Global Warming: Change or Stay the Same

A lot of people in the world contribute daily to pollution or global warming. They are both very similar and can lead up to one another. Many of us don’t really know what is going on, and why there is so much debate to Global Warming. The real question is: “Why bother?”

The question is not the really big issue. What if I did bother; a lot? If I changed my whole life upside down: start walking to school, plant trees, use limited water, and eat no beef. Yes, beef and cows are a big role in global warming. A research team led by Akifumi Ogino of the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba, Japan examined the energy used and greenhouse gases emitted at every step in the process of producing beef, including raising calves, managing animals and producing and transporting feed. The researchers found that it took 169 mega joules of energy to produce 2.2 pounds of beef (the equivalent of four average-sized steaks or nearly nine quarter-pound burgers). This is the same amount of energy that would be consumed by leaving a 100-watt bulb burning for 20 days.

What would be the point of turning your life completely upside down if you know that halfway across the earth in Europe there are people driving cars to their neighbor’s house; eating beef every day, and keeping the tap on while watching Television. Some people say it is just a sense of good will, but how does that help you when people like President Bush dismissed energy conservation as a sign of personal benefit? How strange that doing the right thing; buying a hybrid car, going vegetarian, walking to school and planting trees will just get you ready for another speech from Mr. Bush telling us that Global Warming is a myth.

Is eating vegetables or walking to school really going to help people that much? If walking to school increases your appetite and you consume more meat or milk as a result, walking might emit more carbon into the atmosphere than driving. It makes you wonder, would I bother checking where my beef was manufactured, slaughtered, raised, to see if it was imported by a “Green” ship, or a polluting charcoal steam boat. If every day, you would care that much, you would be wasting a lot of time and some people will just not bother, and drive to work.

There are so many excuses we can tell ourselves to prove that doing nothing would be the exact same as trying your hardest. But the scariest is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too late and too little to change anything. Climate change is leading to us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ predictions that seemed awful a decade ago turn out to have been too hopeful: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the scientists predicted. Now it is getting worse and worse as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climatologist lately? They look really scared.

Whatever we can do now, at this very late date and decade, might be too little, and too late. People see what they want to see, and I see a change, people should stand up, and tell the world that they do not want to end the human existence! I think we should try our hardest to stop global warming because if you can change yourself, you could just change the world.