No longer a myth: global warming is for real
Al Gore’s 'An Inconvenient Truth' has burnt-up this year’s box office

-- Andrea Jackley

At least 225 people died, 163 in California alone. Buckled roads and ruptured water lines plagued the country. Overworked power transformers failed to perform, causing blackouts in highly populated areas such as Queens and Los Angeles. One event after another, the heat wave of 2006 brought heightened attention to issues that have often been left on the backburner of the American public’s conscience.

One of the hottest topics this summer, pardon the pun, is global warming. The documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and was released in select theaters around the nation in May. The film is based on a global warming awareness slideshow presented around the world by former presidential candidate Al Gore. It has been implied that Gore may be enjoying more prominence as a movie star than a major hitter in the Democratic Party these days. Now playing on over 600 screens, the film made a splash at the box office amidst the blazing heat and soaring gas prices.

The science behind global warming is relatively simple. The Earth’s atmosphere is what enables life to exist and thrive. The atmosphere literally acts as a shield, trapping the Sun’s heat and warming us. It is a delicate balance of the amount of energy received from the Sun, how much is reflected back into space, and how much is retained by the atmosphere. The atmosphere is made up of what is referred to as "greenhouse gasses," including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and water vapors.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by 30 percent, methane by 20 percent, and nitrous oxide by 15 percent. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), "There is certainty that human activities are rapidly adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and that these gases tend to warm our planet. This is the basis for concern about global warming."

The steady increase of these gasses in the Earth’s atmosphere has strengthened its heat-trapping capabilities.

Proof of global warming has come in all shapes and sizes in recent years. Glaciers and snow cover throughout the world have melted causing the sea level to rise between 4-8 inches. Worldwide precipitation has increased approximately one percent. One of the most recently touted statistics is that 10 of the twentieth-century’s warmest years occurred in the last 15 years of this century.

The Catalyst, Metropolitan State University’s student newsletter, had an all-too familiar summer headline for readers in their Jul. 24, 2006 issue: "Heat exposure information offered." The snippet informed us that "more people have died in Minnesota from heat-related illnesses than from tornados, blizzards, floods or any other weather condition."

So how did this happen? The EPA has cited several major factors: The combustion of fossil fuels to power motor vehicles and heat homes; increased agriculture (cattle farming and rice paddies play a large part); deforestation; landfills; industrial production and mining. Out of all the industrialized nations in the world, the United States has, by far, the highest emissions of greenhouse gasses, contributing one-fifth of the world’s total in 1997.

So what will happen now? Scientists predict the average global temperature to rise 1-4.5 degrees over the next 50 years. According to the EPA, scientists have identified variables likely to and vulnerable to change as our health, agriculture, water resources, forests, wildlife and coastal areas. El Nino, the periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean that is notorious for stirring up stronger and more frequent tropical storms, may have ties to global warming. After a particularly strong hurricane season in 2005 and the disaster of Katrina more attention than ever is being paid to this possibility.