This, and not to belabor my metaphor, but I'm a writer and that's what I do, seems a lot like religious folks who say "you don't believe in God" = "you must be a lawless bastard who isn't worried about your soul." People who are at one extreme always assume everyone else must be at another extreme. Therefore, me not agreeing with the "consensus" of the eco-folks about global warming must mean that I give not shit-one about the climate.

And that's bunk. I have to care about the climate–I live in it. The "varmint," my grandmother called it, "that we all live in." Just because somebody doesn't subscribe to your ideas doesn't mean they don't care about the topic. Look at how many words I've already thrown at this thing and you'll get an idea that I do, in fact, care a great deal.

What I care about most of all is A) getting people to think for themselves and 2) keeping us from taking actions that will hurt us more in the long run than the warming they were meant to fix. Anytime you bring government in to fix anything, you can pretty much be certain it's going to get fucked up.

Anyway, all of that to make you aware of where I stand on this. I would love to get some non-biased information that would convince me one or the other, but there aren't any sites like that in existence, to my knowledge.

And sweet: I dig being in a research paper.

I also would like to say that, it's true the planet is not a human or something that we could kill. I mean okay we kill the planet, but yeah.. Where do we live?? IN the planet, I thought so… So I guess that instead of having the environmentalist say"OH no! we are killing the planet" they should stop giving the human race so much importance because to the planet we are just like any other animal. So instead of saying we are killing the planet we should say. "well it seems like we are somehow making the environment get all funky, and if we make things worst we won't be able to live in this planet (hat hopefully won't end up like Venus, and us trying to survive), so yeah I don't know do you fell like doing something about it for the future humans that will live here, or should we just ignore until it becomes a real issue??

Well I don't know why I end up writing so much but the only point I wanted to make was… Don't just agree with "destroying human race" neither with "saving human race". The best thing you can do is to find information about global warming that's not biased and will educate you enough so that you ca n make up your own mind about.

Oh yeah, I'll like to say thank you to whoever decided to write about this issue. This is the first peace of information I found showing both sides. This will make it easier to write my research paper, because now I won't just be targueting one opinion… So yeah, Thank you!

Ps: sorry for anything that was written wrong or if I forgot to end any ideas. I probably did both

Nor, mind you, do I advocate simply saying "Fuck it" and doing whatever the hell we want with the environment.

What I want is a balanced, sane discussion without hysteria…just like your comment is. It is simply not helpful to throw rhetoric out there and get people all riled up and ready to do Something! Right! Now! Because that normally makes for a very stupid course of action.

I'd be much more impressed if we had a two-hour movie that showed everybody's point of view, presented all the evidence, all the holes, all the suggestions, and let people make up their own minds.

This trailer wants to make up your mind for you, IMO. And that's never a good thing.

You're critique is well placed but allow me to offer a different perspective. I work in a building packed with climatologists, meteorologists, and a myriad of other -ologists from varying disciplines. These are the people that get quoted in Time and Newsweek and are the people that tell you to duck and cover when a funnel cloud is about to flatten your trailer. They are right in the thick of the global warming debate.

I have observed that they don't have a massive grasp on causes yet, but that their is a mountain of data suggesting that things are changing. Are we partly responsible? On the regional scale the answer is often times, yes. People in the building have published papers showing how deforestation in Central America affects rainfall totals in the region. They have been able to take both satellite data and data taken in situ and make both predictive models and descriptive models. Then they are able to look backwards and discuss if this is maybe the reason the Maya in the region died out abruptly. It seems that people can destroy an ecosystem AND influence climate at the same time.

Globally there is much more dissention among the ranks as you point out. The climate is changing. It changes all the time, actually, we just haven't been looking and noticing this for very long. That's really part of the problem; sophisticated data sets aren't available for a long enough period to really allow for precision predictions. This is what the majority of the dissenters are really dissenting about.

Now, this issue of whether the climate is being changed globally by humans should be separate from the "environmental" movement. We, as humans, should think twice before dumping a whole bunch of who-knows-what into our environment. Why? Cause who knows what the consequences will be? As you say, instead of just accepting that things will be fine and that chasing the all-mighty dollar is the end all, be all of existence we ought to THINK about the consequences of our actions more thoroughly than we do. I realize this concept is not in vogue at the moment.

Technology is what humans do. It is the defining trait of our species, really. Instead of using it to completely blast our surroundings maybe we can start to push it towards helping us be more comfortable in conjunction with the envrionment. Unfortunately the environmental movement wraps its arguments in emotional hyperbole and talks about "killing" the planet. You're right, this won't happen. Life has shown through the previous mass extinctions that it will find a way. It IS presumptuous of humanity to think it can affect that. However, why should say, "Well what we do doesn't matter so to hell with it all!" We need balance, we need to think about what we're doing.