With no hope whatsoever of changing any of the disputants' minds, I'll give a small bit of personal history.
I taught science at WMU for 30 years, and most of that time I gave special topic lectures on the problems of global dependency on oil deposits in the Persian Gulf --- from "political" concerns. This is very much like putting a huge amount of the world's "personal wealth" [an analogy term for those already too irate to think non-literally] in a very high-risk investment. All that turned out to be true and we had to fight a bunch of wars, kill lots of people who "we don't care about", and protect a bad decision investment "too big to fail."
As my career went on, I shifted to straight Environmental teaching, all those years [about 20] attending the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings, and consequently every session on the growing Global Climate Change issue I could. What impressed me was what the biologists were seeing --- many precursors of species habitat shifts and species being extirpated because they couldn't shift [either because there was no suitable habitat at all, or they were too slow to move to one [ex. a plant]. While folks concentrated on the statistical studies to take their cheap shots, the skeptics ignored the biologists because they knew they had no answers for that. The varied mass of climate change indicators has marched "onward" since those early days when the community began to become alarmed.
Those of us who were not naive knew quite early that this alarm was almost certain to be ignored. Our non-naivete arose because we were historians of technology as well as scientists and we knew that the only solutions to the problem would be aimed directly at the heart of the global techno-economic system and all the massive power that this represents both physically, economically, politically, and in "average Joe Citizen's" psychology. Almost everyone educated as an engineer did not want to admit that the dominant system that they had built had a tragic flaw in it either.
So trying to convince certain people [many of whom exist even on this board] that what sounds like esoteric science which they don't honestly understand is correct and needs attention before it's actually killing them and their loved ones, much less people "we don't care about", was always a very low percentage hope.
But what should a moral man do? Just forget it as a Don Quixote fiasco and dance on?, or try to do what one can? That's what the scientists are doing: what they can. Frankly many of us are depressed by what we hear whether we expected it or not. Many have quit their activism. Many know that the established techno-giants, who have too much to lose, and the politicians who think the same way about them, will simply not do anything of significance.
I, in my retirement years, "know" that we will do nothing. I because I care about moral decisions in my personal life, will continue not to drive a car, produce food on my roof-garden and support the local growers, recycle so much that I only place out three bags a year, have nothing but compact fluorescents and LEDs in my house and pay a premium for green energy from the local giant.... and much more which is "inconvenient." But in my view, the game is already lost. Nothing to do now except sit back, do what little I can, and watch the "excitement" on television as less adaptable people and things about our world die.
