Two thousand seven is gearing up to be the
warmest year in recorded history. Whether or not that comes to be the fact is that the world is getting hotter.
Ice shelves are melting in the Arctic and Antarctic. Glaciers are receding everywhere. Permafrost is thawing.
Whole communities are dealing firsthand with the effects. Meanwhile, for whatever reason the debate rages on as to whether or not this phenomenon is being caused by man's activities despite the scientific consensus that the accelerated warming is caused by CO
2 emissions. We exhale CO
2 and we cut down the trees that breathe it in. But more importantly the fuels that we burn to power our cars, heat our homes, and light our houses emit CO
2. Naysayers state that man is too insignificant to have an impact on our environment. But it shouldn't be that difficult of a concept to grasp. Man has been manipulating his environment since the beginning of recorded history and now man's mastery over his environment is having negative effects of a catastrophic scale on the environment as a whole. There is a simple analogy in the production of wine. The yeast that consumes sugars in the grapes produces alcohol as a byproduct. The more the yeast consume the more alcohol is excreted until there is so much alcohol that the environment is no longer suitable for the yeast and it dies. Man is the yeast, oil and coal are the sugars, CO
2 is the alcohol. And as we all know, too much alcohol will kill you.