The United States has one of the highest levels of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, meaning the country is very high on the list of contributors to global climate change, according to the State of the Climate Address delivered to the White House Jan. 24 by the Presidential Climate Action Project.

The project works to raise awareness about the globally changing climate and hopes to make the environment, and climate in particular, a high priority for the next president of the United States. The State of the Climate Address explained that, “Global climate change now threatens not only the environment, but also our national security, our economic stability and our public health and safety. We can no longer discuss the State of the Union without assessing the state of the nation’s climate.”

“The biggest threat right now is that we as a nation are not taking vigorous steps to address how much energy we consume and how much we contribute to the climate change problem,” said Karen Hewitt, the visiting outreach coordinator at the University’s Center for Global Studies. Hewitt has been a major part of planning the University’s participation in this week’s Focus the Nation Campaign.

Focus the Nation is a nationwide campaign encompassing over 1,600 institutions, most of which are colleges and universities, that centers on educating the public about global warming and future solutions to the problem.

“The more the public knows, the more pressure there is for policy makers to make things happen,” Hewitt said.

The University Environmental Council will sponsor many free educational events during this week, including a viewing of the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and a teach-in Wednesday at the Urbana Free Library about climate change.

Michael Schlesinger, a member of Gov. Blagojevich’s Climate Change Advisory Group and a professor in the department of atmospheric sciences, will be a panelist at the climate change teach-in.

“We have unknowingly already left a climate change legacy of 1,000 years,” Schlesinger said. “Time’s up.”

Among the many actions Champaign-Urbana residents can do to help the situation, one of the most important is to become educated, Schlesinger said.

Students can take a class about climate change taught by Atul Jain, an associate professor in the department of atmospheric sciences, that covers the science as well as the policy and governmental topics surrounding the issue.

“The problem is not whether or not the climate is changing,” Jain said. “We know it is changing, the question is how much.”

Scientists differ on what the impacts of global warming will be and to what degree the earth’s temperature will change, yet they agree that it is increasing.

Jain said there are things that people can do every day to try and reduce their individual emissions such as using public transportation instead of automobiles.

“We have to know what our personal carbon footprints are on the planet and what we can do as individuals to lessen the impact,” Hewitt said. “Building awareness is a great first step.”

Although there are a number of environmentally concerned groups on the University campus, Oregon State University has a program called the Campus Carbon Challenge that is trying to reduce student carbon dioxide emissions by promoting a list of 50 actions people can take to reduce their carbon emissions.

Professor Schlesinger said he would support a similar program on this campus to get students more involved in starting to solve the problems of climate change.

“There is no aspect of this that is easy,” Schlesinger said. “You can’t just wait and take action later; you need to take action now.”

5 ways you can reduce your carbon footprint

1. Reduce your shower time to 5 minutes

2. Use a reusable water bottle instead of bottled water

3. Buy local products

4. Carpool or use public transportation instead of driving

5. Spread the word