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With the formation of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, debate regarding what and how much needs to be done in order to prevent global warming has taken on a different pitch. Movies such as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and the dozens of grassroots organizations that have sprung up show the popular support for reducing our current pollution profile.

And while it is tricky to make the claim that we aren't doing enough, that is precisely what those many organizations and scientists are saying. The United States scored the worst out of all the member nations of the G8 summit in a recent survey by the environmental group World Wildlife Fund. The survey cited the failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, an initiative that seeks to raise emissions standards, and the lack of any similar emissions-regulating standards as major setbacks.

The United States has long taken the approach that market forces will be sufficient to balance greenhouse gas emissions and that any forced regulation would hurt the economy. President George Bush instead proposed a softer approach for "a long term global goal" over the remainder of his term that would attempt to implement gradual reductions in greenhouse gas emissions without making it mandatory.

Not everyone in the government agrees with the Bush administration, however. An April, 2007 court ruling allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions for the first time, citing their proven detrimental effect on the environment.

Rulings like this one open the door for the possibility that the U.S. will take its place on the international stage as a leader in greenhouse gas emissions, but many obstacles still stand in the way. For one, Americans are addicted to their vehicles, driving an estimated 2.3 billion miles in 2005. Then there is the problem of coming to an agreement on what is a safe temperature range that would establish the absolute safe maximum temperature rise that the earth can withstand without major catastrophes. The United Kingdom and other countries have agreed upon 3.5F as the acceptable limit, putting the pressure on the international community to make changes fast, as global temperatures have already risen by approximately 1F in the past decade.

Two studies published back in 2005 in the peer-reviewed journal Science concluded that, even with drastic regulation of pollution, the world will continue to heat up and sea levels rise for centuries. This is because the ocean takes a long time to dissipate the extra heat it is absorbing due to the effects of global warming, meaning that the damage we have already done may cause sea levels to rise between 3 and 15 feet in the next 1,000 years. If we continue to delay making strict restrictions on the emissions of greenhouse gases, sea levels may reach that height in only 100 years.

The problem is that now is the time for the U.S. to make sweeping changes in the way we produce and consume energy, and now is exactly when not enough is being done. And with each passing day, we only produce more difficult consequences that will have to be dealt with later.

Learn more about this author, Bran Herbert.
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