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What is surprising is that many people (mostly journalists and non-scientists) have picked up bits of information from skeptics and have used that as their sole base for argument against the facts. The facts that they might not even know about.
I was watching 'dateline' on BBC today and was amused (and shocked) to hear the points put by Janet Daley of the Daily Telegraph. If journalists have such views then so will their readers!
Here are bits of information the skeptics pick up from the media and formulate a case against years of scientific research:
1. Warming is a natural phenomena which has been happening for centuries due to solar activity, and the natural climate cycle: People use this to say, "well hence rise in CO2 levels cannot be due to human actions". --: There is a CO2 cycle in nature and warming does take place due to it and due to solar activity but the exponential rise in temperature over the last 100 yrs is NOT naturally happening. The rise in the CO2 levels and hence warming has been proved by extensive research spanning over 30 years involving many countries. Also, there is not a single scientific paper which refutes global warming due to human activities.
2. There has been noticed a slight drop in temperature in this decade: A decade of level or slightly lower temperatures is only a temporary dip to be expected as a result of natural, short-term variations in the enormously complex climate system. Ten years is peanuts compared to hundred million years old climate cycle.
3. Forcing countries to make cuts in emissions will stop development and progress: At what cost? These people forget the enormous environmental cost 100 times or more than the entire world economy! We might be able to continue with the emissions for a few years and then when the climate will play havoc it will all collapse.
And how will it stop progress? All we trying to do is replace an existing bunch of inefficient fossil-fuel based technology with a more green, non-pollution, healthy and renewable one. It can only take the world forward.
4. The spokesperson of USA said at Copenhagen that rich countries cannot pay for this because they didn't know that CO2 emission would cause global warming until recently.: This is not true as the data and proof was available in the early 1970s, or even earlier. It has been suppressed by lobbyists and greedy companies and have pressured scientist for years to modify their data. Even during the 1st IPCC report we heard voices of scientists expressing concern how politicians and oil companies were hounding them to tone down their findings.
4. The scale is too great, it cannot be done, it cannot be enforced: Wrong, the technology exists to save our lives, it can be done and enforced it people realise that the very survival of the future generation (in fact the current generation) depends on it. People should listen to the "meek" but hardworking scientists all over the world rather that their showy television know-it-alls who are funded by the polluting firms.
I encourage you to go look at data provided by NASA, IPCC etc and other websites and read scientific papers (or at least articles written by credible scientists) and look at the pictures of receding ice-covers and glaciers over the last few decades then form your opinions.
Here are some more graphs for your reference:
