AGW is the acronym for Anthropogenic Global Warming, which means man-made global warming. Human induced climate change.
This is yet another scientifically observable phenomenon that is being disputed by people with no scientific background, but a lot of faith. In this case, it's faith in politics and the capitalistic system, but usually, it's religious faith that causes people to discount and disregard science.
This religious opposition to science has been going on for a long time. Galileo, after showing humanity the heavens with his spyglass, was rewarded with an investigation by the inquisition from the Catholic Church and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. This was because he proved that the Earth goes around the sun. The church may not have liked it, because they felt it contradicted the bible and would erode faith in religion, but their not liking it doesn't change the fact that the Earth goes around the sun.
The age of the Earth, Evolution, and the use of stem cells are other forms of science which have been under attack, (stem cells not so much because they didn't believe in them, but because they didn't like where they were getting them from).
There are many other examples of people disbelieving the science, such as when they first starting understanding germ theory and simply asked people to wash their hands before surgery and not use the streets as sewers. People believed that this could not possibly be true, and yet it was. In the case of sanitation, you wonder why people didn't just practice it for aesthetic reasons, and then find out by accident that it prevented disease. People were being willfully filthy as well as willfully ignorant.
Humans are influencing the climate. Of that, there is no doubt. Sometimes it's subtle, and some times it's profound, but our fingerprints are there to see. This time, it's political. In the name of protecting big business, while thinking they are protecting their "way of life" people are dragging their feet on making changes that we should be making for other reasons anyway.
Part of this movement to keep things the way they are is to try to discredit the scientists that are studying climate change. And in that vein, someone has hacked into the emails of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. Out of the billions of bytes of information pilfered from the accounts, they are holding up perhaps 3 or 4 emails and pointing to them and saying "See! They hold professional grudges and jealousies! They cannot be trusted! Every word they say is a lie and their entire professional body of work is in question!"
It just doesn't follow. First of all, what the hell is the University of East Anglia? I've never heard of them before, and if I was ever to walk around defending global warming, I wouldn't be quoting from the book of East Anglia. When chunks of ice the size of states are breaking off of Antarctica for the first time in recorded history, when the ice on Greenland is melting so fast that they project it will be gone in a few years, when the Glaciers in Glacier National Park disappear, I don't need some guy in England to tell me something's not right.
Go ahead and have a debate about the science, if you must. The Earth's climate is a huge system with many parts. How are we effecting it? What will be the magnitude of the impact? Is Methane more important than CO2? Go ahead and have that debate, but you better have a hard core science degree in your resume before I pay any attention to your arguments. We need oil is not the counter to increased CO2 emissions are warming the globe. Being a nationally syndicated radio host or television show host is not equal to even a 4 year degree in geology. The vast majority of scientists agree that we having an adverse effect on climate. That's somewhere around 99%, not 60% or 70%. The numbers are so overwhelming that it's no stretch to say "THERE IS NO DOUBT".
What's confusing is where this is going and what we are going to do about it. But if we can't get over listening to some ignorant crackpot defending capitalism and unable to see that his emperor has no clothes, we are truly in trouble.
