Agreed. How could any sensible person think humankind is responsible for global changes in weather or climate?
First by getting their science information from places other than political Blogs.
Our planet Earth is believed to be a little more than 4 billion years old.
Yep. 4.54 ± 0.05 billion, actually.
During this almost unfathomable length of time, Earth has undergone countless dramatic shifts in weather and climate. Man is truly a newcomer to Earth as measured in geologic time.
That doesn't mean we can't influence things on a large scale in a short time.
If Earth's total time of existence were compressed into a single 24 hour day, all of human existence would still not equal one full minute of the first hour of that very first day. We just got here!
It wouldn't even equal a second on a 24 hour scale. On the scale of one year, the
Cosmic Calendar, anatomically modern humans have only been here for 8 seconds. On a 24 hour scale, we've been here 0.533 seconds. Blink.
Find the fraction that represents the dawn of the Industrial Revolution some 250 years ago divided into a planet more than 4 billion years old. It would be a value so infinitesimally small as to be expressed in scientific notation using a negative exponent.
How much time would it take to detonate 30,000 nuclear bombs and obliterate all human life, and most animal life, on the planet? Clearly, how long we've been here doesn't necessarily translate into how much damage we can do.
The question is, just how much influence can we have on the global climate? Not how much someone thinks, or reasons, or believes, but how much it actually is. The answer is, no one knows.
There is no "theory of climate change" to reject or argue against. There are dozens of different hypotheses, and people advancing political action switch what they call that theory according to what argument they want to make. To deconstruct this:
(1) Human activity has raised the level of CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere beyond what it would otherwise be. [Uncontroversial]
(2) Mean global temperatures have increased over the 20th century. [mostly accepted]
(3) Human activity has contributed to some degree to that increase. [mostly accepted]
(4) Human activity is the primary cause of temperature increase over the 20th century. [unproven, speculative]
(5) Human activity will result in temperature increases in the 21st century that are larger than those experienced in the 20th century and larger than would have happened in the absence of human activity. [unproven, speculative]
(6) Temperature increase in the 21st century will have devastating consequences for humans. [highly speculative, controversial]
(7) Government intervention now can reduce temperature increases in the 21st century significantly. [highly speculative, utterly implausible]
So, the only thing that scientists agree on are (1-3). The rest is unproven, speculative, and often implausible. But without (4-7), observations (1-3) simply aren't worth teaching in school or using as political tactics. But activists and politicians promoting government action or inaction like to pretend that agreement on (1-3) implies agreement on (4-7).
What we have now is liberals in particular abusing science for political purposes. They like to pick some half-аssed scientific result that fits their agenda, draw completely unsubstantiated conclusions based on assumptions and junk science, try to use it to get people riled up to vote for them or transfer billions into the coffers of their corporate buddies (oh, yes, liberals have corporate buddies), and accuse anybody who disagrees with their political agenda as "unscientific". Conservatives aren't much better, because many of them think the Bible is a science book and will deny actual science including empirical data if it disagrees with their beliefs or political agendas.
Like most scientists who are searching for the truth, whatever that may be, I agree with what is actually the agreed upon theory of climate change, namely points (1-3). But that's all science supports right now, and the rest is speculation and politics.
That 400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere problem? Nobody knows.
