I agree entirely with your first sentence.
You and I are not at the same point.
I agree with your second sentence too.
It is upsetting when some people ignore facts that do not fit in with their own opinion...and also when they resort to ridicule/name calling in their frustration.
If you alter your analogy to someone else lighting the fire or a fire that reignites after being dormant for some time then we might have mutual ground.
Lets look at pandemics for a moment.
Every year thousands of people die of 'seasonal' flu right?
Bird flu appeared...the word 'pandemic' was used...people expected to catch it and die on a world wide scale. True?
Swine flu appeared.....the word 'pandemic' was used again, used both times by those apparantly with knowledge of such things. People expected to become ill withing weeks or even days and die from it.
Both instances caused panic but there was not a world wide event of people dying left right and centre was there?
The numbers that die each year from various forms of flu were dismissed as irrelevant.
Now I know you will probably conjure up figures to show huge death rates from Bird/Swine flu and defend the use of vaccines designed to combat both but the FACT remains that wrong or shall we say misleading information was given.
It happens.
I see, so rather than take note of and prepare for a pandemic, we should instead ignore the issue until it has run it's course and evaluate the results. In this way we will be absolutely sure how many were infected, died, and became ill before spending the time, treasure, and effort to avert the pandemic we can no longer do anything about.
Though this approach will certainly allow for absolute verification of the extent of the damage, and likely save resources it will make no difference to those who were impacted by the virus...though we may learn enough about it to develop a vaccine.
The problem with this analogy is the possible result of applying it to something capable of effecting virtually every aspect of what we call civilization. Something that does not "Run it's Course" over a few years, cannot be vaccinated against, and awaiting absolute verification would likely mean it is too late to do anything regardless...it may already be anyway.
You may be correct in that this is nothing to worry about, but consider the results if you are not. There is very little chance a mile wide asteroid will impact the Earth in your lifetime, but if it does we are all toast....thus we spend billions looking as a just in case because we know how bad it would be.
We have a very good idea what the impact of higher temperatures will be, and so we worry about this in much the same way....only it seems this has a much larger chance of happening in your lifetime, and is probably happening right now.
A slow poison still kills.
