Vida Chen, 18, stands at Santa Clara and San Pedro Streets in San Jose, asking pedestrians, "Do you have a minute for the environment?"
Chen, a San Jose resident, works for Environment California, an organization that collects money from the public to influence state legislation on environmental issues.
At Smith College in Massachusetts, Chen was looking for a way to change the world as well as find a summer job. She stumbled upon Environment California; soon she was attending to the growing concerns over global warming.
"It let me get more involved with this issue," she said.
Many student organizations and youth activist groups are trying to show the world that global warming is serious and that it's having detrimental effects on the Earth.
The issue is gaining credence. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court entered the fight, announcing that it would take a case on vehicle emissions standards.
But the battle goes on at the local level. College students such as Chen, who wears a blue Environment California T-shirt, inform the public and try to persuade people to help campaign for a greener world.
Chen stood in 90-degree heat for five hours June 23 with Brooks Brandt and Christina Galvan, both 18. The three students cover the San Jose area as part of the Menlo Park branch of Environment California. They work five hours a day, six days a week, at different locations, talking to passersby about the environment.
"There are people who walk by who are willing to donate," Brandt said. And that's exactly what happens. Many people sign up for membership and donate to the cause. Their contributions are used to fund political campaigns.
Global warming could become "the largest environmental issue of this century," said Michael Hanemann, professor of environmental economics at the University of California-Berkeley. "It's a very large problem. It's going to increase in magnitude as the decades advance."
The phenomenon is caused by a buildup of "greenhouse gases," which mainly include carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Released by the burning of fossil fuels, these gases build up in the atmosphere and blanket the Earth, trapping in heat from the sun.
The past few decades have seen an exponential increase in carbon dioxide, mostly generated by human activity, Hanemann said. As a result, the Earth's temperature has been rising. In the 20th century, the Northern Hemisphere's average global surface temperature rose one degree.
Although it doesn't seem like much, small temperature increases may have enormous ramifications. "It's a profound change in our climate that is unprecedented in human history," Hanemann said.
Former Vice President Al Gore contends in the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" that glaciers and ice floes have been melting at alarming rates. He says that if it isn't controlled, Greenland would be iceless by 2050. That much water would raise the sea level by about 20 feet, drowning low-lying areas such as Manhattan or coastal India and affecting more than 100 million people globally.
Environment California is dedicated to preventing this. It has supported several bills that have passed through the Legislature; in January, a measure was passed that allocated $3.2 billion for installing solar panels on new buildings in California.
This summer, the organization is working on Assembly Bill 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, said 20-year-old David Wyman, citizen outreach director of Environment California's Menlo Park branch. The bill's goal is to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions in California by 25 percent by 2020 and 75 percent by 2050. Wyman hopes for it to be passed by Aug. 31.
Other programs, such as the California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) have similar goals.
"We want to have all campuses be carbon neutral, or to have a 90 percent reduction within the next 50 years," said CALPIRG Student Board Chair Tamasso Boggia, 19.
Like Environment California, CALPIRG also runs on donations. But the money comes from UC students, not the general public. To keep a CALPIRG branch running, at least 20 percent of a campus's student body must pledge at least $5 annually.
"The only way we manage to stay on campus and keep our funding is the pledge fee," Boggia said. "We have to take a week out of our activities each quarter and talk to all students."
One of the largest problems student activists say they face is the community's general indifference toward global warming. "It affects everyone," Galvan said, "and the sad part is that a lot of people are apathetic."
Nonetheless, students and organizations are working to imprint the seriousness of the matter on the public.
"It's the most important issue of our generation," said Dan Xie, 19, a UC-Davis student. "The human ramifications in the next 20 years would be huge." She coordinates her school's CALPIRG Campus Climate Challenge, a national program focused on making college campuses more energy efficient. Ultimately, she just wants to make a difference. "I hope I can make a little dent in the universe of politics," she said.
The next few decades will be strongly influenced by what is being done right now, Boggia said: "It is our future we're fighting for."