This time it’s the much-vaunted U.S. National Academy of Sciences that’s harking the onset of global warming, and its negative effect to our environment. It concluded in a study that the earth’s climate is hottest nowadays in almost 2,000 years. Commissioned by the U.S. Congress to determine the legitimacy of widespread allegations that earth’s temperature is heating up, the members of the academy came up with a chart that shows a sudden rise in global temperature. Graphically, the said chart resembles a hockey stick that now its slowly gaining popularity as the “hockey-stick chart”.

I’ve seen a hockey stick before and we all know how it looks like. It’s like a check mark in our examination papers, or like a Jai-Alai racket. Therefore, this sudden up-tick in world’s temperature is so sudden that I have never seen a chart like that before, suddenly going up in such a short time-frame. Maybe, if we can only see the income charts of oil companies like Petron or Shell, then maybe we can actually witness such fantastic graph.

Al Gore was saying this all along—that the Earth is heating up and the United States of America should be signing the Kyoto Protocol the soonest time possible, otherwise, catastrophic changes in the earth’s climate may occur in the next fifty or hundred years that we’d be seeing deserts expanding at a deadly rate, jungles disappearing like bunnies in a magician’s hat, super-destructive storms (like Katrina) and humongous smogs smoldering the cityscapes from New York to Ulaan Bator. I heard a CNN report yesterday that says New York has had the hottest weather this year.

But President Bush and Dick Cheney continues to be so adamant, citing loss of millions of American jobs if America signs the Kyoto Protocol. Al Gore belched at this, and had repeatedly accused President Bush of unduly protecting the interest of oil and coal companies in America, an industry to where he had once belonged to a Texan oil magnate before he went into politics.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences mainly lays blame on “human activity” for the onrush of global warming, like industrial pollutions, fuel emissions and continued use of prohibited chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons in air-conditioners. I bet its time we take this warning more seriously. I think President Bush should stop being a “war president” for a moment, and give global environment a much needed attention.

Many scientists have reiterated that if global warming goes on at the present rate, ice in the North Pole would melt gradually causing the global sea level to rise by 6 to 8 meters in a hundred years. If that happens, coastal cities like New York, Manila, and Tokyo (note that 80% of the world’s population live in coastal areas) would disappear on the face of the earth.

I think this is an environmental threat not to be taken lightly.

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