When I first heard about climate change, I knew that there were essentially three things that needed to be proven.<p>1) That climate change is happening, i.e. the world is getting warmer.
2) That it's not a natural phenomenon, i.e. driven by human behavior.
3) That it's a bad thing, i.e. not a positive thing for the world.<p>Fairly quickly I accepted 1) based on the evidence. Over time I accepted 2), again based on evidence, but mostly on CO2 levels which I knew were well correlated with warm periods historically and logically should be, given it's a green house gas.<p>Much later I started to accept 3). I still think the negatives are over-done, an ice age is far worse than global warming and we have no idea how close we are to the next one. But species extinction simply can't be fixed after the fact, so preventing it trumps all.
I think we're being naive over most climate change 'denial'. These people are not dumb, they just want to keep the debate going while being fully aware climate change is happening.<p>By delaying society's mustering of will to face it, they a) confirm their notion that we can't do anything about it (because in their minds, fixing it requires the kind of kumbaya UN cooperation they loathe) and b) cash out while there are still profits to be made in dirty industries and practices. And we're enabling them by continuing to make this a debateable matter.
I'm not a denier by thinking no change is happening. However, I do deny the more aggressive estimates are true. This is easily fact-checked by going back 20 years and see who predicted 2017 correctly.<p>It just seems fishy that the most vocal proponents of global warming are always pushing models that overestimate the amount of change. That kind of constant inaccuracy needs to be questioned.<p><a href="http://www.snopes.com/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/" rel="nofollow">http://www.snopes.com/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/</a>
I'm not convinced that the climate model is accurate - climate modeling is a billion times more complex than a 3 body problem which we can't solve. Nor am I convinced that the increase in co2 is human driven. Or that we know how the atmosphere will react with such increase