"Global warming adherents are simply replacing God -- Christian or otherwise -- with constructs of their own."
Thermometers and satellites?
Divorce the "journalism" from the science and that's pretty much what you are arguing with. I had the opportunity to chat with a climatologist recently and she was quite clear, the instrumental data shows a warming trend, physical experiment shows CO2 is a major factor in this warming, and chemistry and basic observation identifies the source of this CO2.
If that's all there were to it, it'd be a slam-dunk. The problem is that we need to know, politically and for our own peace of mind, what future climate changes might be over the horizon. This involves understanding the processes of climate change in very great detail, which entails paleoclimate studies, reconstructions from proxy data, and very very complex models.
Is it possible they've all made a mistake and nothing bad will happen? Yeah, sure. But would you bet your life or livelihood on that? Or more correctly, would you bet the lives and livelihoods of millions of people on it?
Even putting aside the environmental arguments, the precautionary principle pretty much comes down on the side of treating AGW as real and acting to mitigate its effects as much as possible. The same argument applied to the swine-flu scare (and bird-flu/SARS/whatever before it), and I have no doubt that the same people who are smugly criticising governments and media for buying the H1N1 “scare-story” now would have been screaming about government incompetence were there 200,000 dead in the US and no vaccine in sight for another 6 months.
SF appeared out of season, spread quickly and killed the wrong victims in the wrong way, just as the two previous pandemics had. People arguing that we didn’t have enough evidence to act, or that it wasn’t that bad because their uncle Frank had it and was okay, or that we should wait and see how bad it will get before doing something about it were stupid, ignorant and dangerous. People saying that we don’t know enough about climate change to justify the level of concern, or that it’s not happening because their aunt Betty got snowed in this winter, or that we need to wait until we are certain there is a problem before trying to avert it are just the same.
The current best science we have indicates that the world is warming, climates are changing, we are the principle cause for this and most of us are not going to come out of it well. That may change in future, but for now it is only sensible to act on what we know, not what we wish was so.
-- David B. (for some reason my name disappeared off the top of this).