I think the worthwhile question in all of this is as follows:
If, through our own voluntary actions, individuals alive right now were contributing to global climate change which would cause harm to people in the future, what would be the right thing to do about it?
Say what you want about the flaws in particular policies. If we think that people in the future have the right to not be victimized by our actions, then it is clear that the baseline recommendation should not be doing nothing. We should be offering alternatives that we do agree with. And if we don't think that people in the future have any such right, then that's what we need to be arguing.
So as I see it, libertarians are generally having the wrong discussion. If we're talking about proper responses to problems like climate change, it doesn't matter whether the scientific basis for concern about global warming supports the concern we see in the public sphere. What matters is that global warming could be happening, and as economic thinkers and political philosophers, we need to be able to say what should be done in either case. Only when we realize this can we properly deal with the role of uncertainty in the process. Perhaps the burden of uncertainty should be placed on future generations, which would absolve us of considerable responsibility. And perhaps the burden of uncertainty should be placed on us, which would suggest a more precautionary approach. But if libertarians put their heads in the sand and align themselves with the most grotesque of conservatives, then they will simply be condemned to fade into irrelevance.
And that's what's been happening: widespread conservative-style ignorance of facts which offend libertarians' sensibilities. The enormous majority of the skeptics' arguments are either based on faulty reasoning, or on controversial, speculative or debunked science. The first category includes, among seemingly countless others, the observation that Greenland was once habitable, the time lag between historical temperature shifts and CO2 concentration increases, the proportion of total CO2 emissions which come from human sources, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, the relative atmospheric CO2 concentration compared with other eras in the Earth's history, and the observation of stratospheric cooling, all of which are in no way problematic for the mainstream's views. The second category includes, again among others, the heat island hypothesis, Lindzen's solar iris hypothesis, Svensmark's, Friis-Christensen's, Lassen's, Soon's, and Balliunas' solar hypotheses, Gray's ocean circulation hypothesis, and the countless observers who cite unnamed and unknown sources of natural variability as the primary driver behind the warming we have observed.
But the weakness of the standard skeptical position is made much worse by the fact that most of the people who defend it don't even make an attempt to find out what the mainstream views are. Having devoted a considerable portion of the past two years to studying this issue, I can assure you all that being a skeptic about the IPCC's claims is fully tenable, but I honestly don't think I've ever heard any skeptical non-scientist make the arguments that would make skepticism a well-grounded position. Further, while skepticism is tenable, the strength behind the mainstream arguments is extremely high, and it is almost inconceivable that they will ever be shown to be as fatally wrong as skeptics seem to suggest. Does anthropogenic CO2 have the potential to warm the atmosphere? Yes, absolutely. Has it been responsible for at least some of the global temperature change which we have observed over the past century? Yes, almost without question; especially in the last 40 years. Can future temperature increases be expected from a business-as-usual attitude? Very probably yes. It is only in asking whether we can expect the kinds of increases predicted by the IPCC, and whether we should be concerned about climate change, that skepticism is defensible. Otherwise, I suggest that people stop listening to one-sided propaganda.
But even if all fears about climate change are debunked, and the global warming scare goes the way of the ice age scare of the 70's, libertarians will not be the winners for their mindless contrarianism. People will still rightfully ask what libertarians would say if there were such a problem as climate change, and what better time to figure out an answer to that question than now? It's time that we started dealing with this issue, and save our credibility as legitimate thinkers before it's too late.
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