Climate Change or Global Warming:

The 18th century began a time of economic and industrial growth around the world, and with that industrial growth came the advent of factories. These factories made manufacturing easier, burning fuel and using energy to faster perform the tasks that up until then had been done by men. The fuel burned was based on coal, a huge producer of carbon dioxide. This went on until...well, it's still going on. While today we have standards and regulations for the amount of emissions a factory can produce, the fact is that for 200 years, there were none. Factories pumped out as many emissions as were necessary to work at peak capacity, as often as possible. Many in the scientific community (some would say most) believe these emissions were the main contributing factor to the deterioration of our atmosphere & increase in worldwide temperature, a trend we call either "global warming" or "climate change".

Big oil industry would have climatologists downplay coal and oilburning emissions contribution to the change. The situation has been studied for over 20 years now, and science cannot state definitively that carbon emissions are the cause of the change, due to the nature of scientific study & the scope of the atmospheric damage done, and thus independent groups use that technicality to claim other possibilities are just as valid despite not having the same hard evidence behind it. Party wise, typically Republicans, being on the side of "big business" are more opposed to climate change & regulation of carbon emissions.

Personally, I find the debate silly. Opponents are grasping at straws, hoping for any new information that could absolve the coal and oil industries of fault & allow them to maintain their current states, lining their wallets and their candidates political funds. Some groups even go so far as to suggest school rubrics emphasizing climate change's controversy, undermining the information in favor of sowing further confusion to slow down the changes in policy that would diminish their profits, fund events devoted to science arguing against it, and finances many of the major scientists opposing.(Source). It just comes across as the last desperate attempts of a group to establish legitimacy in the face of overwhelming evidence against them.