They have a very big incentive to spread FUD and they do it all the time. They are basically extortion and defamation platforms used as a political lever. At least here. But I very much doubt it's much different elsewhere.
Ask yourself though, even if all this climate change and global warming is FUD, what happens if we respond to it like it is real? Result: we have a cleaner planet (cleaner air, cleaner water, oceans that still support life) and we have a sustainable path when fossil fuels do eventually run out.
What happens if we ignore it? Result: the potential demise of the world as we know it...
Think about it from a risk vs reward perspective. It's clearly much riskier to ignore than it would be to take a hit on our economic growth and pivot hard to 100% renewable energy.
What is not clear at all is whether humans are responsible for it.
Hard liners on "man-made" climate change are sponsored through various channels just like hard-liners on no climate change at all.
I am no ecologist, but I know my statistics, math and logic. From what I've read on the subject, claims that it is man-made are based on assumptions which don't hold and huge jumps in logic and conclusions.
What we can safely deduce is that there is some shift in the climate with temperatures increasing. Humans probably are a contributing factor without any way of knowing how much we contributed overall.
Every paper which claimed something differing from the above made HUGE jumps in their logic.
It's definitely possible to model the whole climate system. Amazon is making recommendations with machine learning AI and shit.
Do I take that by your logic we should not even try to understand the environment? Since definitive answers are not possible, and if the current expert's opinion is not sufficient, then I fail to see what argument could possibly be of any higher quality.
"Hard liners on "man-made" climate change are sponsored through various channels just like hard-liners on no climate change at all."
Evoking "hardliners" sounds like all debates would be about selecting the most charismatic authority and sticking with their opinion.
I prefer to peruse the reports of established scientific bodies http://www.ipcc.ch/
And to answer your other question, environmental NGOs have plenty to do with atmospheric research. They publicize it some of it. They fund some of it. They use some of it as a political lever.
Having said that, surely it's a fact that we'll run out of fossil fuels at some point and will need an alternate source of energy, and that will be expensive no matter when we do it, so why not start early?
Their screaming leads to a lot of tension and escalation. THIS IS A PROBLEM. SOLVE IT RIGHT NOW. This is what FUD is after all. This leads to rash decisions. We don't know where and when to invest. Should we invest in more nuclear and supplement with distributed photovoltaics? Should we build giant panels? Should we focus on batteries and what kinds of batteries?
Or should we focus on hydro power instead? Or maybe beam energy from space (it's a thing)? What about clean chemical reactions?
And most importantly - when should we start and when should we double down on it? What are the checkpoints of R&D and production grade equipment? What should we wait on?
Opportunists did what they do best - they found an opportunity to get attention and are exploiting it for their gain. This goes against the general public's gain. That's what I am against. Repeating completely unproductive rhetoric to get the tension high.
There are plenty of current, pressing problems to solve; why solve a problem that won't exist for decades if not centuries?
Examples of this would be guano (replaced by saltpeter and then by the Haber process) and whale oil (replaced by petroleum).