Forget global warming for now. Let's talk dirty air.
If you believe that human-induced global warming is a hoax designed to line the pockets of greedy scientists and Al Gore, it might be easier to acknowledge that fossil fuels are fouling the air.
Here's a chart from the Los Angeles Times that shows how China's Ministry of Environmental Protection interprets air quality versus those environmental alarmists at the U.S. Embassy. What Beijing calls "slightly polluted" qualifies as "hazardous" by the diplomats.
Dirty air might be a stronger agent for change than the threat of global warming.
According to PEW Research, in 2010, only 34 percent of Americans believed that "global warming is occurring mostly because of human activity." That's down from 50 percent in 2006.
And Halloween 2011 marks the day that the world's population reached the seven-billion mark. That's seven billion people aspiring to an energy-intensive higher standard of living and facing the choice of basing their behavior on petroleum fuel and coal or renewable sources.
This video from NPR on global population says "it all depends on how we manage our food, water, and energy."