The main issue is in the terminology, because while it’s undeniable that climate has been changing steadily over the last 200 years, “believing” in climate change doesn’t mean to actually agree to the suggested solutions.
I’ll try to go through some points:
a) Climate is changing -> yes
b) Climate is changing and it’s, in some percentage, influenced by mankind -> yes. It has been proven that earth goes through natural periods of warming and cooling. The post-industrial sudden increase in the average temperature seems to suggest that mankind influenced it. Saying that it’s 100% manmade is wrong, saying that man had no influence is also wrong.
c) What are the effects going to be? -> this is very tricky. Many scientists for decades has been suggesting that the temperature will keep rising until catastrophe happens. Other scientist suggested that earth is a system that self-balances, and feedback systems will greatly reduce anything caused by mankind. In the case of Co2 emissions and the increase in temperature, the natural result will be an increase in water evaporation, leading to a greater amount of clouds that lead to lower temperature (precipitations + screening from the sun). So far, all the models that forecast the temperature to keep rising have been proven wrong for nearly 30 years, so due to lack of any clear evidence I’m leaning toward the side of a self-balancing system, simply because any study that tried to prove otherwise has been wrong since 1988.
c-part 2) “But 97% of scientist say that…” -> I’ve heard that many times. Quote:
In an analysis of 12,000 abstracts, he found “a 97% consensus among papers taking a position on the cause of global warming in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are responsible.” “Among papers taking a position” is a significant qualifier: Only 34 percent of the papers Cook examined expressed any opinion about anthropogenic climate change at all. Since 33 percent appeared to endorse anthropogenic climate change, he divided 33 by 34 and — voilà — 97 percent!
If a “scientist” has to rely on this kind of tricks to boast the results of his research, I tend to immediately be very skeptic about his results.
d) What is the solution -> reducing Co2 emissions, no matter how much (or even if) it will impact climate change in a significant way, is something we should invest on. Even if someone didn’t give a damn about climate change, reducing air pollution is extremely important.
e) How should we reduce Co2 emissions -> another tricky part. If every country in the world invested a ton of money into reducing Co2 emissions and China + India didn’t, basically nothing would change. It becomes then difficult to evaluate how much each single country should invest into alternative sources of energy, especially for those countries with high energy demands (larger and more populated areas), and those with little/no access to alternative sources.
I wish there were more reliable studies regarding climate change, so that there wouldn’t be the need to talk about “believers” and “deniers”. And I also wish funds towards research were split more evenly, because for decades billions of dollars worldwide has been given to scientist working on climate change models and they’ve been wrong nearly all the time. If all the money that resulted in just hearing people saying:“Yep, climate is changing” had been directly invested into solar/wind energy, we would probably be in a much better position.
Let’s put it this way: if tomorrow it was proven to be 100% correct that climate change is influenced by mankind but will selfbalance itself with no catastrophic events within the next few years (this impending doomsday is something most scientist has been saying for 30 years, and have been proven wrong), wouldn’t it be better? I mean, being able to ignore short term effects and focus on long term and better investments on renewable energy seems like a much more achievable plan than:“WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW OR IT’S WATERWORLD”. This is why I’d like to see funds to be funnelled equally to both sides of the scientific debate, because so far the side that has received all the money hasn’t produce really convincing data regarding the issues I mentioned.