Ken (and Stephanie), it answers your questions.

Cheers!

How can we do something about the changing climate when it might be caused by the Sun? Just doing something, anything, is better than doing nothing? I’m not sure if that is so. ADAPTING to Sun-caused climate change makes complete sense, but fighting it is illogical.

The skeptics (I’m included) believe that the climate changes naturally. It changes rapidly sometimes and slowly at others, but it never stops changing, whether humans exist or not. If the sun is responsible then there is not a whole lot we can do about that, apart from adapt and flourish as we always have. We can’t fight the Sun.

If humans are responsible then there is no discussion, the Skeptics will join the Believers and do what is needed to combat the human component, because we can fight it. So it makes a big difference in the video whether humans are at fault or if it is naturally occurring. The video make no sense otherwise.

I would love global climate change itself to be false, but no matter the causes, how many more images of drowning polar bears, dying forests and tides creeping ever closer do we need?

I don’t think its really up for debate – as your assumption goes – that the climate is changing at a dramatically fast pace. Regardless of whether human or “naturally” caused, we need to do something. Soon.

For example, if we take action to mitigate climate change and it turns out to be false, we will spend considerable money and cause global depression and end up with a sad face. If we decide to take no action and it turns out to be false, we end up with no costs and a happy face. Just like in the video. No change here.

However, if we take action to mitigate climate change and it turns out to be true (but it is caused by the Sun), then we have spent considerable money, caused a global depression, and we still end up frying anyway in the worst case scenario with wars and droughts etc (because we have zero effect on the Sun). If we decide to take no action to mitigate climate change and it turns out to be true (but it is caused by the Sun), then we still fry anyway in the worst case scenario and end up with another sad face.

So with the view that climate change is not caused by humans (Sun perhaps), we end up with 3 sad faces and only one happy face. The only happy face resides in the “Take no Action” column and in the “False” row.

The other flaw in this in the logic which needs to be addressed by the author is the belief that Climate Change is going to be bad. Remember, only 20,000 years ago the entire northern hemisphere was covered in ice down to the 45th parallel. Climate change opened it all up for us. Climate change can be good. I would be more worried about Global Cooling, I think a new glaciation would really be bad news.