I was disappointed the Daily would ignorantly print Texas A&M writer Mike Walter’s article entitled “Hollywood’s next big catastrophe.” To dislike a fictitious Hollywood film is one thing, but to use the faults of a movie to discredit years of research on global warming is the only catastrophe.

In his argument, Mr. Walter cited a petition signed by more than 17,000 scientists (of which we don’t know what they are scientists of) stating there is “no convincing evidence” of global warming.

His point becomes moot if the reader were to know that the petition was signed over six years ago, and in that time thousands of scientists worldwide have studied global warming with mounting evidence that it is very real.

In fact, Mr. Walter’s counterpart public university, University of Texas at Austin, recently published a scientific paper with some of the most convincing and concluding evidence. Researchers found that both plants and animals have shifted their geographic ranges substantially north in the past few decades as a response to global temperature change.

Since the industrial era, health problems related to global warming and air pollution have increased substantially. For example, currently every one in 75 people will develop fatal skin cancer, and if the current trends hold true, the percentage will be higher still. Melanoma incidence has increased by 1,200 percent since the 1930s (Source: Palo Alto Medical Center).

Health scientists have estimated that yearly there are 265 hospital admissions for asthma and 240 non-asthma respiratory admissions, 3,500 respiratory emergency doctor visits, 180,000 asthma attacks, 930,000 restricted activity days, and 2 million acute respiratory symptom days (Congressional testimony, 1997, by George Thurston, New York University Medical School).

The number of deaths in the United States associated with air pollution ranges from 50,000 to 100,000 per year (Annual Review Public Health, 1994, Vol. 15).

Believe in global warming or not, that is up to you. But I ask that you not base your decision on Hollywood movies (and their critics) or politics.

Heather Stricker

Alumna