Global warming. “The world’s biggest problem”. Or is it? Is global warming really something that we should all try and deal with over the next hundreds of years, or should we focus on problems that will affect the future of America and the world right now?

We have bigger worries other than global warming. Haifa Iversen, Arlington High School biology teacher and ecology club adviser, said people can never truly stop global warming, but just slow it down. But I will say Iversen is trying to do something about it. She drives an electric car, and has forced a no plastic water bottle policy in her Biology class. Although there is no wrong in what Iversen is doing, we have more pressing matters that we can try and deal with right now. According to Rosamund Hutt, a writer for the World Economic Forum, declares that we are going to have to be able to sustain about 9 billion people by 2050. However, the demand for food will be 60% greater than today. This is just one of the many problems that we are dealing with right now. World violence, debt, and world hunger are things we should be focusing on right now.

That’s not to say that global warming is non-existent. Rising oceans, weather abnormalities, and melting glaciers are what come with climate change. And yes, we should try to do something about it. But our biggest global issue? As stated by author Duncan Green, “Some 850 million people (one in eight of the world’s population) go to bed hungry every night.” World hunger is an immense problem, and there is a much higher chance of us successfully ending world hunger as of now than ending global warming in the next one hundred years.

https://www.cnbc.com/id/100893540

Jonathan Murray, a science teacher here at AHS, has the same thoughts on the subject as well. Murray even admitted he didn’t know a great deal about global warming. But he did know enough that trying to fix global warming would take a much longer than fixing something such as world violence. However, he did take notice of the fact that in the future, it won’t be him trying to fix this situation, but his son Jameson Murray, and Jameson’s children.

Sophomore Kyle Christiansen has similar beliefs. He believes people are right in seeing global warming as a problem, but people need to notice that we have more important challenges we have to face. Kyle believes that national debt will cause a war faster than global warming will cause the end of the world.

There is a recurring theme throughout the points I have made. Time. It would take an incredibly long time to slow something that we can’t truly get rid of. Michael Barnard, a Carbon Innovation Strategist, gives us a bleak outlook of how long it will take to stop global warming. “Call it a hundred years to stop all greenhouse gas emissions, three hundred years for the excess methane and CO2 to disappear and a hundred years before temperature stabilizes at a new, lower normal. Five hundred years give or take. We screwed up big time and it’s going to take a long time to fix.”