One of my rules to live by holds that a teacher doesn't mix politics with lessons. In grade school, was your head stuffed with global warming - the fabrication which, if the Tooth Fairy ranked as a Big Lie, would qualify as a Crock of Bull the Size of Mount Kilimanjaro? Via IP, Michael Crichton condemns the scam of scams:
Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?...Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?
Take ten minutes to read it thoroughly and arm yourself with a few sharp maxims, so if in conversation someone references global warming as if it were serious, you can quickly and cleanly throw down a little reductio ad absurdum. Like this one: "Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had."