ABSTRACT
After years of debating and gathering new information, climate and environmental scientists, with few exceptions, now agree that global warming is a grim reality, one that is largely due to human-related or anthropogenic activities. This is the view of bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, a United Nations organization consisting of some 2,500 climate scientists around the world), the American Geophysical Union, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and various international organizations. Global warming and its repercussions have become topics of increasing public awareness (Cox 2005:2). Recognition and concern about abrupt climate change has found its way into popular culture and even the mainstream media. In the United States, the generally sedate Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which has come to rely heavily upon corporate funding and in the process has blunt its historically critical stance, ran a television special on November 2, 2005, titled “Global Warming: The Signs and the Science,” with the following message:
[H]uman activities are provoking an unprecedented era of atmospheric warming and climate change. We’re seeing more drought, more wildfires, more flooding, bigger storms and more variable weather. Tropical diseases are moving north, childhood respiratory illness is skyrocketing, and in the last three decades over 30 diseases new to science have emerged.
