Al Gore? The guy who's the poster boy for climate change owns a huge mansion that's incredibly inefficient in its energy use:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp
"In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home"
This doesn't even take into account the amount of fuel the guy burns on all of his globe trotting talking about the evils of Global Warming. So yeah, there's the deniers, but it's hard to take these people seriously who are talking about the end of the world, yet are greatly adding to its demise.
I'm all for alternative energy sources, but when do you think you're going to get solar to a point where's its more economically feasible? I just got an estimate from a company last summer and to get a few panels installed and up and running, it was around 40K up-front and then I would break even with the energy savings in about 10 years.
Now think about low income families, you think they'd ever be able to afford something like that? Add in the fact renewable resource companies keep going bankrupt and I keep wondering when, if ever there will be a decent alternative to actually mitigate the ongoing damage.
Show some human understanding. Let them save face. Invite them in and make them want to join you. Find points of agreement. For example, it isn't incorrect to question science, especially when just tens of decades of data are being used to predict the outcomes of epochal processes. But now it's not just predictions. You can see the effects with your own eyes. Something immediate is happening now. And whether you believe(d) the cause was human or not, what is certainly true is that humans have the ability and urgent need to improve the situation.
The more important goal (more important than trumpeting your rightness) is solving the problem. Any one of us could have been a "denier" in different circumstances. World views take time to adjust, and getting insulted by your philosophical opponents over and over doesn't speed up the process.
As a scientist brought up to value Karl Popper's writings on the practice of science, it's disturbing to see a hypothesis (CAGW) making a whole series of failed predictions and each time some new excuse brought out to explain that failure together (from some) with choice epithets for those who remark on that failure.
Feynmann made the point here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
"If it (theory/hypothesis) disagrees with experiment - it's wrong"
Wouldn't the fact that the arctic and antarctic are geographically quite different have an effect here? The arctic ice in question is largely ice sitting atop water. Thus the feedback mechanism described in the article. Light colored ice thins, darker water is exposed to sunlight to warm and thin more ice or not freeze as rapidly the next winter.
See a similar effect in Greenland as pollution (mostly from North America?) is covering the ice sheet with a darker soot, leading to heating of the ice sheet and faster than normal melts.
The Antarctic is sitting away from pollution and the ice sheet is largely atop a landmass, not just water. In particular, the central ice sheet is on land. So any water warming affect would be going outside-in, not inside-out. No internal feedback loop to destroy itself. Regarding pollution, as a contrast to Greenland, its air currents aren't pulling in heavily polluted air from industrial centers and setting it down on the ice sheet.
Why it's grown? I haven't got a clue, but why it hasn't shrunk like the Arctic? It's not the same configuration, it shouldn't be expected to react the same way.
A skeptic could quite reasonably have been skeptical about any or all of those assertions at various points in time. If you manage to establish some of them to a satisfactory degree, that doesn't give you a free pass to assume away all the others.
That doesn't affect who is right, of course. But everyone on both sides of this debate seems to have this notion that their side is the scrappy underdog going against a political and corporate behemoth manipulating the truth for profit.