Unpopular Opinions Are Controversial

I'm a little nervous about this. I normally keep to myself when I'm aware my opinion on something is unpopular. Also I could be wrong about every single thing I'm about to say so feel free to correct me or argue with me or shun me forever.

I'm going to get the major one out of the way though. Anthropogenic global warming (global warming in the view that it is entirely the fault of homo sapiens). It's a very hip and popular to be of the opinion that humans are the scourge of the Earth and everything would be so much better without us. Especially when it comes to climate change. But I kind of want to optimistic about our species, part of me thinks it is slightly arrogant as well to think that we could have so much of an impact in so little time. We've only measured temperatures around the world for what? 200 years or less? Compare that to the age of the planet, 4.6x10e9 years (depending on what your religious views would dictate). When you look at that, we've only made thermal observations for about 4.35e-8% (0.00000000435%) of the Earth's existence. In my opinion, that's a very short amount of time to be making serious claims about the environment. We have evidence from investigation that the climate of the Earth has changed dramatically time and time again, the continents have broken and reformed time and time again. We know that the global temperature and composition of the atmosphere has never been a constant.

So there are a lot of people around me who believe that change in global climate is solely the fault of humans and must be REVERSED. I just disagree with that, I'd be far more concerned if the climate stopped changing. I believe we have an impact, but I also believe that we haven't been studying for long enough to be truly certain about anything. I also have slight problems with how the Precautionary Principle is applied to the making of laws, it can get out of hand since it does not require much evidence/proof to ban or create restrictions.

I believe we should be cleaner, make sure that what we use can be replaced or just used more efficiently. I also have to say that just because someone says something is more efficient in energy production it doesn't mean anything about the actual power output. Efficiency being the total output of usable energy over the total input. You could say that solar is more efficient than nuclear, but nuclear can still put out far more energy that solar can. And a lot of green energy sources still have major drawbacks, such as deforestation for solar panels and wind turbines, also the side effects those can have on local wildlife populations. thus in trying to save the environment from pollution you end up cutting down vegetation and clearing large areas to set up green energy sources.

I don't want to sound like I'm saying that we should stop efforts to make things greener or stop caring completely to the point that things do get bad if the case is that our impact does become too great. But a lot of people, primarily in my school, go around saying how horrible a species we are that we're destroying the planet and that we should be trying to cool the Earth down and that we should just all switch to solar and wind. I just tend to notice that there are some issues to many proposed green energy sources, they won't work everywhere and can cause more harm than good depending on what you want to use and where and then that climate change has been apart of our history and there is much evidence to support that drastic changes in the Earth's climate have facilitated the evolution of Earth's organisms, who knows? It may be a good thing. I'm kind of neutral on the subject for the most part and try not to talk about it.