No one is "responsible" for it. Due to our ignorance, it was impossible to have anticipated that the global heat machine would have been so sensitive to our miniscule perturbations to it. This problem started at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it was slow to begin and impossible for us to detect with the technology we had at the time and our ignorance of natural processes. No doubt it was aggravated by other activities other than the combustion of fossil fuels; I suspect deforestation and our rapidly increasing agricultural production played a major, if not THE major role. The exploding human population and human ingenuity are the prime factors, and no one can really be blamed for that. And no, there really may not be anything we can really do about it, except delay or minimize the damage somewhat, or perhaps to manage it away from total disaster.

The responsibility and the culpability came when we began to realize the issue was upon us, and as the evidence started to accumulate and industry mobilized to misdirect and obfuscate the facts. And not just capitalism, Soviet and Red Chinese and Third World industries polluted too. And no, I don't think it was wrong to be skeptical, but it was very wrong to simply refuse to even consider there might be a problem because it might mean inconvenience and expense for some of our commercial entities and their political lapdogs.

We've seen it before, with pesticides, pharmaceuticals, with lead in the gasoline, with tobacco products, even with the Corvair independent suspension and the exploding gas tanks of the Crown Vics; with every single caution and warning and concern that the enormous effect we have on our environment with our technology might possibly backfire on us.

The commercial response has always been the same, denial, evasion, propaganda, political contributions, and dirty tricks, enormous sums spent to deny the problem and to avoid spending a nickel to solve it or even research it. "Leave us alone, we know what we're doing." We have seen an effort to discredit and destroy the reputations and careers of any who sought to inform or warn the public of any industrial threat, and even to accuse them of treason and sedition--whatever it took to make them go away. There is a consistent history and pattern to these crimes, and crimes they are--they all have a means, a motive, and an opportunity--the characteristics required to define any criminal suspect.

Even primitive man had an effect on his environment, both deleiberate and accidental. The abos in Australia set fires in the bush to provoke new growth and fertility, and our own native Americans and their Paleolithic forebears affected the continent by selective hunting of certain mammal species and slash and burn agriculture. But our population has grown too much and our technology is too powerful for us to subordinate the carrying capacity of our environment to our individual economic preferences.

Don't piss in the soup, we've all got to eat.