Replies

One is the contingent who think, as an article of political faith, that Global Warming is false. Because it's mostly leftists who advocate human caused warming, they must oppose it.

While that is part of what drives many to dismiss out of hand the GW crowd, their track record is something that should make one sceptical of anything they are claiming with certainty. We have been running out of oil and will be out of oil in 10 years has been repeated since the Nineteen teens. The Population Bomb and the mass starvation and dying that was to have occured 20+ years ago is another. The "death" of the oceans 20 years ago if we didn't do something in "10 years" is another. "Silent Spring" another of their doom and gloom causes that turned out to be absolutely false. Same with Alar. The list goes on and on and on and on. While vitually 100% of their past predictions having been wrong, I am skeptical of their current predictions.

You're conflating two different, but overlapping groups. I agree that the doom-n-gloom crowd have a poor track record. But Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory doesn't really have enough track record to judge. There's little doubt that the Earth has been warming. And there's little doubt that CO2 is a warming agent and also that human activity has increased its atmospheric concentration.

But there are good reasons to be skeptical. No theory should be used a basis for public policy unless its reliability can be determined. I don't see any convincing way to demonstrate recent warming is determined to any significant extent by greenhouse gas emissions. There's no way to go back and change CO2 concentrations to validate the models. Predictions of global temperatures fifty or a hundred years are no help as they can't be validated here and now.

What would be convincing is predictions of global temperatures for some limited time in the future, say five or ten years. These could be compared to predictions of other models If GW models outperform the others significantly in that time frame, it might be reason enough to act.