The Federal Way School district in Seattle, WA temporarily banned the showing of An Inconvenient Truth to students.  Due to a complaint by a man named Frosty Hardison (who believes global warming is related to Jesus Christ’s second coming) and a small group of parents, the film was not shown to a seventh grade science class.  The teacher who was going to show the film was reprimanded.  Fortunately, the school lifted the ban on the film, and now requires that a contrasting viewpoint be presented as well, which I think is reasonable.  But back to Frosty:

“You will not teach or show that propagandist Al Gore video to my child, blaming our nation — the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet — for global warming,” [Frosty Hardison] wrote in an e-mail to the Federal Way School Board.

Mr. Frosty Hardison criticizes the film because he claims it is anti-American.  His complaint, to some extent, implies that he believes criticism of the USA is not appropriate for American schools.  Sadly, this concept is self-contradictory.  The USA would be nothing without the freedom to express ideas, whether they are pro or anti-American.  I’m sure everyone has heard the following:

More evidence of global warming’s alarming consequences.  This time: an entire island near India is swallowed by rising sea levels.

The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

This island was once home to 10,000 people.  According to this article, rising seas will soon make 70,000 people homeless.  Yet another reason to take serious action to both quell global warming and mitigate the effects of future disasters we have already set in motion.

EDIT: Check out this very intriguing website: A World View of Global Warming.  It is created by photographer Gary Braasch, who has gone around the world to take pictures of the effects of global warming.  Check it out!

EDIT 2: I forgot to mention that my little environmentalist brother Benny sent me this link.

If you’ve paid attention to the news recently, you’ll have noticed that Insight Magazine (owned by Washington Times) attempted to smear Barack Obama by claiming he spent time in an Islamic Madrassa school as a child, and thus was taught extremist Islam thought.  This story was debunked recently, but before it was, Fox News repeated all of the allegations and claimed them as truth, without doing any fact checking.

Barack Obama’s office responded by sending out a memo, which can be found over at “The Horse’s Mouth.”  A quote from that excerpt follows:

To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago. Furthermore, the Indonesian school Obama attended in Jakarta is a public school that is not and never has been a Madrassa.

I think it’s completely ridiculous that any major news source would publish a front-page story without fact checking.  That’s wrong, and it shouldn’t be done.  However, why can’t we have an Muslim president?  Why does Obama have to emphasize that he is not and was not a Muslim?  I understand that many terrorists happen to be Muslim, but most Muslims are not terrorists.  Why does Obama have to say that he is “a committed Christian?”  I understand that Obama is trying to set the facts straight, but I kind of feel that what he did is a slight insult to Islam in general.

Something that really bothers me is when people make racist remarks to me in private because I am white. Over my winter semester break, just a few weeks ago, I was working at my local community center and I was approached by one of the [white] custodians in the kitchen. She began venting about how she hated her job and couldn’t wait to quit. This entire conversation was pretty awkward at this point, and all I could really do was nod and say things like: “uh-huh.”

Well, she was going over a list of things she didn’t like, and she started talking about how much she hated “those certain groups of people that play on the pool tables all day.” This was in reference to the fact that the pool tables are primarily occupied by young hispanic males. At this point in the conversation, I began to feel fairly uncomfortable, so I told her I needed to get back to work.

I should have told her that what she said was wrong. I shouldn’t have just walked away from the conversation. But I don’t want to accuse someone of making a racist comment, especially someone I have never talked to before.

Funds provided to US climate change research are moving in the opposite direction of global average temperature. According to the National Academy of Sciences, NASA’s earth science budget has declined 30 percent since 2000. The Academy believes this trend will continue as funding is shifted toward a mission to Mars. At the same time, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is having serious cost problems.

As a result, the panel said, the United States will not have the scientific information it needs in the years ahead to analyze severe storms and changes in Earth’s climate unless programs are restored and funding made available.

There is no reason for earth science budgets to decrease this much at such a critical time. First, we have the huge issue of global warming to monitor and study. Without satellites and other equipment, we run the risk of being in the dark on the eve of a massive environmental disaster. Secondly, even global warming denialists will admit monitoring the weather to prevent storm damage is essential. Saving lives from natural disasters is much easier when we have plenty of warning time. Without advanced earth science observation, warning time shrinks.