Global Warming

For my Global Search for Justice class, which is the required/core class for juniors and seniors, we have to do an extensive research project that includes a paper, poster session, and group presentation. Each GSJ course has a different focus such as women and health, dismantling racism, environmental justice, etc. You choose which class sounds best to you and take it. I chose environmental justice because I think it is extremely important and not as widely focused on as other issues, especially, being at an all-female school, women's issues. I did not want to take a class focusing on women's issues since I feel I get a good background (heck, even a detailed knowledge) of that area in pretty much every other class I take. Anyway, the point of this is I chose environmental justice. Turns out I have an extremely difficult professor (the professors who teach these classes are from other disciplines; mine is a sociology professor) who, since it is a writing intensive class, grades much more difficultly than her other classes (or so I hear). We already had to do our research proposal for the project, and I got 7/10. So did almost everybody in the class, so I guess I probably didn't actually do that bad. I didn't think I did bad anyway, I did everything she asked, but what can you do. Apart from this huge project, we only have to write 2 papers, so I guess for a writing intensive class that isn't so bad. Again, I think it just means she grades harder.

My research project, which we have to have 20 sources for (only 10 scholarly though) is on global warming. I wanted to do it on something less controversial than factory farming and animal rights which a couple people are doing (and as you can see by my previous posts I don't understand) and less typical than pollution or hazardous waste dumping. Turns out something that I thought was simple and non-controversial is actually very controversial. A few degrees of change (actually only around 1 degree Fahrenheit) in the earth's average temperature is a huge change to some scientists and a weak sign of change to others. Whether or not the climate change is natural or caused by human activities such as deforestation and fossil fuels is also debated. Climate modeling is unpredictable or at least a higher than desirable percentage of error. The predicted impacts of global warming are especially debatable. In fact, some people think the earth should warm up to make the world more livable, while many others think it will cause droughts and floods, more extreme weather events (hurricanes, etc.), higher spread of diseases such as malaria. I think I should focus more on alternate energy sources-those are good for a variety of reasons, not just the fact that they contribute less to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which contributes to global warming-or, as apparantly is politically correct, global climate change.

Where concerns about the world getting warmer
The people thought they were just being rewarded