Climate Change: Global Warming

In April 9th of 2010, Marisa Marcavillaca—a farmer and indigenous women’s organizer from Peru— went to The Capitol Hill to tell her powerful story. Her words were quoted by Al Gore in one of his speeches. She said through a translator: “We are very concerned, in my community, [and] in my country, about global climate change. Nature is disrupted. We are seeing the impacts on a daily basis. We are losing our lands, water is disappearing, it rains when it shouldn’t rain, and we have freezing temperatures, when we shouldn’t have freezing temperatures. Also, warmer temperatures in our farming area have spurred plant diseases, and the quality of agricultural seeds has degenerated cutting into local women’s ability to earn a living. Because our yields are down, it is difficult to feed our children.” (Jaime Baily 14).

Climate change has become a very contested and debated matter. Some scientists say that the earth is warming; skeptics contend that it is cooling. Glaciologists say that the polar ice on earth is melting, and skeptics say that Antarctic ice is growing. Skeptics-that have also concluded that the earth is warming-point out that the earth has gone through many such warming periods (interglacials or periods of desertification) in between cooling periods and that these are natural cycles. But the long-running debate over whether or not global warming is anthropogenic is arriving to its end. Not only it is caused by man, it’s real, it’s here. All across the world, in every place known to man, glaciers and ice-sheets are melting, the average temperature is increasing and dangerous weather events are occurring as an integrated response to green house gases produced by man’s activity such as motor vehicles, factories, fossil fuel plants, etc . We are already suffering the consequences of the global warming