Last week, planet earth reached a landmark! CO₂ emissions exceeded 400 parts per million. So why aren’t scientists celebrating? Well, this is nothing to celebrate. Al Gore expressed a common sentiment among global warming sympathizers, tweeting that the event was “a sad milestone.” Action must be taken to reduce carbon emissions and the burning of fossil fuels.

The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii has been monitoring CO2 emissions since 1958. On Thursday, May 10^th, it released a report that stated a new, unprecedented level of CO2 had been recorded in the atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps heat in our atmosphere and has been linked to rising temperatures, ice melting and sea level rising. 

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, Fox News guest commentator, Erik Rush, tweeted "Yes, they're evil. Let's kill them all," to his nearly 40,000 twitter followers. Rush was talking about Muslims, who he had immediately blamed for the bombing.

The shocking and unacceptable nature of his words, however, has much deeper consequences. In the United States, free speech is valued -- after all, it is the first right guaranteed under our constitution. Yet what Rush tweeted is not protected as free speech because it insights violence. If one just ignores his words or dismisses them as being intentionally controversial -- they run the risk of encouraging and promoting hateful ideology and perpetuating the cycle of violence in humanity.

Encouraging others to "kill" an entire certain group -- whether a religious, racial, or ethnic group -- is polarizing and dangerous. Rush might explain the scandal away by saying he was only being sarcastic, but hate speech isn't something that we should ignore or just explain away.

Rush has a global platform that most do not -- he is invited to speak on Fox News as an unpaid commentator. His hate inducing words are completely unacceptable. Fox News should drop Erik Rush from their program, or else they will be endorsing his hateful ideology. It's time to take a deep breath and stop the cycle of violence.

2012 was the hottest year ever in the United States recorded since 1895. Global sea level rose approximately seventeen centimeters within the last century and we have experienced twenty of the warmest years since 1981. But that is not the only problem we are currently facing...

The United Nations made a report on the relationship between climate change and women's equality, stating that "women are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than men -- primarily as they constitute the majority of the world's poor and more dependent for their livelihood on natural resources that are threatened by climate change."

Women make up 45-80% of all food producers in developing countries. Climate change has caused a wide array of inconsistent agricultural patterns, making traditional practices to be inadequate. This creates many problems for women, who may solely depend on agriculture for food and income.

It is important to understand the effects of climate change to citizens of developing countries. In places such as Africa and Asia, women and their families are very dependent on agricultural crops and resources. But due to climate change, the likelihood to gather these resources has decreased -- leading to a variety of issues for women and their families.

Yesterday, GlobalSolutions.org staff and members joined the One Billion Rising rallies around the country to raise awareness about violence against women. The name of the rally pointed to the fact that 1 in 3 women worldwide---that's one billion women around the world---will be raped or physically abused in her lifetime.

Eve Ensler, the movement's creator, calls this an atrocity. This is truly a human rights crisis that is happening across borders and nations. It is easy to be numbed by the statistics, or to believe this problem is so widespread, so prevalent all over the world, that it is hard to know where to begin to address this problem. Yet, One Billion Rising relayed messages of hope and inspiration. In their words, "one billion violated is an atrocity; one billion rising is a revolution."

Earlier this week, the Senate voted and passed the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. This bill has proven to save the lives of many women across the country who had been subjected to domestic and sexual abuse. The 78 Senators who voted to reauthorize VAWA demonstrated a strong commitment for protecting women's rights as human rights. There is no reason why those same 78 Senators couldn't vote to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the international women's rights treaty.