Mark your calendar.

On Jan. 31, 2008, 3 million students will gather on 1,000 college campuses to hear 20,000 presentations about global climate change and then discuss the issue with 2,000 political leaders. The event, called Focus the Nation, will spill out into civic groups and houses of worship. At the end of the day, by means of a national online vote, all those people will have identified three policy recommendations -- and that will focus the nation's attention enough to begin a serious national effort to deal with global warming.

That's the plan, anyway.

Eban Goodstein, an economist and professor at Lewis and Clarke College in Portland, Ore., brought the plan to Virginia Tech on Wednesday. About 20 people turned out for a noon lecture on the danger of global warming and Focus the Nation, a movement that means to do for global warming what Earth Day did for the environment -- make it a mainstream issue that politicians can't ignore.

"This is not a partisan issue," Goodstein said, "but it is a political issue."

The scientific community is in virtual unanimity that global warming is real and human action is adding to it, Goodstein said. Polls show that the majority of Americans hold the same opinion.

"It's as if the only people who don't see how serious the crisis of global warming is happen to work in Washington, D.C.," Goodstein said.

Neither technology nor money is the real impediment to doing something about global climate change, he said, the real problem is political will. Focus the Nation aims to change that.

Right now, Goodstein said, "Focus the Nation is four of us and hundreds of volunteers."

Focus the Nation's Web site says the project needs about 5,000 volunteer organizers to reach its goals.

"We stand at a unique historical moment," Goodstein told the students. The choices made over the next decade will affect not only the current generation and the one that comes after, he said, but they will also affect "every human being that ever walks the planet from now until the end of time."

Goodstein's PowerPoint presentation includes charts that have become familiar to anyone who has looked into global climate change at all. In the past 400,000 years, the Earth's temperature and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have marched in virtual lockstep. As those gases have increased, so have temperatures. But those gases are accumulating faster than ever before, threatening to drive temperatures higher than ever before. Essentially, Goodstein said, greenhouse gases are wrapping a thicker blanket of atmosphere around the Earth.

"The simple science of global warming is thicker blanket, warmer planet," he said. "It's that simple."

The effects of that thickening blanket are potentially catastrophic. Scientists agree that temperatures are certain to rise, though they aren't sure how much. The range is 2.5 to 10.5 degrees over the next century, Goodstein said. Most estimates put the increase at 3 to 4 degrees.

The Kyoto Protocol, an agreement negotiated in 1997, aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from industrialized nations so that in 2012, they emit 5.2 percent less than in 1990. The U.S. signed the treaty during the Clinton administration, but never ratified it. The Bush administration officially withdrew the U.S. from the process, saying its costs would wreck the economy and that the two-tiered system that sets different rules for developed and developing nations is unfair.

According to Goodstein, economists are in two camps concerning Kyoto's costs. Some believe the economic benefits would outweigh the negatives, so that adhering to the protocols would essentially be free. Others say there's no free lunch. The protocols would cost Americans about $300 per family per year for the duration of the treaty. That, Goodstein said, means the treaty would cost less in three decades than the Iraq war has cost -- and the economy seems to have weathered that so far.

Goodstein said the costs of doing nothing about global climate change, such as species extinction, more intense storms and droughts, water shortages, the spread of pests and disease, and rising ocean levels, would make old environmental problems such as burning rivers seem almost trivial.

"Now we're taking our stupidity from the local to the global," Goodstein said.

As soon as he finished his talk, students began to line up so they could sign up as organizers for Tech's part in Focus the Nation.

On the Net: focusthenation.org