Well, here's my 2 cents.
I graduated from college with the intention of going to university for environmental sciences.
The people teaching classes on ecology, ethology, environmental climate and all that spoke about climate change as a fact. They never questioned it.
They said, "we're releasing ample supplies of green house gasses. CO2 is just one of them. Water vapour is actually the most abundant, although the least powerful. There are others, such as NOX. All of these gasses have varying degrees of strength for the greenhouse effect, but they ARE there. CO2 is just most looked at because the causes of their emissions are directly in our face: cars in traffic, big factory stack chimneys. etc." You can also count on there being heavy metal-based gasses, those gasses found in fridges and hairspray cans, dioxins and a load of other stuff that that we've pumped into the air. Oh, and remember all of the nuclear radiation on top of all of that. You know, from atmosphere bomb tests, underground bomb tests, nuclear plant meltdowns.
Then, they'd go on to talk about how there is a lot of documentation about how frogs are being severely affected by these changes. Some species of frog have gone extinct. Everything Nam said is true and stuff they teach here at my canadian college and university.
You know, a problem is that there is SO MUCH going on in the world. Climate change is one of the major things. Yes, there have been ice ages and yes we are due for one...
The thing about ice ages is that they don't happen in a flash freeze; they take hundreds or thousands of years to happen. When they happen, a good 90% of everything in the world is frozen and dies.
So my thinking is, if these climate change warning are saying that we're affecting the world to such a degree that we can expect something catastrophic in 1-2 hundred years, whether or not it's a natural occurrence is irrelevant: We're speeding things along.
One reason that I dropped out of university was because I started to feel like Nam. I mean, hey - other people got us into this mess and now there's this huge fight about if the mess even exists. Then some people start "believing" or "not believing" in climate change, as though that changes something.
A good question is what to do about it? I mean, what CAN we do?
Here in canada, there is this thing where they audit garbage. They fine you if you don't separate your plastic from your paper or if they find quantities of produce that should have been tossed in the compost.
MEANWHILE, a good 80% of what we recycle is tossed in a landfill anyway. Why? Well, they can't recycle most of the stuff they're given.
Take a water bottle for instance. The body of the water bottle will be made with a certain type of plastic, while the head of the bottle will be made of a different plastic. The cap will be one kind of plastic, and the ring that holds the cap will be yet another. Then you have the paper, the glue, and the ink on the label. What does this spell out when you multiply that by a billion?
It spells out one hell of a tough time, nearly impossible, to separate the recyclables from that which can't be recycled.
What's more, is that people don't know what you can and cannot recycle make it difficult for you to properly recycle things, and messages are usually crossed or jumbled.
For example, some websites say that plastic bags can be recycled. Yet, when I put plastic bags in my blue bin, the recyle collector refuses to pick it up. Why? Well he says that those plastic bags can't be recycled. So he leaves the whole thing.
How about computer products and batteries? You have to lug that sh*t out of your way to a special store to deal with it. Yea, because that's reasonable with a fulltime job, a family, a persona life, etc etc.
And then, there's rubber and styrofoam. All things that can't be recycled or broken down, but are still in production. Yet, us - the general public - are told to "do things differently for the good of the planet." Hey I'm all for positive and constructive changes, but when my hard efforts are quite literally being thrown away as useless, what the hell's the point?
If climate change is such a serious problem, then why aren't the serious contributors being held accountable for their actions? Is it as simple as politics, money, and greed? Maybe.
Oh, and don't forget deforestation. Population increases. Factory farming is a real CO2 contributor. Industrialization of countries such as China and India (who have been looking at the US with envy for some time now). Did I miss anything?
Maybe what's left "to do" is to kiss the Earth as you knew it goodbye and say hello to Eaarth. It looks similar, but there's something very different about it. Maybe what we should do is start to embrace this new change and figure out how to work with it, because people are *not* going to change.
Anyone heard of earthships? Man takes garbage and uses it to build a fully self-sustainable, eco-friendly, severe-weather-resistant housing. Google it.