Brother, you have had entirely too much of the Al Gore Kool-aid. The question that needs to be asked is have we, in any way, affected the climate of this rock we live on? The answer is not likely. We live on a very small percentage of this planet, yes it may be crowded where you are but I can drive in any direction from denver and go hours without seeing anything resembling civilization. Florida was the same, Michigan, Texas, Illinois...you name it, there is much in the states that is uninhabited and we're not even talking canada or the south american, african or antarctic continents. Hey bud, how crowded is Australia? The point being, throughout history mankinds leaders have come up with one panic issue after another to keep the people fearful and groping for leadership to 'save us'. I don't know how old you are, but not to many years ago at all they were telling us we are headed for the next ice age based on this same data they have you scared to death of. It wasn't true then, and it's not true now. At one point in our history copper poisoning was going to destroy the worlds water supplies..but guess what...never happened. There are scores of such panic tactics and you sir have fallen victim to one. I have friends here in colorado who work at the foremost data collection center on earth trends (which I shall leave nameless, but some research on your part would give a very good educated guess) and what they find most interesting is where the data used in 'Al Gore' type research is taken. Tell me, if you put a sensor near a major city and then compare those readings to say a best guess as to what it was before that city was put there...what do you think you find? Exactly what you intended to find, a warming trend. Concrete is a heat sink, asphalt is a rediculous heat sink, steel, buildings, roofing...all tend to hold the sun's heat and give alarming readings....if you don't know what you are looking at. Those that do, and are not politicians have many times debunked that which has you praying they will save you. The warming 'trend' is local to that area only...like putting a hot pan on your countertop will heat that spot...not your house. That pan, on your counter is a much higher percentage of your house than civilization is on this planet.
I think it was said best by H.L. Mencken when he opined:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
(and thus clamorous to be led to safety), by menacing it with an
endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Mencken died in 1956...the ruse you have been duped by is a very old and very well used one. I promise you, by the time your children are your age...there will be a completely different doomsday prediction that our leaders can save us from...if you give them enough money.
I'm very aware of the scare mongering that is pumped through our teles, radios and newspapers to rally support for campaigns that under normal circumstances people wouldn't condone. I didn't buy the "weapons of mass destruction" and "45 minutes" BS that pursuaded about half the population of the UK that war was necessary. And I became aware of the protest in Manchester, at the time of a Labour confrence, that was of a totally unprecented size and recieved not one iota of media coverage. In short I am sickened by the bias of the media towards the agendas of the politicians in power. I agree totally that in conventional media we get one damned threat after another, many of which never materialize. However, based on what i have gathered from many varied sources i am not convinced that the current rapid changes in our climate are fictional or are being over enthasized.
You mention how little space our civilization takes up of all available land, to suggest that our impact can not be as big as we are being told it is. I don't see a direct corelation here, what needs to be concidered is the rapid increase of carbon dioxide producing areas (our cities full of vehicles and factories) and the rapid decline of the carbon-dioxide-consuming/oxygen-producing areas, our forests. Unless these vast unpopulated areas you speak of are flourishing with forest and plant life then they don't offer much relief to the issue we're concerned with.
You are right about the effect cities with concrete streets and buldings have on holding heat, making the ambient temperatures within them higher than it naturally is outside them. But these readings are now being ignored for a much more global approach. A lot of the data comes from high-resolution thermal infrared imaging tools onboard of satellites. But would you like to know something else that's very interesting about concrete. Its production creates an equal mass of carbon dioxide. That means for every ton of concrete created, a ton of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. Contemplate that for a moment and you will probably see that the human impact in the atmosphere is far vaster than it is on the land. And that is just concrete, there are many other types of processes going on producing enormous quantities of polutants continuously.
The effects are visible, the melting of the ice caps is accelerating, meaning that it probably won't be many years now untill there are no ice caps at all. Of course there have been times in the past when there was no ice at the poles of the earth, so what's the big problem? Well we weren't alive then, we didn't have cities built on flood planes. We didn't rely on successful crop cycles, or sustainable fishing, which will all be jeopardized by this. All signs point to a mass extinction, the like of which has happened several times before, but the difference about this one is that we are prediciting its arrival through science and might be in a technological possition to actually do something about it.
Just because the boy has deceitfully cried wolf many times, does not mean that a wolf will never come.
Yes I watched the Earth series too, was stunning!