I'm afraid that this issue(AGW) vs climate change is one of those generational changes where the final outcome will not be realized before more decades have passed and much harm has been done.
I was once a firm believer in AGW and the Carbon Dioxide thesis of warming. My first realization as to the foolishness of it all was the idea of a future arid earth being promised by the radical climate warriors. How could that be possible as more energy (heat) would drive the hydrological cycle more vigorously, thus more rain and humidity globally. Next was the realization that mature forests remove ZERO carbon from the atmosphere. A mature forest is a stable ecosystem and if you understand systems you'll realize that input=output for stability. As trees die they release all of the carbon stored in them and this amount is utilized by new replacement growth. The net is zero over time. Finally, I started finding data refuting the worst alarmism of the radical Eco-warriors as in the NASA link below. As all things religious however, facts hardly ever matter to the true believers.
My biggest concern now and should be to any rational person is the now being contemplated possibility of regime change based on climate change denial. A new round of reasons to kill our fellow humans.
I live on a Caribbean island 10 degrees north of the equator and here are two true stories.
1] My country hosted a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 2009. The BBC's only local interview with a resident environmentalist was with a young man claiming that sea level rise was destroying the local east coast and proceeded to show the extremely narrow beach while spouting a lot of meme buzzwords. I was familiar with the chap and he is all mouth, few brains. He lied outright as this is an annual seasonal affair. This interview was viewed worldwide.
2] A group of European environmentalists held a series of meetings to lobby for increased petrol taxes locally. Why? Trinidad is one of the largest CO^2 per capita generators worldwide. Reason? Our natural gas reserves have attracted European and North American petrochemical heavyweights to the island to exploit the reserves. These people set up their companies on our soil to utilize our resources, repatriate most of the profits to their foreign shareholders and now want us to pay higher taxes to compensate for them exploiting our reserves. Well Fuck them.
I've often wondered about if intelligence + information is a constant. We have more information readily available than ever before, but I swear that many people have gotten less intelligent, as in the ability to reason competently. The simplest logical problem appears harder for many to solve than from what I remember. If this is true then we're in very deep shit.
One final thing. I have found the true believers to be the MOST cruel and sadistic of human beings. Once was part of a group committed to environmental work, and yes fools, one can both believe in a better healthier environment AND deny AGW as true. Anyhow two radical members had these two beliefs (of many). First, in reply to my question of human population growth and the choice on whether to have children and how could you control people's freedoms, seriously suggested the practice of infanticide as a workable solution. Second, they wanted to end space exploration as mass from the planet (their Gaia) was being removed. One was a fucking PHD from Australia. Forget about East vs West, First-world vs Third-World, Christian vs Muslim vs Jewish, these are the future schisms for us.
Like the cultural revolution in China, ideologues without any sense of reality will doom many lives if they dominate the world.
Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
"An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions.
The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States."
What was the recent shit show on the Amazon? I live in the tropics. Anyone else here ever see a tropical forest regrow?