That misses the point that there is a natural carbon cycle. Yes the natural world generates carbon, but it also absorbs it. Over billions of years an equilibrium is established. The point is that we are increasing production of carbon, not that we are producing more than is naturally produced. You are full of salt, but that doesn't mean that you can chug down a cup of salt and not suffer effects from it, because the salt in your body is in equilibrium, while the cup of salt upsets that equilibrium.

But anyway, it's silly to pretend like this isn't a problem. The scientific community might have been fairly evenly divided for a long time, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. A consensus has been growing steadily that the issue is real.

And the big problem is that it's not the kind of problem that you can allow to reach the point where even the biggest skeptic can no longer ignore before you do something about it. By then, it will be way too late and the effects will be far too bad. By just being reasonable, emphasizing conservation, common sense stuff, and putting in a serious effort to get ourselves away from fossil fuels, we can hedge our bets without massive sacrifices. Gettng ourselves off of fossil fuels (besides avoiding a collapse of our economy when it starts becoming very expensive due to demand growing very fast) would also provide many benefits to this country in terms of self-sufficiency.

We do owe those who come after us, and we should take a conservative approach towards protecting what we pass on to them. The inevitable result of our current activities will result in a world none of us would want to live in. Nature always loses over time, and the losses are almost never recovered. If only 1,000,000 acres get used up a year in the whole world, that's a billion acres 1000 years from now.

But 1000 years is a blink of an eye. We have to live on this planet a LONG time, and we are growing in a very non-linear way. That cannot be sustained long term. In the last thousand years we've grown in population something like 22 times over. If that happens in the next 1000 years, we'll hit around 132 billion people on this planet. Obviously we are going to either stop having babies (how likely is that unless it's at the point of a gun, which it might end up being) or we are going to have to seriously lower our use (and reuse) of resources.