I remember my parents, two alumni of the infamous UC Berkley, picking up the book State of Fear by Michael Cricthon. When my mother handed it over to me on an airplane to read, I was a little skeptical as to whether or not I would enjoy it, because it was a fiction book about global warming.  I am not an activist of climate change and do not care much about receding ice that is melting, but I do recycle…so, why not? Plus, it was fiction.

After reading it, I thought, finally, something that makes sense! Something that speaks to why I am so skeptical of the climate change movement! The book posed scientific evidence, which is not very accurate, but proves a point, from both sides of an argument about a sinking island and how global warming caused the sinking of said island. It showed how both sides of a legal argument used carefully selected information (graphs over a certain amount of time) to prove whether or not ice was melting, a section of the earth was cooling, or a certain species was becoming extinct because of climate change.

The characters, with their jargon, skeptical natures, and likable personalities, got to me. I started to doubt the existence of the terror of global warming.  I started to doubt the one-sided argument I was hearing.  I started to doubt the apocalypse of global-warming rhetoric, the arguments about heating/cooling.

The world goes through trends. We had the ice age and now its melting. Maybe there is a reason the earth is warming (which is not only effected by human beings, though it mostly is) other than humans deal with carbon stupidly. And maybe, the awareness of global warming, and its devastating effects on the earth is a trend because just like our generation, the baby boomers believed as my mom said “the core was going to melt and kill us all”.

Global warming, seems to me, to be something out of a science fiction movie of the 50s or 60s. Something like the cheesy scary movie, the birds, but instead, of appearing randomly to swoop menacingly, they drop from the sky.  Global warming, like never before, has transformed ever since 9/11. It has become about telling people about how the world is going to end, species are going to die, the core will emerge from the cement, melting us like the atomic bomb, ice will flood California and sink it….the list just goes on and on. The threat of global warming has existed for a long period of time, and yes, carbon emissions have gone up since Bush was in office, but seriously? The climate is supposed to change over time.

(By Sararasmussen, Whitman Pioneer, 10/10/2008)