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 And that’s where another interesting commonality emerges, because the cannabis plant — specifically, the durable fiber called hemp that it produces — may well prove to be an essential resource for combating global warming.

To buy into the premise of this article, you have to accept the reality of anthropogenic or man-made climate change. Not everyone is willing to do this: A March 2014 Gallup Poll found that while 65 percent of Americans believe that the effects of global warming will either happen or are happening in their lifetime, only 36 percent think that this poses a serious threat.

And as noted by Think Progress, as many as 163 current members of Congress — who have collectively received nearly $60 million in campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industry — deny the realities of climate change.

But for scientists, the consensus is decidedly different. An analysis by ex-National Science Board member Jim Powell revealed that out of approximately 14,000 peer-reviewed abstracts on climate change from 1991 to 2012, only 24 rejected the reality of global warming.

According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its report Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, the fact of global warming is unequivocal, and many of the changes to the climate observed since the 1950s are literally unprecedented over the course of decades or even millennia.

Each of the last three decades has brought successively warmer temperatures at the planet’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. In the Northern Hemisphere, the years from 1983 to 2012 were likely the warmest 30-year period in at least the last 1,400 years. Since the early 20th century, Earth’s air and sea-surface temperatures have risen 1.4°F, with two-thirds of that increase taking place since 1980.