Put on your shorts and sandals, because winter has arrived in Ohio in the form of 60-degree weather.
Throughout the eastern United States, last winter went down as the coldest winter in almost 40 years; just a year later, winter feels like spring.
Last year, I constantly heard global warming skeptics saying things such as: “If global warming is real, why is it so cold?”
Well, first of all, climate change is real; many scientists have proven this. They also almost all agree that human factors contribute to climate change. Only a fringe group of scientists disagree.
Secondly, Al Gore and the rest of the Democratic Party called it global warming instead of global climate change, which is a much more accurate term.
Climatologists have said for years that climate change can cause extremes in hot and cold weather, so the presence of both in recent weather is a sign that climate change is already here.
On a side note, Democrats are terrible at branding.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a terrible name that no one outside the political sphere knows, because Republicans are so good at rebranding and renamed it Obamacare, giving it a negative connotation.
But, getting back on track, I find myself wondering: Are we able to stop climate change at this point?
In 2009, Obama pledged to cut CO2 emissions by 17 percent by 2020. That is quite simply not enough. In 11 years, I would expect us to reduce emissions by 50 percent.
It took us about eight years to put a man on the moon after president Kennedy’s famous 1961 speech and, at the start of World War II, we outfitted every factory in the United States to build military equipment.
But you’re telling me we can only cut CO2 emissions by 17 percent in more than a decade?
Those sorts of half-attempted approaches to climate change are not only too little too late, but also insulting to American exceptionalism and ingenuity.
We had fully functional electric cars back in the ’70s but never progressed with the invention, probably because big oil companies wanted to continue making profits.
The technology is all right in front of us for the taking to make the Earth greener.
We have electric cars, high-speed rail, alternative energy sources in wind and solar power, but we don’t have the political will to overcome lobbyists.
If we stick to timetables that are 10 or 20 years down the line, we will never be able to reverse the harm we have done to this planet.
We needed significant change years ago, not years from now.
Even if it is too late to change the progression of climate change, it is no reason to keel over and let it happen. We all know ways to reduce our carbon footprints, but I’ll add one more thing to that list.
Stop using the phrase global warming and replace it with climate change, because next year, or even next week, it could get cold again.
William Hoffman is a freshman studying journalism and political science, and a columnist for The Post. Did his column warm you up?
Email him at wh092010@ohiou.edu.
