The problem with global warming and the Al Gore stuff is that you really have NO way of checking if this stuff is true. And let’s face it, we’ve been had royally in the past (e.g. 1970’s energy crisis) Even if you read the actual scientific papers (where can you find those anyway) rather than journalistic/political boil-down , how do you know that the scientists are not being paid by self-interested politicians?
I find the psychology of why someone would fake this stuff the most persuasive thing.
Why would someone want to fake this stuff? There are arguments on both sides – profits from Green products, do-goodism, scare-mongering journalists wanting to sell papers – or on the other side, Oil profits, laziness and wanting to be elected. To take another example – the Church says your kid goes to hell if he isn’t Christened and you do if you don’t go to church on Sundays (NB not Saturdays). If seen as the attempt of Roman Emporer, part time fratricidal maniac and first head of the church, Constantine to control a failing Roman Empire, subsequently propogated through the generations by fear-mongering and clever viral marketing techniques like christening, completely loses any credibility and in fact looks distinctly dodgy. In other words seeing the obvious hidden motives behind an argument or movement can help you to see its likely validity independently of its content.
The book Collapse by Jared Diamond goes into why people tend to be myopic in their use of resources and how this has led to the collapse of various civilisations in the past, despite the fact that these people obviously knew the consequences of their resource use. I found it very persuasive.
So overall, even though I don’t trust media reports at all, I tend to believe the Global Warming hype.