As an engineer I can tell you that not even 1 in 10 of the people in my profession “believe” in global warming. The science simply isn’t there. One of the first things they teach you in thermodynamics is that you can’t solve for the temperature of an open system, especially one of the complexity of the earth. There is too much that is unknown and too many assumptions that have to be made. Anyone who tells you different is not a scientist but rather a fool or a person with an agenda.
Climatology is a “soft science” in that it has no real predictive accuracy but is rather a bunch of models in which a person makes certain assumptions to arrive at the result they wish to achieve. It is only loosely based on measured data and known interactions. In that sense it is more akin to economics or psychology than any discipline in the hard sciences. There is simply too much that is unknown for it to be otherwise.
Still, assume for a moment that the climate really is warming instead of just “changing” (as if such a thing has any meaning at all). You would still have to prove;
1: That the change is for the worse. This hasn’t even been addressed and really can’t be known with any certainty. History shows that humanity has benefitted from a warmer climate more often than not.
2: That there is something we can do about it. The answer to this question is clearly no. Show me a country that is meeting its Kyoto quotas and I will show you a country that is lying or dying.
3: That the efects of what we attempt to do to ameliorate the “problem” aren’t actually worse than the alleged “problem.” Even the tiny step we have taken towards biofuels shows that the cure is often worse than the disease. A sub-category of this is that we might actually exacerbate the problem we are attempting to solve instead of creating new ones, such is our paucity of knowledge about the subject.
4: Even if all of the above could be shown, then we would have to weigh the usage of our finite resources. For instance, it might be much more economically effective to simply design crops that are more heat resistant than to starve millions of people in the third world by creating an artificial demand for biofuels. We have already killed enough Africans by our banning of DDT. Just because the environmental movement doesn’t have a conscience doesn’t mean that the rest of us don’t.
5: There are other problems that are unquestionably real that are more deserving of our attention. For instance, having a mad mullah developing nuclear weapons who has stated on several occassions that he intends to wipe other countries off the map. States such as Saddam’s who have used WMDs and supported terrorism throughout the globe while daily violating the armistice and sanctions that were put in place to keep him in check. The willingness of our fellow citizens to use the ballot box to rob us of our hard earned resources and the willingness of our own press to take the side of our enemies… whether they be purveyors of junk science or lunatic death cult worshippers. Ecologically there are certainly greater threats such as being hit by a massive comet etc…
6: You have to trust politicians to solve the problem. Given that they currently would rather subsidize US farmers to grow food crops for fuel rather than importing ethanol from Brazil you would have to be a fool to think that they will act rationally instead of abusing the mandate they are given for their own purposes. This is the one part of this whole equation of which we CAN be certain.
For this and about a million other reasons, global warming is a non-starter except as a means of extending the control of government over the lives of free men and as a means of separating those same men from their rights and possessions. It is also useful to people such as reacharound as a means of feeling morally superior. Funny how for some people that always equates to the application of force against those who disagree with them.
