Global Warming, Denial, and a book called Letter from Tomorrow

I remember sitting in a college composition class (I teach college composition now) and trying to decide on a topic for my persuasive paper. Being a gen-x child of the nineties, I wanted to write about the legalization of marijuana; but my teacher told me she refused to ever read another paper about abortion or marijuana, because it just came down to individual belief. Of course that was before I'd ready any post-modernism and realized that everything in life comes down to personal beliefs, but still I felt compelled to find a way around her dictum.

My solution was to research deforestation--I figured that if we started using hemp for paper we could reduce deforestation. Little did I know that reason would never allow me to read extensively about our environment and escape discovering the real environmental issue that faces us in the twenty-first century. Back then hardly anyone had ever even heard of global warming, and those who had thought that it was caused by the hole in the ozone (if you still think this, please do some research--they are two separate issues). But the more I read the more I realized that this was going to be the single most important problem for the people of the twenty-first century.

I wrote my college composition paper on global warming, and I included a lot of that evidence in Letter from Tomorrow. The fact that now, just over a decade later, scientists have reached a near consensus that the effects of global warming are readily apparent in the arctic and antarctic is a surprise--I thought then that it would be around fifty years before hard data began to come in. But the reality of fossil-fuel induced warming is not a surprise to anyone who has spent any time reading actual scientific work rather than the idiocy that comes out of the internet media.

Back then I thought that one of the most difficult things about writing the book Letter from Tomorrow would be convincing people that global warming is an important issue. Now I feel that the scientific evidence is out and anyone who reads my book will find that the predictions Sharanrala makes are on their way to becoming fact. So why is it that the number three most popular video on google video is "The Great Global Warming Swindle"? Who is swindling who? Which is more likely--that oil and coal companies are feeding us a bunch of propoganda with this video so that they can continue ripping us off, or that our non-profit-motivated scientists studying the issue in depth and having reached near consensus are trying to "swindle" us?


JC