The Lincoln Log

Photo by Dana Lui

As I am sure the rest of you have noticed, winter has had more bite than in recent years, and the weather has been all over the place. It seems to be that when the sun is out and shining, the temperature is always colder than when it is raining. What is the cause of all this you ask? It’s all because of global warming.

While San Francisco has been ranked one of the “greenest” in the United States – filled with plant sanctuaries, a national park, and bikers galore – consumers throughout the city and beyond have been contributing to global warming everyday. Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are released into the air because of power plants, automobiles, airplanes, and buildings. The deforestation around the world alone contributes about 25 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of the burning and cutting of trees. These unnatural works, while extremely helpful, create a massive amount of carbon dioxide emissions that our Earth just cannot handle. Although we release carbon dioxide as we breathe, it was always meant to be that way and is completely natural for us.

We are obviously threatened by global warming, yet why aren’t people running around screaming in circles? That is because nothing extreme has happened right before our eyes. We would probably need a pile of snow on our doorstops to finally realize that something is amiss. In “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore helps reveal to the public the changes that we have undergone in as little as 30 years. For example, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa, as noted in “An Inconvenient Truth,” was brimming with snow and glaciers only 30 years ago, whereas it is almost barren of snow today.

I have been freezing my butt off lately, and I am tired of our insane weather. How the rest of you put up with this weather, I do not know. I assume that the temperature will continue to drop and rise in a random fashion until we finally all freeze to death, burn to death, die of skin cancer – who knows. Even if we do not live long enough for us to experience the worst results of global warming, butit will be our children who must suffer the consequences of our irresponsible actions.

Most of you probably will not even try to change the effects of global warming, as you all probably think, “Oh, I can’t change the world.” Nevertheless, with every mile of gas that you drive, with every extra spray of aerosol air freshener that you spray, you are adding to the mess that we are going to have to live with for the rest of our lives. Everything we do affects animal lives, such as polar bears and penguins, because global warming is quickly melting away the polar icecaps, their habitat and home. Eventually, global warming will come to affect everyone in the world, even our high-tech selves, and we will either die of an ice age from the melting of the ice caps, or by burning to death, because of the disappearing atmosphere.

I personally believe that everyone should try to live life with a greener perspective. What I mean by that is that we should drive hybrids rather than gas-consuming racecars, grow up to help create technology that can bring us closer to ending global warming, and just being kinder to the nature and Earth around us. The Earth has given us so much – and not to sound hippy-like – but isn’t it our duty to give something back?

We as the younger generation treat global warming as if it will have no effect on us. We continue our lives as if nothing was wrong and I just have to wonder: is global warming really the way to die?