I just watched this in its entirety tonight. The thoughts I had throughout the program were:
Are they proposing that there is no consequence at all of dumping an unlimited amount of carbon into the atmosphere?
Is it really plausible that people concerned about global warming are greedy bastards trying to cash-in? Isn't more likely that they are worried about the welfare and safety of millions or billions of their fellow world citizens and themselves? And that the global warming deniers are the ones most likely financially benefit from their actions, at least the ones at the top who control carbon resources.
Things are getting better in terms of solar energy and energy storage especially by Elon Musk through Telsa and Solar City. The problems that were had by that clinic powered with solar cells could be resolved by more and more efficient batteries and a battery in the form that is going to be produced by Musk's GigaFactory.
China is burning plenty of fossil fuels and is presently choking on them. They need to move to renewables just to be able to breathe properly.
After the film was over I thought what I have always thought on the matter. If you are wrong about Global Warming we are all screwed. Therefore it makes sense to assume the idea is correct and try to act accordingly. Anyways, those precious resources won't last more than a few hundred years at most. Why not make the switch to renewables now and preserve them? It'll be hundreds of millions of years before we can make more!
All the points have been debunked many times.
However, I think there's a key thing to understand. Not all scientists are the same. What a scientist says about something that is not in their field, well, they might be able to explain what's going on better (though maybe not), but their opinion isn't worth much more than the average schmoe. It's difficult enough to keep up with the details of one field, let alone others.
So, as we would expect, the consensus is much stronger amongst climatologists who have studied global rather than regional patterns, stronger amongst meteorologists than physicists, and stronger amongst physicists than, say, computer scientists. Ultimately, it doesn't matter much whether someone is a "scientist" if they don't know what's going on in the field they are talking about.
Take me, for instance. (Please!) I was convinced of AGW back in the 1990s. However, while I did give a paper at the American Meteorological Society, my work was in thunderstorm formation (mostly convection) and regional climatology (mostly El Niño). I've seen papers on global climatology, but I was also involved enough in scalability of simulations and certain fairly obvious things like the incompressibility of the Navier-Stokes equations to have some skepticism about the calculations, though I judged them probably to be right enough. I've done a fair amount with general fluid dynamics and chaos, and I did a tiny bit of stuff with Antarctic ice cores.
This puts me ahead of all but one or two people I've seen in public fora about the subject and certainly way ahead of the majority of scientists. Still, I'm so far from the folks who do climatology that, to a zeroth approximation, I might as well be considered a complete ignoramus. I'll state my opinion, but only if I can give enough caveats as I have in this message. I wouldn't be caught dead on a video like this one that someone else could edit.
It's very difficult to respond critically to a video. The video plays; to reply to it you have to stop it, transcribe the argument, rebut it, and then return to it. That makes videos great tools of persuasion, but poor ways to actually learn about a complex issue.
I doubt, however, that this video is covering anything that hasn't been done a thousand times before, and debunked a thousand times before. Here are a couple lengthy lists of denialist arguments and scientific responses to them:
Arguments from Global Warming Skeptics and what the science really says
How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic: Responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming
If you like, you can go through the video, stopping after each argument, and then going to look up what some scientist has said about it. If that seems like too much work, and so you end up giving them the benefit of the doubt since they seem to know what they're talking about... well, that's why they made the video.
Oh, and one more thing: yes, this also applies to films like An Inconvenient Truth. The difference is that An Inconvenient Truth, while flawed, is backed at its major points by work that isn't rebutted and which has withstood repeated scientific scrutiny. If you want to know actual truth, you look at the work of actual climatologists in any climatology journal, or read a summary of their work by climatologists, such as:
A general principle, if it's a video, it's not science. It's either entertainment or propaganda.
With science you lay out a set of facts with references. You don't have an anonymous narrator or a bunch of random alleged expert talking heads.
There are enough loony scientists in the world and enough people with personal agendas that you can make a video about almost anything and fill up 90 minutes with the narrator intoning with this quote and that quote over ominous background rumble and interviews with various people that will expound at great length about how they're right about something.
And it all means nothing. The methods of fudging and dodging and asking rhetorical questions is very well developed. A clever writer can make a case for almost anything.
They say that an honest critic is the best friend of a scientist, while today climate skeptics are perceived as heretics. From my vantage point, CO2 -> significant temperature increase (like 5 degrees Celsius), which is what entire furball is about really seems poorly supported. Even if this guy is incorrect on every single point he raises, that still does not prove merit of MMGW claims (it's not like "if he's wrong, they're right").
This film is beneficially provocative. We can only truly advance our knowledge and understanding through debate, dissention and conflicting views. It is a necessary process in successfully dealing with our most challenging problems.
Here you can find some interesting responses
p.s. the second looks like a repetition of the first one but video 2, 3 and 4 are just more in-depth analysis of the first one which represents an introduction.
Trust your own eyes. Have a look at this:
"CHASING ICE" captures largest glacier calving ever filmed.
No swindle.
