What climate change?

Let’s see: earthquakes, floods and droughts. It seems that every day there is some new disaster being sensationalized on television. I’ve never quite seen anything like it and can honestly say that it’s worrisome.

The events are seemingly non-stop. A few months ago, there was the 7.0 quake in Haiti. Last week, an 8.8, 90 second earthquake struck Chile. The Portuguese island of Madeira flooded two weeks ago due to heavy rains, to which a hotel worker commented: “People think these storms happen all the time here, but this is the first time I've ever seen anything like this.” Meanwhile, a drought on the Me Kong river has caused it to be “much lower than we’ve got records on in the last 20 years,” according to Jeremy Bird, the chief executive officer of the Mekong River Commission (MRC) secretariat. He continued that “it is difficult to say whether global warming is responsible but the wet season in Vientiane last year was one of the worst on record, and was followed by much lower than average rain late in 2009 and early this year.” We can’t forget the snow storms that have pummeled the east coast. A winter storm in New York City over two days broke a monthly record for snowfall in Central Park that stood for 114 years, according to the National Weather Service.

These events are all facts, because they happened. Their causes, as well as the debate about global warming or climate change, is disputed. I get disappointed with the people in today’s world and the role that politics plays in everything. People read something in the news and take it completely as fact. They don’t think about the source, they don’t follow the money… nothing. We live in an age where mankind’s access to information is at an all-time high, yet it seems that technology has created a generation of passivity. It’s easier to be told something than to really think about it. How else can people look at record snowfall and automatically take it as a scientific, unquestionable fact that global warming doesn’t exist? Global warming and climate change is largely a semantic debate about defining terms. People hear “warming,” and think that the opposite is happening if snow is falling. To those people, I have to ask: isn’t there at least something odd in the drastic amount of storms? Setting record after record, whether it’s for the intensity of an earthquake, a dramatic drop in water level, or snow in Central Park? How can you look at all these numbers and think that nothing is wrong with them? Because I look at them and feel pretty disturbed. We can fight all day and all night about who caused what, but it’s clear that something is wrong. And it might be too late to fix it. Not that anyone would care though, since by the time the news tells them it’s time to worry, it’s going to be too late.