The topic of global warming has become so popular today as to even fill up the front cover of fashion magazine Vanity Fair, complete with a green clad bunch of celebrities ranging from George Clooney to Al Gore to J­­ulia Roberts posing solemnly to advocate the seriousness of the “New Green Revolution.”

Unfortunately, any remnant of a solution to this global epidemic will not be found within the pages of a magazine. Rather, a solution lies deep within the core of the rampant and mostly unrestrained industrial expansion that parts of this world have undergone in the last two centuries. It will pose questions about how our global economic system is affecting the world and will challenge us to decide just how serious the consequences will be if we continue to refuse the sacrifices that will come with necessary change.

Scientists all around the world have been observing global warming—an increase in average oceanic and atmospheric temperatures—for decades now. Both national science academies in the largest industrial countries and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agree that the average global temperature has risen between 0.4 and 0.8 degrees Celsius.

It is not the increase, but the reason for it, that is most contested. Most scientists believe that the rising concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases due to human activity is trapping a larger amount of solar radiation within the atmosphere, causing higher radiation absorption by the earth and subsequent higher surface temperatures. But theories aside, a truth still exists—increased oceanic and atmospheric temperatures are already having effects on the earth’s complex weather systems.

Warmer tropical seas are fueling larger and more frequent tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean, which crash into our Southern shores as fierce hurricanes.

Last summer, the United States experienced a hurricane season that shattered all previous records. The season brought forth not only the most hurricanes, with 14 storms topping the previous record of 12 set in 1969, but the highest number of fierce storms with a record-breaking three Category Five hurricanes in one season: Rita, Wilma and Katrina. The total cost damage of all the season’s storms was the highest as well, an astonishing 50 billion dollars combined.

In a recent article for Nature magazine, Kerry Emanuel analyzed hurricane records for patterns in changing storm intensities. Emanuel discovered that over the past 30 years, the fierceness of hurricanes hitting our shores has increased dramatically, in direct accordance with the rise in ocean temperatures. If this uprising trend continues, the intensity of hurricanes will rise each year, posing an even more serious threat to states that border the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic Ocean.

This change in ocean temperatures could also affect the current U.S. tornado season. As cool air from the North Pole comes down and mixes with the warm air from the warmer waters of the Gulf Coast, tornadoes are being created more frequently—with increased fierceness and longer duration. Already the 360 tornadoes this year make up the most tornadoes in the first three months of a season ever. And the number of tornado-related deaths so far is already the highest since 1998, even though the season hasn’t reached the peak month of May. The potential economic cost and blow to human life that this rapidly changing weather will have upon our country cannot be ignored.

California has also experienced some unusual weather, and while nobody has proved that it has been caused by global warming, one full day of sun over all of spring break makes one wonder if the two are connected. And when one considers both the detrimental effect of this rainiest of rain seasons upon California’s huge agricultural industries, the problem becomes even more frightening.

Although the Bush administration took steps to further global warming research, they have done little to significantly decrease greenhouse gas emissions, largely because of a fear that this will adversely affect the economy. But as the toxic gases keep rising, it will be the same economy that denied the warming that will foot the cost of fixing it.