Glabal Warming

            One of the hottest topics in the United States is the issue of global warming. This issue once discounted and ridiculed as the wild imaginings of over enthusiastic environmentalists and "tree lovers," is now being taken seriously by scientists, politicians, business leaders, and the American environmentalist community. "Environmental scientists have been trying to warn these groups that our continued use of coal and petroleum products, as well as established business practices such as dumping industrial wastes into the air and waterways, would be the cause of a natural phenomenon called the greenhouse effect, or global warming." Now, when the earth's biosphere is obviously suffering adverse ecological effects from a century of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane emissions, it is apparent to even the most skeptical anti-environmentalists that global warming is real.
             In one of his televised debates with Vice President Al Gore, George W. Bush said that "scientists do not yet know the cause of global warming." This must have been a surprise indeed to all of those scientists in the world who have understood both the fact that our earth is getting hotter and the mechanism underlying this global climate shift for a number of years.
             The prospect of "Global Warming," a state of planetary change wherein the average ground temperatures of the entire earth are elevated to unnaturally high levels, has been around for a number of years. However, during most of the last two decades, the truths about global warming were frequently questioned and debated. It was decried by conservatives, big business, and even many well-intentioned and intelligent scientists. "Global warming theory was called an error in computation", at best, or at worst it was an outright deception foisted on the public by radical anti-technology, and anti-human environmentalist. However, it is now an established fact that the Earth's surface is growing warmer.