The United Nations International Panel on Climate Change's recent report, released late last week, was almost unanimously described by media reports as painting a "grim" or "bleak" picture.

And, indeed, it's hard to know which is more worrying: the report's descriptions of droughts, floods and famines visited upon millions all over the world due to global warming, or media descriptions of politicians and bureaucrats rewriting the report's scientific language to hide just how bad the problem could be.

Certainly the physical effects of global warming will be bad enough. For example, most Americans are used to thinking of water only as something that comes out of a bottle or a faucet on demand. It takes only a little bit of consideration to realize that all water has to come from a lake or a river somewhere, and that lakes and rivers are filled by precipitation. A hotter, drier world means less rainfall, and less rainfall means less, or no, water in rivers and lakes, which means no water coming out of the faucet.

At the same time, these physical effects are all merely engineering problems that can be dealt with or circumvented one way or another. A lack of water suggests the need for better reclamation systems and the development of new water sources, like condensation or desalinization plants. Famines might be pushed back with the development of hardier, genetically engineered crops able to thrive in more arid conditions. Carbon emissions can be lowered with more energy-efficient vehicles, new power sources and carbon sequestration technologies.

But such technologies can only be developed and widely deployed if the political will to do so exists. And the lack of such will is precisely what symbolizes the political interference in the scientific global warming process.

It's tempting to point fingers at prominent anti-global warming figures, such as Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe and author Michael Crichton, both of whom regularly portray global warming as being highly exaggerated by the media if not an outright hoax. But such people exist only as projections of a wider public skepticism toward global warming.

Why does such skepticism exist? Commonly heard arguments usually suggest that the scientific debate is ongoing and that evidence is not yet conclusive. However, the handful of holdout scientists are vastly in the minority.

Furthermore, none of these skeptic scientists have produced research which directly contradicts global warming. A 2004 survey of global warming research found that none of the roughly 900 papers published on the subject between 1993 and 2003 disagreed with the scientific consensus with regard to human-created global warming.

This strongly suggests that those scientists rejecting global warming are doing so based on their subjective opinion rather than specific scientific evidence in their favor. At worst, the nay-saying scientists are acting as shills for rich industries, such as the oil and gas industries, that stand to profit most from delaying action on global warming.

Instead, a more likely reason for public skepticism toward global warming is simple inertia and a resistance to the ramifications of what global warming would actually mean. Virtually every American alive today has certain expectations from life: we drive around in cars, we get as much water as we need when we need it, we toss garbage as we wish.

And while at some level we know that living the lifestyle we live isn't the greatest thing for the planet, we don't like to believe that driving to a fast food joint, eating a burger and tossing away the wrapper and Styrofoam cup will somehow lead to an ecological catastrophe.

If nothing else, millions of parents don't want to look back at their lives and think that the carefree days of their youth ultimately led to a hellish, Mad Max-style apocalyptic world for their kids and grandkids.

So we hear perfectly normal, well-educated people, people with college educations who should have a decent idea of how the scientific process works, parrot lines like, "Well, I don't think the evidence really supports taking action yet," or "Healthy skepticism is an important part of the scientific process." They say this without any real firsthand knowledge of what the evidence is or how much skepticism the scientific community itself has already directed at global warming.

Fortunately, the answer to such dodges is simple: education. Whenever someone tells you that not all scientists agree with the idea of man-made global warming, ask them to take a look at the IPCC report to realize how vastly outnumbered those skeptics are. Whenever someone tells you that the data isn't yet conclusive, ask them what specific data they're talking about, and see if they have any specific evidence in mind. Direct the skeptics toward Web sites like www.realclimate.org, where working climate scientists address every global warming counterargument imaginable in plain, simple language.

Global warming doesn't mean the end of the world. But it does mean we don't have the luxury of ignoring it because of the frightening ramifications. Let's get a grip and meet this thing head-on.

Jones is an electrical engineering graduate student.

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