Global warming is a celebrity in the making, breaking headlines with either optimistic progress updates or scenarios of doom. With consequences no one can accurately foresee, one thing is certain: global warming is attracting the spotlight. Even President George W. Bush gave the topic some attention when he decided to back down from a campaign pledge that promised to put restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions.
Pete Wyckoff, professor of biology, described this action as, “definitely a step in the wrong direction.”

Christine Whitman, administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, tried to defend Bush’s decision, saying the president “didn’t want to do anything that was going to discourage decisions that would result in a better mix of energy.”

Except for big business lobbyists and factory owning companies, most of America was caught off-guard with the announcement, which outraged environmentalists.

Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust said, “It only took the president 60 days to walk away from his most specific environmental pledge of the campaign. It is a disturbing indication that the president has a political tin ear on environmental issues.”

Bush’s new stance on carbon dioxide came out just after a comparison of satellite data from 1970 and 1997 yielded what scientists claim is direct evidence that greenhouse gases are building.

Last month the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a 1000-page report that foresaw glaciers and polar icecaps melting, countless species of animals, birds, and plant life dying out, desertification, coral reefs destroyed, and small islands sinking.

Despite his blunt actions, which have aggravated environmentalists and scientists alike, Bush says he wants to “tackle” the global warming problem and will attend key talks in Bonn in July. These talks follow the failed U.N. global warming summit in Hague last November, which had planned to implement some of the agreements made at the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.