All I'll say on the subject is that I'm all for more efficient, environmentally friendly things. But I believe that we can't accurately* say for sure that Global Warming is guaranteed.
Who gives a shit? It is the only environmental issue that the public has responded to, and the thing that has made people more interested in hearing about other, very real issues such as the immediate threats of pollution. So it has a purpose, whether or not that particular theory can be proven.
Willco said something like this in another thread*. I don't agree.
90% of why can be lifted from this. (http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2004_05_23_d-squareddigest_archive.html) "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public" is the key sentence.
I'm sure plenty of people in the Bush administration felt it was okay to say whatever they needed to as long as it garnered public support for the Iraqi war. In their minds, they were justified. But lying in a democracy isn't the way to do things, and any kind of massive scientific conspiracy would risk not just the credibility of those involved, but of all researchers everywhere. It'd be a horribly manipulative and dangerous thing to do.
That said, there is no massive conspiracy and the people arguing against it are either 1) directly benefiting from the continued creation of greenhouse gases, 2) ideologically opposed to the sort of collective action this kind of problem needs, and/or 3) prepared to commit suicide before ever admitting that Al Gore was right and they were wrong.
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*IIRC Willco was talking about public waste disposal systems in cities during the industrial revolution. I've got no idea what the municipal political institutions were like at the time, so maybe that kinda thing would have been warranted back then. Just not in a modern democracy.
Any way I find it ironic that 'hippies' called it 'global warming' then conservatives called it 'climate change' to make it sound less threatening and now because it is now known as 'climate change', 'hippies' can now say colder weather is a part of 'climate change'.
I think the change has mostly come from scientists. The UN working groups were always called the International Panel on Climate Change even back in the 80's.
They want to get across the idea that there would be lots of different regional effects, including changes in wind and precipitation patterns as well as temperature, rather than the uniform heating that "global warming" seems to imply.