Most people I've talked with about the issue agree that the climate is changing; they are just distrustful of being told humans are contributing to it. I'm no scientist. I didn't collect the data, I didn't analyze the data, I don't understand the formulas so I don't know what effect humans are having on the environment. I do run my house on solar power and have high mpg cars. I use a reusable straw and reusable grocery bags. My carbon footprint is smaller than the average American just "because."
But, I and a lot of people are suspicious of people's motives and their actions. We've been through this most of our lives. For awhile, hairspray only came in pump sprayers, because aerosols were destroying the ozone layer. Freon got banned, and the price for replacements were 300 to 1000 percent higher. Then you add the cost of replacement or retrofitting equipment, recovery and proper destruction of Freon, the additional training and record-keeping and it cost everybody money, except the companies who greatly benefited. We were told that would save the environment.
We were told fuel-efficient cars would pollute less, and thus save environment. How's that working out. Regular cars are going extinct. SUVs and crossovers are proliferating. State and federal governments still use large vehicles. I just love seeing a Dept. of Environmental Conservation Chevy Suburban go by, especially when they are going above the speed limit, wasting gas and polluting more. This is in a Democrat controlled state, by the way, so can't really blame the Republicans for that.
If scientists and governments want the public to buy into this, they have to start leading by example, not just preaching.
I have solar on my house, I recycle as much as I can, I shop and consume in a way that means I generate maybe a bag of trash every 2, 3 weeks and my recycling only needs to go out once every other month. Other people in my family generate a bag of trash per person per day. I can't even begin to fathom how they do that. I have a sports car that I've put high performance parts in and get 30+ mpg on the average day (with 41 mpg as the top record on a flat road). Because it's a sports car, it has no hauling capacity so I bought a huge military truck. It only gets 10 mpg but I can run it on about any fuel I want. It made sense - large hauling capacity and it is designed to sit for extended periods of time without use. It rarely gets used and I'm not driving around a big vehicle every day and if I want, I can go make biodiesel for it or just filter and run it on used motor oil! I also have a garden and I'm extending it this year. I'm still eating food I grew last summer.
It doesn't matter how much humans are contributing to it. Doing things which do not crap up our only planet is only common sense. Doing things which pollutes less only makes sense. No one I've told this to has yet to actually prove to me that we have no effect.
But there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. All the lithium that is used for those batteries is mined in essentially only one place and the pollution from mining there is so bad that you can mine the dirt and get usable amounts of lithium. The pollution and waste in the Ganges River is so bad that you shouldn't go into the water yourself if you value your health. Was it here that I saw a post that they're putting carnivorous turtles in there to eat up the human bodies dumped in it?
And I'm just scratching the surface.
And all of this "humans aren't going to make a difference" nonsense is just that because it assumes an "all or nothing" approach. The we can only do one thing: limit pollution. There are other things we can do such as landscaping and urban planning that either offset the changes or resist them and create areas that are more resistant to climate extremes. Kind of like the whole dustbowl thing... we farm differently now and have benefited from it although if you had gone to those farmers beforehand, they'd have laughed you out of the region. Same thing. I know a guy, a complete idiot, who refuses to recycle because it's some money making scheme. So what? You're gonna throw away glass that's gonna hang around for a million years or plastic that never goes away instead of letting it be reused??? Yeah, recycling is about money and not resources or they'd recycle styrofoam as well (all plastic is recyclable) but they don't because it's too expensive. But this same guy won't just go and dump motor oil in his back yard (and says, like so many people, that we're not messing up the planet). The contradictions in people regarding this are crazy. I'll point it out to him some day but he's not exactly the brightest peanut in the shed.
Whether or not global warming is happening, this isn't a scientific statement or really evidence of anything when you think about it.
The warming trends recorded in data would only be noticeable across an entire human lifetime, and human memory is very unreliable on that scale. Even if you had exceptional recall over the course of decades, I'd wager your experience is with local observations (and if it were global, how could you have made observations across decades to notice subtle changes in all locations?). Sales data would absolutely be dominated by other human trends (e.g. population growth, changing tastes, demographics, economic growth, etc). Does this mean you haven't witnessed changes in the environment during your lifetime? Not necessarily. Ecosystem destruction and pollution has been immense in the last ~50 years and is probably far more dominant than global warming effects in your observations.
Unscientific claims from all sides should be discouraged.
You really just can't accept when someone flat out tells you that the numbers don't lie... Amazing. A nationwide business that has shown serious changes that affect sales and... what, it's not acceptable because it isn't over a full lifetime of 70, 80 years and not something that you yourself have observed (not your years, not your observations, not your data)? Did you not read the part where I said "weather directly affects sales?" Weather projections and history are a critical part of this business and are required pieces of data when talking to business partners, banks, and investors and it always has been.
I don't care to try to change your mind. The facts won't change whether or not you believe something.
What business are we talking about? Weather directly affects sales in tons of things (e.g. icecream, oil, boat rentals, vacations, agriculture). But that doesn't mean climate change would be visible in sales data since this data will be noisy and and interest rates, economic growth, and hundreds of other variables will have a far greater impact. It's a very bold claim that you can see evidence of global warming in sales data.
I love it how people try to tell me that we're absolutely not experiencing a global warming. I work in an industry that is directly influenced by how warm the winters are. I see the data and the numbers and sales. It's getting warmer every year.