One major topic that CUs extensive environmental staff focuses on is the climate and environment, and it is one that students, staff and community members of Boulder share. It is a topic that is echoed from Boulder across the planet. The realities of Earth’s changing climate and increased global warming have been worldly issues for many years.

“The rate of warming is increasing,” said a National Geographic News article from June 2007. “The 20th century’s last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia.”

Global warming is not going away; if anything, it is increasing.

(CU Independent Illustration/Josh Shettler)

With such a current global issue fiercely stirring up concern and controversy world-wide, the debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney seemed a perfect opportunity to address and discuss the issue. So, what stopped them? The climate is a pressing, current problem that the next man in the White House needs and will be expected to investigate, if not begin to alleviate.

However, all three presidential debates came and went “without Barack Obama or Mitt Romney ever uttering the words climate change,” said Suzanne Goldenberg at The Guardian. “It was the first time since 1988, the year Congress was first briefed on the emerging threat by the scientist James Hansen, that there had been no mention of climate change in an election debate.”

Though the whole nation has its own opinion on what candidate won which debate, the more important concern should be why neither of them chose to speak out about climate change. Though the economy, health insurance issues and military are all important points to be discussed, climate change is a crucial point for the world (America included) and needed to be a main topic in the discussions. Climate change should be marked with a star and put down in pen, so as not to be erased or passed over because the issue is big – bigger than those two men with their differing agendas and stage presence. Climate change is an issue of the world, of the earth. If the earth is not discussed and if plans are not made to care for it, then a time will come when elections and politics will not matter or exist – global warming promises us so.

Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Katrina Winograd at Katrina.winograd@colorado.edu.