I know a lot of people credit Al Gore with bringing awareness to the issue of Climate Change, but it irritates me that a politician had to do it. Climate Change became instantly politicized, and the way a person felt about it stereotyped them one way or another. It is so bizarre to me that a person’s opinion regarding an ongoing scientific phenomenon is well-predicted by their political leanings.

I had my own doubts about man-made climate change for a long time. The fact that it was so politicized was enough to make me a skeptic. And then that BBC Documentary came along (The Great Global Warming Swindle), which seemed really damning. More damning, however, were the subsequent revelations that much of the data in that documentary were misrepresented or altered.

So this is probably just me being an idealist, but I still have some hope that the deniers can be convinced to at least behave responsibly. I think that anyone would agree that smog and landfills are unpleasant and it’d be nice to have less of both. We can be absolutely, completely sure that those are man-made. There should be no argument about that. And for those Islam-hating fundamaniacs, let’s remind them that we are funding some pretty evil Islamic regimes when we fill up the tank.

I’m hoping some great engineers end up saving us all by creating really fantastic batteries so that someday in the not-so-distant future, we might all just drive electric cars. Hug your local engineering grad student.