Global Suffocation

“Global warming” actually sounds kind of nice, even a little comforting. Feel a chill? Well, don't worry, the whole globe is warming up just to keep you comfy! To get action, to galvanize public outrage, we need a better name. We should call it what it is: global suffocation.

The warming is anyway just a symptom of the problem: increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This is due to man's burning fossil fuels and destroying the ecosystems of living plants in forests, praries, wetlands, oceans, etc. Everyone knows temperatures fluctuate – daily, seasonally, yearly. But since the industrial age, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels go only one way -- upward at an increasing rate. Any doubts whether CO2 levels are rising are dispelled by the data, just the facts, provided here courtesy of wikipedia. [The timeline on the x axis would be better shown reversed, history moving to the right, but look at the numbers: already over a record 375 ppm and increasing rapidly.]

You suffocate when you cannot get enough oxygen. Oxygen is removed from the air when it combines with carbon in fossil fuels to produce carbon dioxide. When we burn carbon (gasoline, diesel, natural gas, coal), we are slowly, imperceptibly suffocating ourselves. A simple, true statement.