Humans using energy do change the environment.
We heat areas too cold to live in.
We cool areas too hot to live in.
We drive / fly / move people and products from place to place.
A tiny percentage of the population uses gasoline and diesel fuel to provide enough food for almost everyone else.
There are exceptions:
Obvious environmental problems in Asia -- much too polluted from manufacturing waste products, and burning coal and wood.
Carbon dioxide is not pollution -- it is airborne plant food.
Adding carbon dioxide to the air is 'greening' our planet (similar to the effect of greenhouse owners adding CO2 inside their greenhouses to accelerate plant growth).
An increase of CO2 should also cause more absorption of thermal radiation escaping from the Earth’s surface at night, and increase the air temperature in the troposphere.
Warmunists claim there is an additional strong positive feedback mechanism -- an accompanying increase of moisture in the air, which will double or triple the warming effect of CO2 alone.
But there is no scientific proof that any feedback happens, whether positive (increasing the warming effect of CO2), or negative (reducing the warming effect of CO2).
Positive feedbacks are rare in real life because they make a system unstable.
The mild warming from CO2, excluding possible feedbacks, is based entirely on laboratory experiments.
The experiments show the influence of CO2 is logarithmic, very significant for the first 100 ppm, but a rapidly diminishing effect with higher concentrations (Earth's atmosphere is now at 400 parts per million of CO2).
Adding CO2 to the today’s atmosphere has so little warming effect it does not appear to be measurable -- if there is any warming it appears to be obscured by larger natural temperature variations.
The effect CO2 is so mild that since the rise of man made CO2 began in 1940, half the time the average temperature DID NOT GO UP.
In the past 75 years there have been three DIFFERENT trends of average temperature as CO2 levels rose almost every year:
(1) 1940 to 1975
- Declining temperature trend
(negative correlation)
(2) 1975 to early 2000s
- Rising temperature trend
(positive correlation)
(3) early 2000s to 2015
- Flat temperature trend
(no correlation)
Fossil fuels provide most of the energy used in the world.
Solar and wind power are not replacements, even if they were cheaper (they are actually much more expensive before government subsidies), because they are intermittent energy sources.
It would be insane to demand that people stop using fossil fuel energy if solar and wind power are the only substitutes "allowed".
The climate change cult, and their friends in the Democrat Party, want to phase out fossil fuel use over a few decades.
They are insane.
And that's one reason the Republican Party now has more political power than at any time since Republican Abe Lincoln became President.