An Inconvenient Truth. made by a political hypocritical dumbass.
I take it you're a global warming "skeptic" then?
i believe it exists at the same time i believe it's overexaggerated. we certainly contribute to it, but methane, an molecule 8 times heavier and 20 times more effective a GW particle is 75% produced by cows.
they too have an impact that at least comes very close to the net result of what we do. This is part of a cycle of nature not directly disturbed by humans. Nature is doing at least 2/3 as much as we are doing, while countering our own effects.
neither side has lent enough evidence to their suspicions to bend me fully to on side or another.
While part of what you say is true, you're actually wrong.
You see the worlds carbon cycle is a little like a sea saw. The carbon levels in the atmosphere are always changing by small amounts. Essentially the plants turn carbon based gasses into oxygen and solid carbon, which they are made from and the animals turn oxygen into carbon based gasses, using the carbon from what they eat. Before humanity, this process was fairly well balanced, while you saw small changes over long periods of time, things were stable from the time perspective that we look at things. So this claim that "Nature is doing at least 2/3 as much as we're doing" - is actually completely false. "Nature's" total emissions is actually about 0. Yes lots of animals produce carbon gasses, as indeed do lots of plants when they die, but all that is carbon is also removed from the atmosphere by nature. If nature wasn't balanced we would have seen a slow build up or loss until life stopped being able to survive. We haven't seen that.
Now the science behind what creates global warming is very simple. There is a set amount of carbon in the world. It is locked up in lots of different places. One of the refined sources of carbon is fossil fuels - which are essentially fossilised plants. This is carbon that would never get into the atmosphere. It's locked away in the ground. By burning it, we're releasing extra carbon, which is not part of the carbon cycle into the atmosphere. That's why you see graphs like this.
Or even better - this one of carbon levels in the atmosphere for the last 400,000 years:
You can clearly see, and surely understand, that we're putting more carbon into the atmosphere than nature would have. This is, in fact, an undisputed fact. There is no scientific evidence that opposes this and it is accepted by all scientists.
Of course the question of "does this make the Earth hotter" is a very easy one to answer - every single experiement that has been carried out seeing if higher carbon levels in the atmosphere results in higher temperatures has found that it does. You can even do this experiement yourself. Make two airtight containers and put a thermometer in both. Seal one up with the normal atmosphere. With the other, burn some paper, or some other plant based material and collect as much of the smoke in the container. The smoke that you can see is actually not a gas but the carbon gasses will be with it. Put both containers in a cool spot (like a fridge) to make sure that the temperatures from the fire don't have an effect. Put them outside and record the change in temperature in each container. I can guarantee that the container with higher carbon levels will be warmer. Scientists have repeated this experiement in much more controlled environments and have found it to be a fact that higher carbon in the atmosphere means higher temperatures.
So as you can see, there is no doubt that global warming is happening and that we are the cause of it.
Now it is a good question, to ask why we should worry. The nihilist view put forward in this topic is a strong one, except it ignores a few crucial areas.
1. It is not predicted that humanity will die out, but rather that we will face a depression worse than the 1930s great depression. That global warming will cost about $9,000,000,000,000 USD within this century. Already in many countries in the world we are experiencing serious problems. The drought in Australia was predicted by the Australian Climate Institute - an independent Government organisation of scientists trying to predict the causes of climate change. Not only did they predict that this would be the worst drought in our history (and it is) but they also predicted that we would have droughts like this on a much more regular basis. They also predicted that by 2006 we would experience a significant increase in extreme fire days - another prediction that turned out to be true. What these predictions mean is that our lives are going to get a great deal harder. Never mind about the future generations, we're the ones who are going to suffer. The World Health Organisation has stated that they believe so far 150,000 people have died as a result of climate change (due to the increase in malaria)
2. Loss of biodiversity. It's been predicted by some of the worlds leading biodiversity scientists that by the end of the century one in five plants and animals will be extinct. That's a dramatic loss and something that ultimately will have a serious effect on ourselves. While some of you may not care about all the incredibilities of nature and the loss of never being able to see or study these life forms again, biodiversity is also a crucial part in the ecosystem. When we're talking in terms of human generations, nature is essentially balanced. Loss of biodiversity leads to that balance being put out - which leads to large population explosions of some animals, while extinctions of others. Large population explosions are usually a bad thing because they lead to higher disease and they eat a lot of resources. Essentially what we will see is more serious diseases and plagues that have serious effects on our food production. Again, from a selfish point of view - this is going to make our lives harder to live.
There is also, of course, the question of moral obligations. I won't go into that, because it's a philosophical question that doesn't even need to be answered. The fact is that we are definitely causing climate change and that it is going to make our lives harder to live. If you want your life to be harder, you could just go and sleep in a gutter, but to decide for us all that we should all live hard lives - that is clearly an unethical decision. Allow us the ability to live in as good a life as we choose by not exacerbating the situation and if you want to live a life of suffering, make that choice for yourself.