Two mornings this week, I went to Dunkin Donuts and purchased a small coffee and a bagel to kick start my day. On one of these visits, I started thinking about how many calories were in one of their donuts. That opened a can of curious worms. I began to think: "Well a calorie is a term used by chemists as a unit of heat equal to the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one kg of water by one degree Celsius. Dietary Calories are equal to 1000 chemistry calories. It sure is hot out right now. Must be global warming (cough, I mean climate change). Global warming is melting the ice caps (poor polar bears). I wonder how Dunkin Donuts would contribute to melting the ice caps if all of those calories were converted into heat energy applied to ice caps . . . " And so began my quest to discover Dunkin Donuts' latent power to destroy our planet. Or at least the Antarctic ice cap.

I've done the research, and it is indeed surprising. The Dunkin Donuts' corporate site boasts $5.5 billion in sales for 2008. For simplicity's sake, I assumed that all of those sales are glazed donuts that sell for (again for simplicity's sake) one dollar. That means that Dunkin Donuts sells about 5.5 billion donuts a year. The website also tells that there are 220 Calories in one of their glazed donuts, which is equivalent to 220,000 chemistry calories. This means that Dunkin Donuts 2008 sales contained about 1,210,000,000,000,000 chemistry calories. I next investigated Antarctica and found that there are 29,300,000 cubic kilometers of ice in the world's seventh continent. Keeping in mind that the density of ice is 900,000,000,000 kg/km³, Antarctica's frozen water weighs 26,370,000,000,000,000,000 kg.

The bottom line: the 2008 sales of Dunkin Donuts had the potential to raise the Antarctic ice cap's temperature by 0.0000459 degrees Celsius. Only after about 21,800 years of sales, the company could raise the temperature of the ice by 1 degree.

So, Dunkin Donuts turns out to be a weak ally for the global warming axis of evil (which includes such stars as CFCs and automobiles). Our beloved calorie factory does deserve credit, however, for its significant contribution to raising the weight of the country since its establishment 58 years ago.

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Jacqueline Zillioux lives in Michigan, where she is applying to med school and continuing to contemplate important factors that affect our health.