What part do climate change deniers deny? Is it that the mean global temperature is going up, or the idea that it is going up because of human activities? I thought it was the latter.
They'll just keep moving the goalposts until it's too late to do anything about it (which was like twenty years ago anyway)
They must only practise the denial because making changes to reduce even a potential climate change does cost money, takes away privileges and benefits gained earlier, and threatens to change their way of living. And they don't want that.
If scientists were saying that there's a slight chance for an irreversible climate change to take place in the next 30-100 years, and it would be wise to do X, Y, and Z now in order to prevent or at least lessen the change, and X, Y, and Z can be done at a minimal cost (or paid by "someone else"), and X, Y, and Z will not change their lives except to ensure they won't be affected much by the potential climate change, then I could imagine no sane person would object to X, Y, and Z nor try to deny the possibility of the climate change itself.
Those who are anti-change are just willing to bet on the possibility that nothing drastic will eventually happen in order to spare themselves from changing their lives now, against a deadlier option that would spare the lives of future generations sometimes later. To do that, they must challenge the basic premises of the climate change itself. The most effective way to do that is to pick the lowest hanging fruit in the tree of facts and concoct reasons why the facts aren't actually true. Surely, proving one thing undeniably and absolutely correct would just cause them to pick another fact.
They're not interested in why climate change is not happening in particular as long as they can keep arguing so that they can execute their agenda of not having to change anything in their lives.
There's also a third camp, which says "OK I get it, human activity is causing temperatures to rise, but we can't really do anything meaningful to slow it down, much less reverse it!"
Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air [1] is a free book that has a good start on this
It's two fold issue. People question the level to which human activity contributes to climate and they question the remedy to it.
Obviously climate change has always happened. It happened before human existence, climate change occurred throughout human history and climate change will happen after humans aren't around. Nobody is denying climate change. Climate change denier is actually a propaganda term invented by one group to attack another. Similar to christ-denier and other "denier" attacks. I prefer the neutral terms "climate change proponent and opponent".
One of the major pushback against the human created climate change is that we were in an little ice age until the 19th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Com...
Climate change opponents say the warming is a result of the natural end to the ice age cycle as has happened for hundreds of thousands of years.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature....
As you see, temperatures have declined and risen for hundreds of thousands of years ( with negligent human input ). So climate change opponents claim that the current climate change is just part of the climate's natural cycle.
Climate change proponents claim that the current warming is a result of human activity ( particularly fossil fuel based industrialization ). After all, we started using oil in the mid 1800s and temperatures started to rise since then. To climate change proponents, that's too much of a coincidence and they believe humans triggered the warming with fossil fuel use.
The second part is the remedy to climate change. Climate change proponents believe it is a "tragedy of commons" problem and we need a global system to manage the problem. Their solution is a global carbon tax system which manages and controls fossil fuel use and the global economy. Climate change opponents are against the globalist policies of climate change since it infringes on national sovereignty and gives too much power to a small group of globalists who can profit by trading on carbon credits/taxes/etc ( essentially another product for traders to gamble on ).
I'm sure I'll be attacked by both sides but this is essentially the core issues of the climate change debate. Is it a natural cycle vs human created? Is the remedy worse than the disease?
Depends on where you live. In some places the entire way of life will be destroyed through drought or rising sea levels. In some places your gas may be a bit more expensive.