affect our children.

Humans are an extremely myopic species, and capitalism and democracy stand to support immediate necessities or instant gratification, over positive, long-term changes or goals, hidden beneath negative byproducts. Don't read this wrong - I obviously value my basic freedoms and the ability to elect a president over Stalin's devastating failure to make communism work in the Soviet Union. But environmental policies are a different story.

Nature doesn't work the way people work. The average life span of a human is less than 80 years, while our earth has been around for 4.5 billion years. It is exceedingly difficult for humans to fathom their long-term effects on their surroundings within a single lifetime. Luckily, however, we have our old friend science to aid us in discovering patterns we could not have come across on our own.

We have been collecting data for centuries and figuring out how the gears of nature turn. These very patterns are what allow us to make educated predictions into the future - for determining the day and time of eclipses, comets or even just tides and the sunset. Science relies on data and experimentation to prove a theory - where a proof generally consists of a series of repeatable and observable predictions. But there are many theories that, while still have not been "proven," are nonetheless accepted as fact. Global warming is slowly becoming one of these such theories.

In 1979, the late Carl Sagan wrote in Broca's Brain that he thought some satellite data suggested the earth was actually cooling. In the mid-1980s, he became one of the earliest pioneers of the global warming theory. In the late 1980s, there was little more than a handful of volumes and articles dealing seriously with greenhouse gasses. Now there are enough papers and studies to fill a library.

Only a few years ago, most of the opposition to global warming was in the debate of whether or not it existed. Now it has become a question of how much warming is the fault of human activity and how much is natural. It is interesting to note that the general consensus among conservatives is that there will never exist enough proof to force the U.S. to take action, (as seen in the failure of the Kyoto Protocol and America's constant reluctance to make emissions standards more stringent). Science has been making serious progress on the road to truth.

On the one hand, we have scientific reason, which has a very good track record for being right. There is also a growing consensus of scientists warning us that global warming demands immediate attention.

On the other hand, government policies tend to favor the businesses that back them (legal bribery) - they turn a deaf ear to the pleas of organizations like the Sierra Club, while adhering to economists' warnings that any change to industry (like setting emissions standards for cars) will devastate the economy. It seems as though we listen to the predictions by economists more than we do those by scientists. When was the last time anyone could predict the stock market?

It may be a necessary evil born out of democracy, but this dichotomy between shortsighted government policies and long-term scientific predictions, unequivocally threaten the future of our race. It is terrifying to think that the scientist's vindication will come only when humans have devastated the natural balance of the Earth. True, we will be able to persevere through pretty much anything, but our survival will be made possible through millions of extinctions, a permanently disfigured planet and atmosphere and a depraved, disgraceful existence.