Global Scare-Mongering
I admit to be a congenital contrarian. I choose Cato over Caesar, Macs over PCs, ancient history over modern, and so on. As John Tierney puts it, "Just because everybody believes something doesn't make it wrong, but that's a good working hypothesis."
Given this penchant, it's probably no surprise that I've been highly skeptical about the CO2 theory of climate change since I first heard about it in 1990, a particularly hot summer in the US. Although I wrote my very first research paper on the topic (back in high school), I hadn't followed up on it since then. In the meantime, however, much has changed: initially, all a skeptic could say was, "the evidence is not convincing because it doesn't rule out alternative explanations for the same data"; now, skepticism is buttressed by an alternative theory of climate change--the solar energy theory of climate change--that does a much better job of explaining the data than the much-popularized CO2 theory.
If you're interested in seeing the two different theories presented for a popular audience, I'd recommend Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" (for the CO2 theory) and BBC's "The Great Global Warming Swindle" (for the solar energy theory). You can watch the BBC special on Google Video for free.
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