What makes me reject the fear-mongering climate crowd is they have an agenda that is anti-capitalism and pro-communism.
Just as it's ridiculous to link a snake-bite to a political agenda, so it goes with climate change. Personally, when I see things like "they have an agenda", that smacks of propaganda where someone is trying to sell me something for their gain without real reason. Some probably do have agendas, but just because you heard the evacuation alert from CNN doesn't mean the fire isn't raging down the hillside.
That said, I started the thread as a climate denier/skeptic, mainly because I was around when folks were worried we were going into an ice age and remembered things like CO2 being a weak greenhouse gas compared to things like water vapor (which can be over 1%).
In the beginning, I did the normal thing and ignored it assuming I'd eventually be proven right, stupid scientists always changing their minds and getting things wrong out the gate in their eagerness to publish.
"Fake" science usually gets debunked within a decade, although sometimes you have to dig for it (usually it just slinks away). Except the first IPCC report was in 1990. So, it's been going fairly strong for over 30 years and, like it not, the U.S. entered a treaty to be net-zero by 2050. Ultimately, as a capitalist, it'll be a good thing as cheaper alternatives should win out over more expensive and solar & wind have been cheaper for years (it's the ESS that's been holding it back and that's about to
change).
At that point I was starting to think just possibly there might be more to it and it would only be fair to look into it with an open mind. That was a pretty annoying experience as there's more hate for "climate deniers" than there are facts.
But slowly over the course of the thread, wading through the nonsense, I was able to find answers to the questions and started to believe.
Then of course I got fairly angry at all the people that have been crying about climate change for 30 years and haven't done squat to fix it, it was outrageous to learn that what I had done merely to be frugal (solar & EV) was far above the average... and me not even a believer at the time.
Anyway, I invite you to read through the science in the thread and ask questions and poke holes. Can't say that I can answer them, but if they're interesting and not already answered (it's a long thread) I'll try to research them.
1) If you had a box of 10,000 molecules of air, how many molecules would be CO2 ? Answer : 4 out of 10,000
10,000 might sound like a lot, but that volume is way tinier than the head of a pin. How small? From
Avogadro's constant and the ideal gas law you can get a rough estimate that 10,000 molecules of air at standard conditions is about 3.7e-13 milliliters of air (
ref). So yeah, as
@wattmatters said, all those tiny reflectors start to add up. Combine that with their very long half-life and they become a very real problem.