Visualize our planet wearing sunglasses, lounging in a lawn chair on the beach and sipping a tall glass of lemonade. Foolish, perhaps, but when such obscure concepts as polar ice melt and glacial retreat were first introduced as evidence of increased global temperatures, what would you expect a person to think?

Given the chance, would you vote Republican or Democrat? Why? For most of us, it is because that’s how we were raised. Very few of us have actually formulated our own thoughts on politics.