My view of global warming

First off, I'm a skeptic. While I'm willing to believe that the average temperature is rising, I don't believe the cause is due to mankind's industrial activity. I think it's very arrogant to assign ourselves that much power over nature.

There are two possibilities.

1) The natural cycle of warming and cooling of the Earth's climate that in the past produced the ice ages. There were no humans around back then to make the Earth freeze, nor presumably to make it warm up again. Somehow it did all of that unaided. I think we may well be seeing more of that now.

2) The sun is causing warming. Considering that Mars is also warming, and apparently Neptune is now getting warmer as well, there's one common denominator between all three planets, which is of course our sun.

Now I have no problem with a reasoned debate on the issue. What we have now is far from a reasoned debate. What we have is hysteria, where the people who believe that global warming is man-made are trying their best to shut down any dissent and to force us to do all sorts of irrational things to curb this supposed problem. I don't like scaremongering or bullying, and I think they would do well to moderate their tone and try to engage skeptics like myself rather than talk down to us or try to intimidate us.

I have other climate questions:

1) What is the optimum climate for the planet?

2) How do we know the current climate is the best?

3) How do we know that warming won't have benefits?

4) Why do we trust computer models that predict 50 years out when five or ten day forecasts are tenuous at best?

5) If the Earth can cool off enough to produce ice ages on its own and then warm back up over thousands of years, is it conceivable that we're in the midst of such a climate shift now?

6) When it comes to cutting carbon emissions, why exempt China?

I'm extremely wary of this global warming movement, which is more a religion than a science, judging by the reactions of those involved in promoting it. It's going to take a lot to convince me that they're right.