My opinion is as follows.
I think that man definitely has had an impact on the environment. But, and it’s a big but, we just have no way of knowing if man has had an impact on long term climate trends.
And, to the extent that man has impact on climate trends, we don’t know how much is man made.
Earth has had a number of ice ages in history. During the last ice age, Chicago was buried under a mile of ice. All that ice didn’t melt because Cro-Magnon man and Neanderthals had coal fired power plants. Which suggests that natural cycles, which we don’t understand, and have no control over, are what is driving whatever “climate change” the liberals say they are observing.
To the extent that we can clean up the environment, we should do so. However, anything we do should be based on a cost/benefit analysis, not on pie in the sky liberal claptrap.
For example, are the EPA regulations which will cause many coal fired power plants to shut down, really a benefit which override the increased costs we will all bear, if put into effect? The liberals who run our government and EPA are not allowing us to have that conversation.
OK!! Everybody pay attention!
Lesson for today:
1. The sun is 1,300,000 times as big as the earth.
2. The sun is a ball of fire that controls the climates of all its planets.
3. The earth is one of the sun’s planets.
4. The earth is a speck in comparison to the size of the sun.
5. Inhabitants of the earth are less than specks.
Study Question: How do less-than-specks in congress plan to control the sun?
Good opinion.
Earth is 4.5 billions years old, give or take. Just what is Earth’s average mean temp? Does anybody really know? Yea, we may influence the climate to a degree or so, but in the overall scheme of things, Mother Earth is gonna do what Mother Earth is gonna do, and there ain’t a damn thing we can do about it except improvise, adapt, and overcome.
But this chicken little crap scaremongering going on is wearing thin. That and the wholly exorbitant costs/destruction of our economy the libs are trying trying to ram down our throats for their own enrichment really chaffs my butt.
And, to the extent that man has impact on climate trends, we don’t know how much is man made.
I agree with all of your points except that we do have a way of knowing the extent of man's influence.
While it is true that we don't fully understand Nature's role on climate, do not misunderstand this to mean we cannot assess the role of human activity. If we restrict our definition of the impact on global warming by human activity as through the mechanism of green house gases (CO2 emission) then we can say with certainty if this is significant or not. We are justified in restricting our definition of human activity to CO2 emissions because that is precisely the feature of human activity that the global warming policy issues are based on.
Let's take a moment to remind ourselves of the scientific process: When a hypothesis is proposed, it must be able to predict some non-trivial observables in order to test the hypothesis. By non-trivial, I mean that the reasoning should not be circular. For example, evidence of warming is not evidence of anthropogenic warming. As an illustration, one could propose a hypothesis that aliens are projecting an energy beam on the Earth causing the Earth to warm. Hence, evidence of warming would be evidence that our 'Alien' theory is correct. -Not! The point is, evidence of warming is not evidence of any particular cause of warming and is, hence, invalid in terms of answering the question of human influence on warming.
However, greenhouse gas warming theory does indeed predict certain non-trivial observables and we can in fact seek to observe them and test the theory. One of the predicted observables is that the temperature trend in the tropical troposphere round 10,000 ft should be increasing at a rate of three to four times the surface rate. We have over 60 years of balloon satellite date measurement to check this and we observe that the trend in the tropical troposphere is about half to three-quarters the surface rate. The exact opposite of what greenhouse gas theory predicts. From that observation alone we can conclude that temperature is not driven by greenhouse warming.
There is yet another prediction made by greenhouse gas theory which predicts that as the surface temperature increases, the amount of energy radiated into space will decrease by a certain amount. This prediction is based on the idea that increased temperature will cause more CO2 and water vapor to be produced by the oceans, resulting in a greater amount of radiation trapping. But again, we have decades of satellite data to test this observation and we find that the amount of radiation into space increases by an amount about three times what greenhouse gas theory predicts it should decrease. So again, greenhouse gas theory predicts the opposite of what we observe.
From these tests, even if we don't fully understand what is actually driving temperature, we can absolutely conclude that the warming (if any) is not driven by greenhouse gases. Independent of whatever else we don't know, this fact is incontrovertible.