![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pathology_docJonathan Abrams: Why I am no longer a skeptic on climate change
When I read this article, something struck me as immediately being very, very wrong. The more I read it, the more wrong it got. And so, sporkage.
Before any discussion of global warming (or climate change if you prefer) can begin, one unfortunately is expected to state up front if they accept it or are a skeptic. So my disclosure is that I currently accept anthropogenic (i.e. human caused) Global Warming (AGW) as a scientific fact, despite considering myself a 'skeptic' in general. I wasn't born believing that AGW is real though.
I don't know how old this person is; but if they're old enough to be published in an online newspaper as anything other than a brilliant teenage prodigy, they would not have been born an AGW supporter. Not as it's now defined, anyway.
When I first heard of AGW years ago, it was through the mainstream media. I got the impression from the media that there was a strong legitimate debate about the veracity of AGW. At first I did not know what to believe, but suspected that humans weren't the cause of global warming, if it was happening at all. I never much liked the environmentalism movement and was therefore skeptical of all their claims, whether they made sense or were hyperbolic. As I got more involved with the skeptical community, I learned which sources were trustworthy and which were less so on various scientific issues.
Fascinating that he neither clarifies what these are, nor links to them.
I also learned about the non-rational psychological processes that can lead people to believe or not believe certain ideas. But honestly, I do not know exactly when, how, or why my views changed, but it's interesting to briefly look back and examine why I did not accept AGW, and perhaps it can give us some clues as to why others still don't.
I can give you a very good reason - they are unconvinced by the scientific argument, or see problems with it as a scientific absolute (the way that gravity, for example, is an absolute), or perceive it as having been corrupted by political or economic interests, or are unhappy with the way requests for raw data have been obstructed or denied (which ought to cast doubt on the veracity of the findings).
I find that most people that are skeptical of global warming do not have good rational reasons for their skepticism.
How do you conclude this? This statement sounds just like an article of faith.
According to a recent article in my local paper (originally from Agence France-Presse), people do not accept global warming because it would negatively impact their desire to consume.
Link to article? Otherwise it's just more unsubstantiated pap. Please note the original source as claimed by this person - within France, that nation which more than any other has divorced its energy production from CO2 generation.
I think this theory may help explain some AGW doubt.
But not all. Perhaps you would like to consider the effect of solar cycles on climate, as well as indicators such as the cessation of the last Ice Age without any possibility of meaningful human intervention and the previous existence of migratory land bridges where bodies of water now lie. On what do you lay the responsibility for these shifts?
People do not want to feel guilty about their habits. In order to assuage guilt, we either attempt to fix the cause of the guilt, which takes effort, or we deny that the problem exists, which is much easier.
You, sir, are sounding very much like the Fundamentalist street preacher who I used to see haranguing people outside Flinders Street Station every Friday and Saturday night.
This denial is not done purposefully, it is done subconsciously. Through psychological factors such as cognitive dissonance, our brain decides for us what we should believe, on an instinctual level. We don't actively choose what to believe, we are influenced in many ways and our beliefs are then formed.
I think you're attributing to cognitive dissonance far more influence than it actually has.
Rational judgement of scientific evidence is only one of these influences on our beliefs.
It's actually a fairly large one.
In fact, for the case of AGW, I'd even argue that the scientific evidence plays an even smaller part in someone's acceptance.
What you seem to be saying here is that scientific evidence plays little part in someone's decision to accept that anthropogenic global warming is real. So the science is settled, eh? 'Nevertheless, it does turn'.
The more complex a topic is, the harder it is to rationally judge the scientific evidence, therefore we use other methods to subconsciously decide what to believe.
Bullshit. The more complex a topic is, the more important it is to rationally judge the scientific evidence. Your position is a cop-out.
Before someone can confidently say they accept or don't accept AGW for rational reasons, they must first honestly admit that they have seen, and understand, the relevant scientific evidence.
Which we are being instructed to take on faith by governments, activists and powerful vested interests (e.g. Al Gore) as being 'settled'.
But most people, myself included, can be intimidated by all the climate models, core samples, and temperature charts that are tossed around. Because of this intimidation, we turn to other non-rational belief influences.
You, sir, sound dangerously close to declaring that your belief in AGW is irrational or based on faith. Yet this is what you claim for your AGW-skeptic opponents.
I have not yet seen Al Gore's Nobel prize winning film "An Inconvenient Truth". I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I was a AGW skeptic when it came out and now that I accept AGW I don't feel the need to go rent it.
Or maybe because you're aware of the British court decision which found multiple errors of fact in this piece of work, and don't want to be confronted with the imperfections of your messiah.
Regardless, I think the title is brilliant. It perfectly sums up why I think people have trouble accepting AGW. AGW truly is an inconvenience. If it were true, not only would we have to consume less, but more importantly it can shake our very core beliefs.
Here we are, back on beliefs again. Not science, which is allegedly 'settled', but BELIEFS. Faith.
The sorts of beliefs that AGW would trouble include political/economic and religious beliefs.
What religious beliefs would these be?
I won't judge these core beliefs that people have, but they are key to understanding why AGW is doubted.
But you have judged them, back up where you mentioned AGW denialism as driven by guilt. If that's not a value judgement, what is?
Just as a religious world view could cause someone to not accept evolution, it too can make them less likely to accept AGW.
Nice bit of sleight-of-hand, but I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE. The one has nothing to do with the other, and you know it. You're somewhere between disingenuous and mendacious here, and IMO trending more towards mendacious.
One of these religious views holds that nature exists for humanity's benefit, and therefore, is at our whim and cannot pose danger to us.
CRAP. I offer you Genesis 41:26-36
26 The seven good cows are seven years, and the seven good heads of grain are seven years; it is one and the same dream. 27 The seven lean, ugly cows that came up afterward are seven years, and so are the seven worthless heads of grain scorched by the east wind: They are seven years of famine. 28 "It is just as I said to Pharaoh: God has shown Pharaoh what he is about to do. 29 Seven years of great abundance are coming throughout the land of Egypt, 30 but seven years of famine will follow them. Then all the abundance in Egypt will be forgotten, and the famine will ravage the land. 31 The abundance in the land will not be remembered, because the famine that follows it will be so severe. 32 The reason the dream was given to Pharaoh in two forms is that the matter has been firmly decided by God, and God will do it soon.
33 "And now let Pharaoh look for a discerning and wise man and put him in charge of the land of Egypt. 34 Let Pharaoh appoint commissioners over the land to take a fifth of the harvest of Egypt during the seven years of abundance. 35 They should collect all the food of these good years that are coming and store up the grain under the authority of Pharaoh, to be kept in the cities for food. 36 This food should be held in reserve for the country, to be used during the seven years of famine that will come upon Egypt, so that the country may not be ruined by the famine."
I would hardly call that as indicating a nature bent to our whim.
AGW poses a direct threat to some forms of libertarianism and right-wing capitalism. I think that this may have played a strong role in my personal AGW skepticism, and perhaps in other libertarians. As I discussed in a previous blog post, values can determine whether someone considers themselves a libertarian, liberal, conservative, etc. One important value of libertarianism is the desire for smaller government. This rubs up against the problem of AGW. If the problem of AGW is real, and if we have any hope of solving it, we would most likely require development of gross regulations from governments.
No, we wouldn't. We would require sensible, practical solutions of the sort detailed in Genesis 41:26-36. In a modern context, such solutions would be developed by a combination of climatologists and horticulturalists, and could be passed immediately into very simple, self-evident and widely-agreed legislation by a sensible, rational and minimalist government. Your argument here is political, not scientific, and does not hold water.
This is exactly what is going on right now in Copenhagen. Those who find regulations unpalatable, when faced with AGW, will have strong psychological pressure to find themselves in what I call the AGW skeptic spectrum: deny the existence of rising global temperatures, doubt the fact that it is man made, skeptical that cutting back emissions can help, and finally, question the idea that cutting emissions can help or is economically feasible.
This is fallacious. What we doubt is that regulation will in itself do a single thing to curb the emissions you claim are so damaging. We do not start with the denial of rising global temperatures (though if the Earth is warming, why is Edmonton freezing its balls off like never before in its history?) - we start with questioning the assumption that anthropogenic carbon dioxide production is the overwhelming driver of that temperature rise; we move on to questioning the effectiveness of cap-and-trade schemes (from which major industrial nations like China and India are exempt) in reducing those CO2 emissions; we conclude with combining those questions into serious doubt that a set of regulations which is potentially economically ruinous should be embarked upon when the actual benefit is minimal to nil.
We'd prefer other solutions, technological ones that actually work, such as giving every nation a power-generation system as fossil-fuel-independent as France's. That would automatically slash carbon dioxide emissions by huge amounts worldwide. Taking the biblical quote above as a metaphor, we'd like to lay in excess grain against the years of famine. Seems what you'd like to do is insist on starvation rations in the famine years and pile on an onerous and unproductive bureaucracy to ensure that everyone complies.
It is for this reason that I think that the AGW has unfortunately been split down the house between the political left-wing and right-wing. Once a topic has become left-wing vs right-wing, the argument is no longer scientific, it is political.
This is a false dichotomy. The issue is one of unproductive bureaucracy versus a productive alliance between technology, industry and decisive (minimalist) government.
Points are scored not by evidence but by embarrassing 'gotchas' like the recent climategate scandal and by rhetoric.
You bet it's embarrassing. You seem to miss the point that "Climategate" casts doubt upon the legitimacy of the evidence, and the way in which those responsible have been dealing with it has far more relation to rhetoric than to honest scientists defending a legitimate finding.
Another problem is that people will have the additional incentive of falling in line with their political party of choice, which for some people is their primary social group. Anecdotally, when someone tells me that they are accept AGW, or do not, I can usually guess where their political allegiances lie.
Talk about sweeping assumptions!
As someone with libertarian/right-wing values, I've learned to accommodate the inconvenient truth of AGW. I think the turning point may have been learning about arch-skeptic (and libertarian) Michael Shermer's about face on the issue.
The day I do a full about-face will be the day I wish even more to hang self-serving idiots like you out to dry. If anything, Climategate nudged me towards the believer's corner, if only because it offered a ray of hope that the fucking idiots who blundered the way they did were actually questioning the veracity of their models. This is what the skeptics have been all about from the start. If we'd proceeded on a strong balance of probabilities, and started laying out a technological solution which would have productive outcomes for all rather than a bureaucracic solution which created a huge regulatory organisation which in itself is intrinsically unproductive, it wouldn't matter who was a believer, a skeptic or an outright denier.
The fact that the founder of Skeptic Magazine could not remain an AGW skeptic made me re-examine my personal AGW skepticism. It made me take a fresh look at an issue that I realized may have been clouded by subconscious influences.
My AGW skepticism has been shifted a little by hard data - the revelation that the defenders of global warming were actually skeptical of their own model. I remain in dismay of your proposed solution, and that dismay would only increase if I shifted further towards the "believer" end of the spectrum.
After reading debunking after debunking of poor AGW skeptic arguments, I had no more excuses.
Knocking over straw men is easy.
Just as some religious people find ways to accommodate the fact of evolution, I found ways to accommodate global warming despite my political views.
Here you go, playing the creationist/denier confluence card again. You will find that all but the most hardline Catholics are free to conclude that evolution is a fact, as are the majority of high-church Anglicans, the Uniting Church, and other mainstream Christian denominations. I can't speak for Judaism, but I wouldn't be surprised to find Reform and even some theologically conservative Rabbis happy to sit down to a cuppa with Darwin, and ditto for their congregations.
As the president of a local skeptic organization I'm often asked if I've ever changed my mind due to scientific evidence, I'm proud to say that in this case I did. But I didn't write this post to pat myself on the back.
I disagree. I think you did.
This has taught me that one should be skeptical of their beliefs, especially if they fit with one's world view. Hopefully, this will encourage others to be take an honest second look at AGW science.
I've been looking at it, alright, and I've found nothing but gaping holes all the way. As I see it, the system is simply too damn complex to attribute climate shifts of the sort we're discussing to only one influence, especially since even bigger shifts of a similar nature occurred in the absence of meaningful human contributions to that influence.
I also perceive that you have not once, at any stage in your apologia (because that's what it is), quoted ONE piece of scientific evidence that would support your claim - however firm or infirm that evidence may be.
Your article reminds me of nothing more than the testimony of an impressionable youngster describing their conversion to fundamentalist or 'rapturist' Christianity, delivered in church or before a youth group, to fellow-Christians whom they seek to convince of their authenticity as believers.
Furthermore, I dispute that disbelief in the solution you propose to "AGW" can in any way be tied to disbelief in "AGW" itself.
In short, sir, you are nothing more than a useful idiot, or possibly very, very naive, and if I were an "AGW believer" I would be embarrassed to share a platform with you. So long as people like you continue to push the AGW platform the way you do, my personal integrity requires me to remain in the skeptic camp, with a toe over the denialist line. This doesn't mean I don't want action taken that would mitigate the problem if it exists (albeit with a different ulterior motive). Only a fool doesn't want that. But the pretence for 'action' that is going on right now disgusts me, and this is why I want nothing to do with the whole AGW shemozzle.
When I read this article, something struck me as immediately being very, very wrong. The more I read it, the more wrong it got. And so, sporkage.
Before any discussion of global warming (or climate change if you prefer) can begin, one unfortunately is expected to state up front if they accept it or are a skeptic. So my disclosure is that I currently accept anthropogenic (i.e. human caused) Global Warming (AGW) as a scientific fact, despite considering myself a 'skeptic' in general. I wasn't born believing that AGW is real though.
I don't know how old this person is; but if they're old enough to be published in an online newspaper as anything other than a brilliant teenage prodigy, they would not have been born an AGW supporter. Not as it's now defined, anyway.
When I first heard of AGW years ago, it was through the mainstream media. I got the impression from the media that there was a strong legitimate debate about the veracity of AGW. At first I did not know what to believe, but suspected that humans weren't the cause of global warming, if it was happening at all. I never much liked the environmentalism movement and was therefore skeptical of all their claims, whether they made sense or were hyperbolic. As I got more involved with the skeptical community, I learned which sources were trustworthy and which were less so on various scientific issues.
Fascinating that he neither clarifies what these are, nor links to them.
I also learned about the non-rational psychological processes that can lead people to believe or not believe certain ideas. But honestly, I do not know exactly when, how, or why my views changed, but it's interesting to briefly look back and examine why I did not accept AGW, and perhaps it can give us some clues as to why others still don't.
I can give you a very good reason - they are unconvinced by the scientific argument, or see problems with it as a scientific absolute (the way that gravity, for example, is an absolute), or perceive it as having been corrupted by political or economic interests, or are unhappy with the way requests for raw data have been obstructed or denied (which ought to cast doubt on the veracity of the findings).
I find that most people that are skeptical of global warming do not have good rational reasons for their skepticism.
How do you conclude this? This statement sounds just like an article of faith.
According to a recent article in my local paper (originally from Agence France-Presse), people do not accept global warming because it would negatively impact their desire to consume.
Link to article? Otherwise it's just more unsubstantiated pap. Please note the original source as claimed by this person - within France, that nation which more than any other has divorced its energy production from CO2 generation.
I think this theory may help explain some AGW doubt.
But not all. Perhaps you would like to consider the effect of solar cycles on climate, as well as indicators such as the cessation of the last Ice Age without any possibility of meaningful human intervention and the previous existence of migratory land bridges where bodies of water now lie. On what do you lay the responsibility for these shifts?
People do not want to feel guilty about their habits. In order to assuage guilt, we either attempt to fix the cause of the guilt, which takes effort, or we deny that the problem exists, which is much easier.
You, sir, are sounding very much like the Fundamentalist street preacher who I used to see haranguing people outside Flinders Street Station every Friday and Saturday night.
This denial is not done purposefully, it is done subconsciously. Through psychological factors such as cognitive dissonance, our brain decides for us what we should believe, on an instinctual level. We don't actively choose what to believe, we are influenced in many ways and our beliefs are then formed.
I think you're attributing to cognitive dissonance far more influence than it actually has.
Rational judgement of scientific evidence is only one of these influences on our beliefs.
It's actually a fairly large one.
In fact, for the case of AGW, I'd even argue that the scientific evidence plays an even smaller part in someone's acceptance.
What you seem to be saying here is that scientific evidence plays little part in someone's decision to accept that anthropogenic global warming is real. So the science is settled, eh? 'Nevertheless, it does turn'.
The more complex a topic is, the harder it is to rationally judge the scientific evidence, therefore we use other methods to subconsciously decide what to believe.
Bullshit. The more complex a topic is, the more important it is to rationally judge the scientific evidence. Your position is a cop-out.
Before someone can confidently say they accept or don't accept AGW for rational reasons, they must first honestly admit that they have seen, and understand, the relevant scientific evidence.
Which we are being instructed to take on faith by governments, activists and powerful vested interests (e.g. Al Gore) as being 'settled'.
But most people, myself included, can be intimidated by all the climate models, core samples, and temperature charts that are tossed around. Because of this intimidation, we turn to other non-rational belief influences.
You, sir, sound dangerously close to declaring that your belief in AGW is irrational or based on faith. Yet this is what you claim for your AGW-skeptic opponents.
I have not yet seen Al Gore's Nobel prize winning film "An Inconvenient Truth". I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I was a AGW skeptic when it came out and now that I accept AGW I don't feel the need to go rent it.
Or maybe because you're aware of the British court decision which found multiple errors of fact in this piece of work, and don't want to be confronted with the imperfections of your messiah.
Regardless, I think the title is brilliant. It perfectly sums up why I think people have trouble accepting AGW. AGW truly is an inconvenience. If it were true, not only would we have to consume less, but more importantly it can shake our very core beliefs.
Here we are, back on beliefs again. Not science, which is allegedly 'settled', but BELIEFS. Faith.
The sorts of beliefs that AGW would trouble include political/economic and religious beliefs.
What religious beliefs would these be?
I won't judge these core beliefs that people have, but they are key to understanding why AGW is doubted.
But you have judged them, back up where you mentioned AGW denialism as driven by guilt. If that's not a value judgement, what is?
Just as a religious world view could cause someone to not accept evolution, it too can make them less likely to accept AGW.
Nice bit of sleight-of-hand, but I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE. The one has nothing to do with the other, and you know it. You're somewhere between disingenuous and mendacious here, and IMO trending more towards mendacious.
One of these religious views holds that nature exists for humanity's benefit, and therefore, is at our whim and cannot pose danger to us.
CRAP. I offer you Genesis 41:26-36
26 The seven good cows are seven years, and the seven good heads of grain are seven years; it is one and the same dream. 27 The seven lean, ugly cows that came up afterward are seven years, and so are the seven worthless heads of grain scorched by the east wind: They are seven years of famine. 28 "It is just as I said to Pharaoh: God has shown Pharaoh what he is about to do. 29 Seven years of great abundance are coming throughout the land of Egypt, 30 but seven years of famine will follow them. Then all the abundance in Egypt will be forgotten, and the famine will ravage the land. 31 The abundance in the land will not be remembered, because the famine that follows it will be so severe. 32 The reason the dream was given to Pharaoh in two forms is that the matter has been firmly decided by God, and God will do it soon.
33 "And now let Pharaoh look for a discerning and wise man and put him in charge of the land of Egypt. 34 Let Pharaoh appoint commissioners over the land to take a fifth of the harvest of Egypt during the seven years of abundance. 35 They should collect all the food of these good years that are coming and store up the grain under the authority of Pharaoh, to be kept in the cities for food. 36 This food should be held in reserve for the country, to be used during the seven years of famine that will come upon Egypt, so that the country may not be ruined by the famine."
I would hardly call that as indicating a nature bent to our whim.
AGW poses a direct threat to some forms of libertarianism and right-wing capitalism. I think that this may have played a strong role in my personal AGW skepticism, and perhaps in other libertarians. As I discussed in a previous blog post, values can determine whether someone considers themselves a libertarian, liberal, conservative, etc. One important value of libertarianism is the desire for smaller government. This rubs up against the problem of AGW. If the problem of AGW is real, and if we have any hope of solving it, we would most likely require development of gross regulations from governments.
No, we wouldn't. We would require sensible, practical solutions of the sort detailed in Genesis 41:26-36. In a modern context, such solutions would be developed by a combination of climatologists and horticulturalists, and could be passed immediately into very simple, self-evident and widely-agreed legislation by a sensible, rational and minimalist government. Your argument here is political, not scientific, and does not hold water.
This is exactly what is going on right now in Copenhagen. Those who find regulations unpalatable, when faced with AGW, will have strong psychological pressure to find themselves in what I call the AGW skeptic spectrum: deny the existence of rising global temperatures, doubt the fact that it is man made, skeptical that cutting back emissions can help, and finally, question the idea that cutting emissions can help or is economically feasible.
This is fallacious. What we doubt is that regulation will in itself do a single thing to curb the emissions you claim are so damaging. We do not start with the denial of rising global temperatures (though if the Earth is warming, why is Edmonton freezing its balls off like never before in its history?) - we start with questioning the assumption that anthropogenic carbon dioxide production is the overwhelming driver of that temperature rise; we move on to questioning the effectiveness of cap-and-trade schemes (from which major industrial nations like China and India are exempt) in reducing those CO2 emissions; we conclude with combining those questions into serious doubt that a set of regulations which is potentially economically ruinous should be embarked upon when the actual benefit is minimal to nil.
We'd prefer other solutions, technological ones that actually work, such as giving every nation a power-generation system as fossil-fuel-independent as France's. That would automatically slash carbon dioxide emissions by huge amounts worldwide. Taking the biblical quote above as a metaphor, we'd like to lay in excess grain against the years of famine. Seems what you'd like to do is insist on starvation rations in the famine years and pile on an onerous and unproductive bureaucracy to ensure that everyone complies.
It is for this reason that I think that the AGW has unfortunately been split down the house between the political left-wing and right-wing. Once a topic has become left-wing vs right-wing, the argument is no longer scientific, it is political.
This is a false dichotomy. The issue is one of unproductive bureaucracy versus a productive alliance between technology, industry and decisive (minimalist) government.
Points are scored not by evidence but by embarrassing 'gotchas' like the recent climategate scandal and by rhetoric.
You bet it's embarrassing. You seem to miss the point that "Climategate" casts doubt upon the legitimacy of the evidence, and the way in which those responsible have been dealing with it has far more relation to rhetoric than to honest scientists defending a legitimate finding.
Another problem is that people will have the additional incentive of falling in line with their political party of choice, which for some people is their primary social group. Anecdotally, when someone tells me that they are accept AGW, or do not, I can usually guess where their political allegiances lie.
Talk about sweeping assumptions!
As someone with libertarian/right-wing values, I've learned to accommodate the inconvenient truth of AGW. I think the turning point may have been learning about arch-skeptic (and libertarian) Michael Shermer's about face on the issue.
The day I do a full about-face will be the day I wish even more to hang self-serving idiots like you out to dry. If anything, Climategate nudged me towards the believer's corner, if only because it offered a ray of hope that the fucking idiots who blundered the way they did were actually questioning the veracity of their models. This is what the skeptics have been all about from the start. If we'd proceeded on a strong balance of probabilities, and started laying out a technological solution which would have productive outcomes for all rather than a bureaucracic solution which created a huge regulatory organisation which in itself is intrinsically unproductive, it wouldn't matter who was a believer, a skeptic or an outright denier.
The fact that the founder of Skeptic Magazine could not remain an AGW skeptic made me re-examine my personal AGW skepticism. It made me take a fresh look at an issue that I realized may have been clouded by subconscious influences.
My AGW skepticism has been shifted a little by hard data - the revelation that the defenders of global warming were actually skeptical of their own model. I remain in dismay of your proposed solution, and that dismay would only increase if I shifted further towards the "believer" end of the spectrum.
After reading debunking after debunking of poor AGW skeptic arguments, I had no more excuses.
Knocking over straw men is easy.
Just as some religious people find ways to accommodate the fact of evolution, I found ways to accommodate global warming despite my political views.
Here you go, playing the creationist/denier confluence card again. You will find that all but the most hardline Catholics are free to conclude that evolution is a fact, as are the majority of high-church Anglicans, the Uniting Church, and other mainstream Christian denominations. I can't speak for Judaism, but I wouldn't be surprised to find Reform and even some theologically conservative Rabbis happy to sit down to a cuppa with Darwin, and ditto for their congregations.
As the president of a local skeptic organization I'm often asked if I've ever changed my mind due to scientific evidence, I'm proud to say that in this case I did. But I didn't write this post to pat myself on the back.
I disagree. I think you did.
This has taught me that one should be skeptical of their beliefs, especially if they fit with one's world view. Hopefully, this will encourage others to be take an honest second look at AGW science.
I've been looking at it, alright, and I've found nothing but gaping holes all the way. As I see it, the system is simply too damn complex to attribute climate shifts of the sort we're discussing to only one influence, especially since even bigger shifts of a similar nature occurred in the absence of meaningful human contributions to that influence.
I also perceive that you have not once, at any stage in your apologia (because that's what it is), quoted ONE piece of scientific evidence that would support your claim - however firm or infirm that evidence may be.
Your article reminds me of nothing more than the testimony of an impressionable youngster describing their conversion to fundamentalist or 'rapturist' Christianity, delivered in church or before a youth group, to fellow-Christians whom they seek to convince of their authenticity as believers.
Furthermore, I dispute that disbelief in the solution you propose to "AGW" can in any way be tied to disbelief in "AGW" itself.
In short, sir, you are nothing more than a useful idiot, or possibly very, very naive, and if I were an "AGW believer" I would be embarrassed to share a platform with you. So long as people like you continue to push the AGW platform the way you do, my personal integrity requires me to remain in the skeptic camp, with a toe over the denialist line. This doesn't mean I don't want action taken that would mitigate the problem if it exists (albeit with a different ulterior motive). Only a fool doesn't want that. But the pretence for 'action' that is going on right now disgusts me, and this is why I want nothing to do with the whole AGW shemozzle.