Essentially I can't stand the left: they don't like our carbon footprint
Your post illustrates a problem, but certainly not of your making. A logical question would be , why should Hansen's Hypothesis and/or Global Warming, which are scientific topics, have anything whatsoever to do with left or right politics? . And of course the answer is, "they shouldn't, but they do."
Although we seldom stop to consider the reasons, we all know why these erstwhile scientific issues have become emotional, political issues. As a matter of fact, emotion, ego, politics, and profits have become so intermingled with what should logically be purely scientific that the science has become almost impossible to pursue without fear of retribution should the result not agree with prevailing political consensus. "Global Warming" has taking on some characteristics of religion: it's sometimes defended on the basis of faith without consideration of the science.
We know that there have been many instances of science prevailing only with great difficulty against our human frailties of instinct, avarice, and ego. We do not easily abandon our biases. We generally won't until our friends agree to abandon theirs as well.* For illustration, we need to look no further than our familiar human history. Consider Copernicus, Galileo and the Inquisition; the Eugenics movement of the early 20th Century; the Lysenko Affair in Russia; Smoking and Lung Cancer in mid-20th Centrury, and then the Ozone depletion controversy. All of these matters involved a battle between good Science and entrenched interests, false beliefs and bad science. In each case, good Science eventually won out, as it must. But not without a fight. It took the Church 350 years to formally recognize the heliocentric nature of our solar system! It may take another 350 years before the absurdity of Hansen's Hypothesis is fully recognized, the bad science rejected, and good science, devoid of influence from political or business interests, prevails.
Politicians, and the public will eventually accept that Global Warming, in 2018, was still a hypothetical phenomenon, and Hansen's Hypothesis was its hypothetical explanation or cause. Each hypothesis would eventually require repeatable observations consistent with the respective hypotheses. These hypotheses can be voted into "correctness," of course, but Mother Nature will ignore the outcome of the vote and go her own way, as she always does. Only bias free, good science, free from political and financial interference, will be able to tell us how Mother nature votes. My personal prediction is that Mother Nature is not voting the same way Al Gore, James Hansen, Goldman Sachs, and alternative energy interests are. Unfortunately, in this instance, Mother Nature, because she has no choice other than to be bound by natural law, is on the side of the coal interests and some rather vile politicians. This is a Women with a mind of her own. She knows that the coal interests got lucky in 2016, but she also knows that they will discover that they are on her "bad boy list." When she gets around to it, she we will mete out a proper punishment.
That said, Mother Nature does not want us to behave stupidly. She will punish us if we do. It would be a mistake not to plan ahead by developing alternative energy sources that are cleaner, more efficient, and less thermally polluting than fossil fuels. It was a mistake for the U.S. to drop out of the Paris climate accords. Although there is still a lot of petroleum in shale and in the Earth's crust, these are valuable feedstocks for the chemical industry. It is shortsighted to squander them unnecessarily on heat production, which is inefficient, polluting and wasteful, when in some cases we have better alternatives. Let us, as a nation, make our decisions on the basis of science and logic, and leave next quarter's profits and stock prices to business interests where they belong.. We will be much better off in the long run if we do.
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*See E.O. Wilson, "The Social Conquest of Earth," for a possible explanation rooted in human evolution.
