GLOBAL WARMING

Global warming has become a household term. You may believe that it is real or you may have doubts. In both cases you will be victimized by the myth of a melting, expanding heat-breathing monster mocking at you from inside the ozone hole in the dense smog of greenhouse gases. You put on a mask to take a breath of oxygen and keep indoors not to be air polluted. You are sweating because of your green principle not to switch on an air conditioner during the heatwave. Your head is stuck with global warming horrors of Steven King's kind. We used to talk about weather to fill in gaps in our conversations. Now, we get used to talking about global warming. I have read the reports on global warming that leave no doubt: yes, global warming exists; yes, global warming is accelerating; yes, temperatures rise, so you may spend less on warm clothes; yes, it is globally inevitable. I trust all this because I am a consumer of this information which may be truthful or may be something else.

Global warming may not be real. It is the product of research institutions that are interested in huge investments. What is called global warming is, in fact, our inability to listen to the nature that negatively responds to our careless intrusion and exploitation. Have you ever connected snow in Africa, like last summer's exotic experience, with global warming? It is not known how much of global warming is produced by industrial practices and how much of it is natural.

They say it is cost-effective to fight against global warming now, within a framework of a cap-and-trade system, pioneering a new carbon economy, in order to reduce heat-trapping emissions. Their voices in the wilderness frighten us with the predictions of Cassandra's type: the retreat of glaciers is dramatic, and the homes of up to 88 million people may have been flooded by the 2080s. It may be so, but we are adapting to cool summers and warmer winters, as well as we are adapting to technological advances. When one problem becomes of general concern, something else is missing. What about wastes, environmentally abusive profiteering, current global economic and financial crises? Isn't "global warming" our inability to unite our efforts, to learn how to live globally in peace with our own selves and our natural surroundings? What happened to our dichotomous thinking that celebrates the extremes, all these "either … or", instead of arriving at one global strategy, global cooperation?

They say that global warming is caused by higher concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere. Today's CO2 levels are 25 percent more than over the past 650, 000 years. So CO2 emissions must be reduced. But we used to have periods of higher average temperatures. Besides, these emissions nay stimulate crop growth. What is more, it is reported that the Arctic is warming 2 or 3 times faster than other ecosystems. The ice in Greenland is disappearing. But another trend, expanding glaciers in Norway, Iceland, and New Zealand are simply underestimated.

I have to live with the concept of global warming, which is thrust on me. I consider buying a new set of clothes, for I am not sure whether the coming summer would not surprise me with unusually cool mornings. I am changing together with my thoughts adapting to our global inability to change without declaring. Are we not living in the time of change?

Conclusion: I do not think in terms whether global warming is real or unreal. I am living in realities of today, dreaming of safety and cooperation with nature that would survive and adapt, while myself may lose the game.