This topic gets me very angry and I am very passionate about it. Especially when I see people like Al Gore saying things like, 'the debate is over, it's proven all meteorologists and climatologists agree we are causing global warming and it will be the end of society as we know it'. Without raising my blood pressure, here are a few of my points.
In my opinion people are quite naive when they think that you can go to the wall and set Earths thermostat to whatever temperature you feel is Earths right or natural temperature. The Earth has warmed and cooled significantly over its history and will continue to do so for eternity, to believe that people have the ability to hold a specific temperature, is laughable.
The global average temperature is somewhere between 12-14C. If you look at the 2 billion year history of the Earth, the global average temperature has ranged between about 10C and 22C. With the cool valleys brief compared to the warm stretches (see
http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm). Our globe is warming, are humans having some impact? Probably, how much of that is Earth returning to normal, most of it. Do we also have impacts that cool our planet? Probably. Can you make an accurate climate model that accounts for all of those parameters and unknown natural variation? Definitely not.
One point people like to bring up, its not that we are warming, its the rate at we are warming. They cite ice core samples that go back hundreds of thousands of years or more. The major problem with that data is, the older an ice sample is, you lose the fine scale (short-term) variability and you see more of a long-term trend. When you compare that to very fine temporal data we have for the past few hundred years, well of course we are warming faster than the past many thousand years, the ice cores you are using intrinsically blur (or effectively time average) that data. It is not appropriate to make comparisons as such.
To construct public and economic policy to attempt to set an artificial normal Earth temperature not only is irresponsible, it is a worthless endeavor because it plain will not work.
The attention that these people give to global warming should be directed to things we actually do have a large impact on and could change. Fresh clean drinking water that could end up being what the next major regional, if not world war is over, not oil. 80-90% of the rivers in China are polluted to the point where it is undrinkable. Over a billion people with not enough water to drink, sounds like a problem to me. The Earth is overpopulated, some sort of epidemic will occur on this planet, even with modern medicine, will kill millions if not billions, but that will actually benefit the planet in the long run. And we must use the oil on our land now and MUST develop an alternate to oil because it will run out or become unimaginably expensive.
The global warming alarmists like Al Gore are in many ways like religious fanatics, in many ways global warming and his version of environmentalism is his religion. Al Gore and people like him, believe what you like, live how you feel is right, but for one minute dont push your beliefs on others (note beliefs, his statements are NOT fact), especially when your goal is truly unobtainable, but comes at an extremely high cost.
Stepping down from my soapbox without getting too worked and keeping this short. Yes, I think this is short.