[Beltiras]

You act as if the sides are equal if proven wrong. If the climate alarmists are proven wrong but their policies acted on we will have moved beyond the convenience of fossil fuels. We will have made a society for our children that doesn't pollute as much. Even if CO2 is harmless in the sense that it does not warm the atmosphere it and the cofactors with it do cause a lot of health related harms. Smog isn't good for anyone. If the climate deniers are proven wrong we hurt our habitat and our children might not be able to fix our wrongs.

[ybalkind]

I dont think the proposed policies put forward by the climate movement are benign. Remember the yellow shirt protests in France arose because working class people resented the increased fuel tax which was raised as a way to fight climate change.

The article I quote earlier addresses this point quite well:

"In 1997, the late Maurice Strong, former under-secretary-general of the United Nations, said: “Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.”

In 1992, he proposed a single global government on environmental grounds: “It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental co-operation.”

In 2009, he declared his opposition to democracy: “Our concepts of ballot-box democracy may need to be modified to produce strong governments capable of making difficult decisions.”

In 2015, Christina Figueres, former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and now the head of a climate action lobby group, said: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history.”

In 2016, Ottmar Edenhofer, former co-chair of the UN IPCC working group on Mitigation of Climate Change, said: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole. We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

Just a week ago, Saikat Chakrabarti, the chief of staff of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the US politician famous for the Green New Deal that failed to pass Congress, was quoted in a glowing profile by the Washington Post saying: “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” "

[eesmith]

As someone who hasn't "familiarised [your]self well enough with both sides of the argument", are you able to tell when quotes are cherry picked and quote mined in order to give a wrong impression about another's viewpoints?

For example, I've watched the "creation vs. evolution" so-called "debate" for about 20 years. I quoted "debate" because there is no debate, only continued raising by creationists of the same long-settled issues. (I speak here of Young Earth Creationists.)

But for someone without the specific training in biology (which, to be honest, is high-school level science often avoided in the US schooling I went to, in order to avoid offense to some religious belief holders), it's hard to tell that the creationist arguments and objections have no support in physical evidence, and that the creationists are often quote mining evolutionists. See http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/project.html .

To go back to your first comment, "There is money on both sides of the argument though."

There is also money on both sides of the creationist vs. evolutionist argument. And much more money on the evolutionist side. The US National Institutes of Health, to modify your quote, "sprays evolution money at anything that moves and at staggering rates — billions of dollars". Similarly, there are innumerable evolutionist companies which benefit handsomely from evolution.

But that spray, and those economic benefits, cannot be interpreted as support for Young Earth Creationism.

Since those arguments do not work for Young Earth Creationism, they are weak arguments at best, so cannot be a solid basis or proxy for understanding the issues related to global warming and climate change.