I saw a man walking down the street holding up a sign that said “Global Warming Will Kill Everyone!”

I was annoyed at him. I was driving along, in my car, with the kids in the back seat and he was walking the opposite direction along the sidewalk on the other side of the street. I rolled down my window. I wanted to yell at him; but I couldn’t get together what I wanted to say. I was having an emotional reaction to his sign; probably what he wanted.

But it really annoyed me because while Global Warming is certainly a bad thing, and will probably end up causing many deaths, that’s not really how I’d like the problem to be framed. Plus, it makes the guy look like a whacko and by extension, all concerned people who worry about global warming to be whackos too. And will that help us to avert the impending disaster?

There are still so many people who think global warming is a load of baloney! I find that hard to believe but recently was browsing (at random) the climate change blog at Accuweather.com and, looking through the comments saw way more comments to suggest that there’s no such thing as global warming than any other thing.

So there’s this huge split, again, another huge split in my country. People who, on the one side, think Global Warming Will Kill Everyone and then the people who, on the other hand, don’t even believe it’s a problem at all.

If I had to choose, I guess I’d be agreeing with the guy and his alarming sign. But I refuse to accept that there are two sides here. This is a complicated problem and like most problems, there is no black and white, clear cut right or wrong answer. We don’t have all the answers but we have some information. And that information seems to be pretty clear at this point. CO2 is causing our planet’s climate and therefore its weather systems to be really weird; call it global warming or climate change, or some other moniker, but you can’t escape the facts. We have a problem and we need to do something about it.