If you scoff at global warming...

When Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth won Best Documentary at The 79th Academy Awards this year, I could have told you what my Christian Republican friends were already thinking: "Hollywood is so liberal."

It's too bad such an important message can be so easily dismissed because of partisan politics. In fact, it's damned near tragic, in the ancient Greek meaning of the word.

So for anyone who thinks global warming is still fiction, consider this news clipping from January 31, 2007:

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is due to release a report in Paris on Friday entitled Climate Change 2007 in which 2,500 scientists from 130 countries unequivocally state that the current trend towards potentially catastrophic global warming has been induced by human activity, which began with the dramatic increase in fossil fuel use during the Industrial Revolution of the mid-19th century....

The report is not without its critics in the scientific community. One senior British climate expert quoted in The Observer warned that the report’s predictions are relatively rosy, given its painstaking consensus process: “The really chilling thing about the IPCC report is that it is the work of several thousand climate experts who have widely differing views about how greenhouse gases will have their effect. Each paragraph of this report was therefore argued over and scrutinized intensely. Only points that were considered indisputable survived this process. This is a very conservative document—that's what makes it so scary.” —Source

I don't want global warming to be true because my lifestyle would have to change and my country, among others, would have been responsible for bringing about this ensuing disaster. But it looks like it is true. I could be wrong, but in the worst-case scenario, I can afford to be wrong.

The problem is that we can't afford to let the opponents against global warming be wrong... there's just too much at stake.

This is no time for polarization and petty squabbling—this issue affects everyone on the planet. The consensus of 2500 scientists across 130 countries says we're responsible for global warming, so our responsibility is to take them seriously, regardless of our political persuasion.

What can you do? Start by having an open mind and informing yourself—watch An Inconvenient Truth.