Good grief, the amount of misinformation in this thread is staggering, especially from people I normally consider to be well informed.
liveforphysics said:
You are aware we had a "global-cooling" scare 30 years earlier?
You are aware the earth is substantially cooler now than 500 years ago?
You are aware that 'scientific-data' has a way of following the concerns of the folks funding it?
You are aware that 'climate change' concerns give folks funding the research massive power/control?
Follow the money/power.
The global-cooling scare was from a
single article in Time magazine, and they even misquoted the scientists involved. At the time, the global warming greenhouse effect was pretty well established, but there was also clear data that particulate pollution (mostly soot) was causing 'global dimming'. There was a debate about which effect would end up being stronger, and a grand total of 3 guys felt the cooling pollution was gonna win. Time magazine decided to gin up some controversy and ran a headline about the "Coming Ice Age!!!!!". Idiocy, but what do you expect from Time? A survey of actual scientific papers from the 70s will demonstrate this quite clearly, but you have to ignore the sensationalist news media and focus on the real science. Btw, in the mean time, we've drastically reduced the amount of aerosol and soot pollution, so the global dimming effect has stopped masking the opposite warming effect from greenhouse gasses.
The earth is in a mild cooling phase, based on the orbital cycles that cause the periodic ice ages. Those forces are 6,000 years into a 23,000 year cooling cycle. However, all this was rudely interrupted about 200 years ago, and the current planet-wide temperature is far above anything we've seen for thousands of years. Yes, that includes the warm spell experienced in northern europe about 500 years ago. Claiming that we are now cooler than 500 years ago is clearly false, it's just a widely repeated lie. The 2000s is the warmest decade on record, the 1990s is the previous warmed decade ever, the 1980s was the hottest decade before that.
The scientific data doesn't follow anything but the data. That's why it's 'data'. The conclusions, however, are often subject to human bias. But that's exactly why the scientific process exists: to minimize the effect of human bias. That scientific process includes a great deal of testing and re-testing, and as the available data grows so does the certainty of the conclusions reached. And the National Academy of Sciences has verified that over 97% of publishing climate scientists accept that global warming is real and primarily caused by human actions. These are they guys who study the data on a daily basis, and know it inside out. Since scientists are inherently skeptical, that means that the current data is extremely robust in supporting the current conclusions. And anyone who wants to bet against 97% of scientific experts in their own field deserves the title of crackpot, and nothing less.
There is massive amount of money to be lost by some very wealthy companies and individuals if climate change is real, and those people are willing to spend craploads of money trying to find evidence that climate change isn't real. Look at the spending from Exxon and the Koch brothers, for example. They've failed utterly, every additional piece of evidence has supported the existing understanding of climate science, not overturned it. And the budgets of these large corporations simply dwarf the budgets of the university and government agencies that do the majority of the real work of climate science. Even more interesting is the fact that a scientist doesn't win the Nobel Prize for following the herd, they win it for going against the herd. Fame and glory belong to the guy who can provide a coherent argument against climate change, but the best they ever achieve is lies and distortions.
