As you may or may not be aware, today is the third annual Blog Action Day. According to their own description, “Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.” With that in mind, the topic for this year’s event is Climate Change. I’ve put a lot of thought in to from which angle I wanted to tackle this urgent subject, as it is effecting the world in countless ways and have decided to use this opportunity to express my views a phrase that continually gets under my skin, often used by those who stand to profit by climate change and the sheep who follow them.

“Do you believe in climate change?”

This question, or variations of it, is one I have constantly seen posed in the mainstream media, asked on talk shows, posted on the Internet, and been asked in person. It seems innocent enough to those who would look no deeper in to it, except for one underlying issue: Climate change is not a belief. A ‘belief’ is something in which you offer your blind faith that it is true without having actual proof. One can choose to not believe in climate change, but that requires at least a certain level of ignorance. The changes in Earth’s climate that have been occurring over the past 50 years and continue to escalate today have for a long time now by accepted by the international scientific community (those kids that you cheated off of in high school) to be caused by human actions. In fact, every time they perform another study on the topic they do nothing but reaffirm their findings. In the past two years, not a single nationally or internationally recognized scientific organization has offered an opposing stance. With that amount of support from the smartest people around the world, there is no conceivable way that the term “belief” can somehow be applied.

Climate change has long since gone beyond the partisan-politics played by those who stand to gain financially and managed to convince the masses that this was some sort of lie. It is time not to bicker over whether or not it is really happening, but to act. There are plenty of ways that your or I can make a difference, such as switching to more efficient lighting, recycling, driving more efficient vehicles, or installing solar panels. Likewise, businesses can do these same things and make an even bigger impact that just one household can. The biggest and best way for the world to change as a whole, however, is through governmental legislation that not only changes policy, but helps change how the world views energy usage and renewable resources. The US government is currently working on a climate change bill as I type this, so put some thought in to contacting your congressman or senators and telling them how you feel.

If you, like the 13,194 other people who signed up for this year’s Blog Action Day, want to help do something about climate change, you can start by simply correcting the next person who asks you if you “believe” in climate change and telling them that it isn’t a belief and explaining to them what they can do about it.

Global warming, climate change, whatever the current politically correct term for it is, we’ve been hearing about the consequences for quite some time now. Melting polar ice caps leading to everything from submerged cities to mass extinctions. There have been some horrible predictions of what might happen if the world doesn’t change it’s polluting habits, but none of them prepared me for the news that national geographic just dumped in my lap. Assuming you read the title of this post correctly, you already know where I’m going with this. Some Danish scientists have spent the last decade studying a species of wolf spider (Pardosa glacialis) native to northeastern Greenland. They learned something that, at least in my overactive imagination, is deeply disturbing. They’re growing larger. As the summer season slowly extends, they are able to hunt for longer which, in turn, gives them what they need to grow bigger. The larger spiders also produce more offspring, which leads to a new generation to grow larger and produce even more offspring. Afraid of giant arachnids yet? No? Well, here’s the kicker: As if it wasn’t enough that these things are growing larger and growing in population, at the end of the ten year study, their exoskeletons had increased in thickness by about 2%. Sure doesn’t sound like a lot, but I’ve seen Arachnophobia enough times to know that this won’t end well. So, on top of all of the other things we can blame on global warming, now we can add larger, more populous, harder to squish spiders to the list.

I sadly gave up hope several months ago that Al Gore would be our next president, but the candidate who I’ve chosen to throw my support behind, Barack Obama, has once again earned my respect and admiration by being the first Democratic candidate to say that he would ask Al Gore to play a large role in his presidency to help come up with a solution to the climate change problems facing our country and our world.

In his words:

I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this (climate change) problem.

Why Hillary Clinton doesn’t seem to think climate change and our country’s debilitating dependency on oil are issues worth talking about is beyond me.