Why peoples don't believe in Global Warming...

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The Global Warming debate benefits the naysayers. It is a topic too complex to ever be decided in the court of public opinion and politicians and corporations have allowed it to be the lynchpin environmental issue. The environmentalists need to change the debate.

It doesn't take a scientist to understand that we are consuming many of the earth's resources at an unsustainable rate and need to switch to renewable energy sources. Does anyone claim that the earth is producing fossil fuels at a faster rate than we are using them?

The biggest environmental issue facing this planet is overpopulation. It doesn't take a scientist to understand the affects of population on environmental issues. A cocktail party conversation comparing a world population of 100 people v. 1 trillion people could probably hammer the point home.

The "Green Movement" also isn't helping environmental causes. The development of new energy consuming devices (computers in every home, mobile phones, DVRs) and then patting themselves on the back by making them more efficient is two steps backward and a half a step forward, but somehow promoted by corporations, politicians and some environmentalists as environmental progress. Don't even get me started on the Prius.

I believe in global warming and global cooling. It happens each day, just for opposite longitudinal hemispheres...

There are two different, but related discussions happening:

1) The scientific discussion. Is global warming occuring? Yes, the data is pretty clear. Is it anthrogenic? Not proven, but the statistical models are starting to converge toward the affirmative. Like all statistical models, they are built on confidence intervals, and these can be wrong. Statistical models will never prove a scientific theory--but they are useful tools to direct us on a course of inquiry.

For my part, I see an intuitive link between carbon combustion and thermal retention--we can demonstrate the effect in the lab on a micro level. But an intuitive link and a micro-level demonstration does not prove to what extent the climate change we are observing is outside the normal pattern of change that would have been expected to occur in a dynamic system.

Meanwhile,

2) The political discussion. The human cause of global warming is presented as fact; and the reduction of carbon consumption is presented as the remedy. Nowhere in the rhetoric of the eco-lobby is the acknowledgement that some component of global warming is a necessarily cyclical part of a dynamic ecosystem. The fossil record (sorry, creationists, I am going to rely on it) demonstrates cyclicality reasonably well, so if reduction in carbon consumption is the remedy, then two questions still need to be answered: "How much remediation will reduction in carbon consumption provide?" and "If we remdiate global warming, will that precipitate unwanted consequences by interfering with the natural, dynamic structure of the climate?" The first question has to deal with the concern that doing something is of no value if the something that you are doing is not going to have any real impact on the change that you are trying to effect. The second question has to do with the principle that the cure should not be worse than the disease.

In the industrialized world, we had the economic advantage of effectively unlimited carbon consumption for two centuries to fuel our industrial development. We have arrived. Now, not suprisingly, the industrializing economies want their kick at the can. We want to retain competitive pricing with industrializing economies. The switch to carbon fuel alternatives involves enormous capital costs in development, retooling and provide no guarantee of sustainability of costs. The industrial side presents the question as an overly simplified business case, without doing the math about whether the long term benefits of switching to non-carbon fuel alternatives actually demonstrate a business case for moving forward.

So where to I stand? I think the real argument in favour of reducing carbon consumption has very little to do with climate change, and everything to do with economics. Release of energy stored in carbon fuels is astonishingly inefficient. A switch to non-carbon fuel energy sources (and preferably a variety of sources) is, in my view, mandating by the long-term business case that you can generate a joule of energy for a fraction of the cost.

Where the debate falls down is that both sides are entrenching positions, with no attempt to inhabit the center. If the eco-lobby could demonstrate a business case to support their agenda, and if industry could acknowledge that cheap energy consumption is not the economic equivalent of efficient energy consumption, we might be able to have a productive public policy discussion.

I'm not holding my breath. (And my apologies for my ongoing contribution to greenhouse gasses from respiration).

Throwing in my two cents

I think that "global warming" is a very vague concept. What we've been told for the past few years is not exactly accurate, and I hate to say it, but we can't trust what we're told as fact anymore.
I don't deny, and never have, that pollution and human influence is hurting our ecosystem and our planet. We still need to develop alternative energy, not only for sustainability, but to reduce the horrible pollution which kills the life around us. Burning fossil fuels may or may not make the ocean rise up and drown us all as many people think, but the pollution it produces kills wild life, and makes us sick. We still need to recycle, we still need to conserve water, all these things are great.
However, carbon taxes are a scam. I cannot say this enough.
A country that imposes a carbon tax first, without throwing everything into weaning us off of fossil fuels and developing cheap, available alternative energy, is scamming you.
Sure you'll get less pollution, hypothetically, but let's think about it realistically. Almost every single aspect of your life will be taxed: your car, your heat, your electricity, your food (that was produced using fossil fuels)... Small businesses will tank. Ol' Larry's car shop can't afford to pay a massive business car tax, but Walmart sure can, and they will. Only those who can afford to pay the tax will remain, and those who can't will eventually protest. Look what's happened in France. The people, not the government, but the citizens of a country, rose up in protest against the unfair, unaffordable prices imposed on them.

More and more data is coming out that what we've been told about global warming is inaccurate and over exaggerated. Temperatures have risen and fallen like this in cycles throughout history (though our records only go back so far, because there wasn't a universal temperature system for quite a while). And, if we can't predict accurately what the local climate will be like next week (think of your weatherman), how can we really believe we can predict the climate of the entire world over a period of years? This is simply foolish. Even when it comes to minor weather systems, after only a few days (I think it's 4-5 days?), one has a better chance of guessing the weather than predicting it using any other method.

What we call "global warming" is a scam. Pollution is real, trash in our oceans is real, the chemical waste poisoning our ecosystem is real, but "global warming" is a purely political concept. We should take care of our planet in any way we can, but that's not what's going on right now. What's going on right now is the slow but steady increase of control over the population under the guise of safety and security.

Environmentalism in general is too hyped up, and is too useful to corporations for selling things like hybrid vehicles and other "green" merchandise.