I think it is the same thing with climate change today. There is so much research insisting that climate change is real and that it is at least to some extent caused by humanity, but this is denied by a lot of people. My feeling is that a few decades from now, humanity's (partial) responsibility for climate change will be as generally acknowledged as the danger of smoking is acknowledged today.
Your opinions and feelings, Ann, while quite valid, are not facts. Yes, there are a number of scientists who insist that global warming is at least partially the result of human activity, while others insist that there is insufficient evidence to make that claim. In this regard, the debate over climate change does indeed parallel the one over smoking in the 1960's.
But here's a critical difference. The people who insisted that tobacco was not a major health risk were largely economically beholden to tobacco sales, either directly or indirectly. Those who refuse to join the human-caused global warming parade are generally
not economically beholden to any anti-global warming entity. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. Those who insist that mankind is destroying the Earth through global warming are largely the ones who have some economic reason to make sure that we think that it's our fault that the earth is heating up.
If the UN-sponsored think tanks and research organizations - along with the ones funded by the US government and American businessmen - all held news conferences this week and said something like, "Well, we know the earth has been getting warmer for the past few decades, but we can't prove that humans are responsible. We don't know how to stop climate change, and we don't know what would happen if we did stop it. It's just as likely that we'd make things a lot worse."
Their funding would be cut off, that's what would happen. I don't know of anyone who'll pay scientists to say "I don't know," even though that's often what the truth is, irrespective of the discipline in which they work. True, they know lots more than us non-scientists who only read extracts of the results they produce, but that doesn't mean that scientists have dropped an exclusive lariat around the truth. And scientists have bills to pay just like the rest of us.
My feeling - which is just as valid as anyone else's - is that in fifty years, people will look back at the 20th century and the early 21st and think, "Man, they were dumb! First they had the Piltdown Man, then all those holocaust deniers, the Y2K scare, and the global warming fakeout! How were they even smart enough to breathe regularly?"
