a living room in the sky

So if we stop wondering "why" about global warming and rethink it in terms of effect, what do we get?

For the sake of argument, let's even drop the whole "global warming" part of it and just focus on immediate effect rather than long-term results ...

Nobody disputes the fact that carbon emissions are high nor that they are man-made and on the rise. Nobody disputes that breathing excessive carbon is bad for us.

(... do they?

I mean, would you put your stick your face in front of a car exhaust pipe? Would you build your living room on top of factory smoke stacks?

OK, that's a bit much. Let me put it to you this way ... how far away would a car have to be before you'd put your face on the same plane as its exhaust pipe?)

So what would be the immediate effect of reducing carbon emissions? Cleaner air and cleaner water. Who could complain about that?

If you could breathe cleaner air and drink cleaner water, wouldn't you do it? If you didn't have to sit in traffic or change a tire or be mocked by mechanics, would you be sorry about that? What would it be like if a quick trip to the grocery store was a five minute walk instead of a fifteen minute drive? Or if you didn't have to watch yet another open field get paved over and filled up with yet another Old Navy-Pet Smart-Michael's-World Market strip mall? Or if nobody is talking about bringing down entire mountain ranges in Colorado because they contain 2 trillion barrels of oil in the form of oil shale.

Sometimes I think that people should drop the whole "global warming" argument.

(I put it in quotes as if it were a specious claim but Gore presents pretty convincing information that this is real, including this most powerful tidbit for me - 53% of non-scientific articles about global warming express doubt about it's existence, but guess what percentage of peer-reviewed scientific articles do? Zero)

We've been running a prolonged experiment with humanity already and we know what the results are.