A friend sent me this piece of Climate Change skepticism:

Climate models assume that atmospheric carbon emissions and other natural events directly and causally determine changes in earth’s climate. However, if we allow that some other variable might be causing the climate to change or if carbon dioxide levels are a result of, rather than the cause of, climate change, then the current climate models are critically deficient and our mystery remains unsolved.

Perhaps the earth would have cooled even more had carbon emissions not slowed or reversed the long-term cooling trend. Perhaps the real warming is just starting in earnest. While more research is needed, it is becoming clearer that there is no need to panic and there is no need to put a severe strain on the global economy by drastically restricting carbon emissions. Our planet is in the middle of a warm period, but people should learn to chill out.

My thoughts in response:

What stymies me a bit in the Global Climate Change debate is that it's based on hard science, and it's pretty hard for me to evaluate PhD level computer models made by climatologists- economics and political science are much more accessible to the layman. But I notice that this writer isn't a climatologist at all http://www.charleslhooper.com/bio/ , and is in fact trained as an engineer but is currently more of a business consultant to the pharmaceutical industry. He's not the most impressively trained spokesman for the Skeptics.

At the end of the day, without getting into weeds I don't fully understand, I'm left with the fact that the field of Climatology has reached a consensus about climate change, and it's of the alarmist variety. Let's not don't buy into the tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories about the venality of climatologists (mostly raised by people on the payroll of Big Oil). Of course, the whole field being wrong is certainly possible, and confirmation bias may be driving the field in the wrong direction, but I think we need to see it as unlikely that such a wrong consensus would persist.

Then at the end of the next day, I'm left with this: there's obviously a chance that the Earth is warming irrevocably in ways that would lead to devastating changes in our climate: sea-level places like Bangladesh could become uninhabitable, places that were bread baskets could become deserts, places that are now temperate could become unbearably hot, etc. Maybe this won't actually happen, but maybe it will. I put the odds of bad climate change occurring at 95%, maybe Mr. Hooper would say those odds are only 20%. Saying we should wait and see is a crazy response to this sort of problem. To illustrate this point, consider something like Iran's pursuit of a nuclear bomb. I would say that the chances of Iran successfully building a nuclear weapon and then actually using such a weapon when they know they'd be annihilated in response is low, perhaps only 10%. By the Skeptics' Climate Change logic, that means we should keep gathering information and letting it play out- after all, we don't have all the facts, and there are many facts that indicate Iran won't use a nuke! Of course we're not doing that in the case of Iran, because 10% is too big a chance to let alone- so we've initiated severe sanctions, we're actively using stuxnet viruses, we (or Israel) are assassinating their nuclear scientists, and we're talking about bombing their facilities. And Global Climate Change is potentially more devastating than Iran's nuclear bomb. I've seen no convincing answer to why we should not act.

It looks like President Obama is planning to take some initiative to deal with this issue- good for him.  If the Climatologists are right, then there's nothing more important he could do.