OK, breaking my normal policy of only posting in mod voice in this sub forum since this is a topic near and dear to me.
Climate changes, all the time... but the current changes are neither unprecedented nor catastrophic.
For example, we are constantly told about how Greenland is melting at an 'unprecedented' rate. As evidence they show you pictures of a Greenland glacier covered with a meltwater lake that supposedly proves warming, with a team of sled dogs pulling a sled through the mess. This is presented as 'indisputable proof' of Anthropogenic Climate Change and a pending Climate Catastrophe.
Minor problem. There are pictures of that exact same scene on that exact same glacier from decades ago... and the local natives even have a word for the situation that roughly translates to 'all is water'. This happens *every single year* and is actually because the glacier is so cold that it *isn't* melting, rather rainfall is collecting on top and is not able to run off, and with the air temperature being above freezing it takes time for it to freeze from beneath.
Another one from Greenland. Back in 2011 there was a 'new' Island revealed from a retreating glacier, that was promptly dubbed Uunartoq Qeqertaq (Warming Island in Inuit). This was 'officially recognized' by the IPCC, the UN, multiple science agencies, proclaimed on the news as 'proof' of CAGW...
Yet that very same island is visible on nautical charts from the 1950's. Oops.
Mt Kilimanjaro was supposed to have lost its ice cap because of AGW... yet if you look at Kilimanjaro today you'll see a perfectly healthy ice cap. It
did briefly lose the cap, but that was actually due to massive deforestation interfering with the rain cycle in the region, without the forests there was no rain/snow fall leading to the disappearance of the cap. Once the forests were re-planted and recovered the ice cap immediately returned. Funny that.
Underneath Alpine glaciers that are retreating in Europe they are finding evidence of medieval roads, mines, and villages, all of which were covered by said glaciers in the Little Ice Age (which we're still coming out of.. more on that later)
Remember all the panic about ice sheets in Western Antarctica melting? Wonder why that story quietly disappeared? Because they found out why there was so much ice movement in the region and it had nothing to do with Evil Carbon Dioxide From Evil Humans... turns out there were a number of erupting volcanoes underneath the ice. OOPS.
You are told over and over that rising sea levels are caused by global warming and this is proof of AGW... however in North America they completely handwave away isostatic rebound (when multi-trillion ton ice sheets on the northern half of the continental plate disappear, you'd think that there would be some effect on the plate itself, and it turns out that there is. Because of the incredible mass of those ice sheets the North American plate was tilted, with the weight removed the plate is returning to level... which means that the southern half of the plate is sinking down.) Sea levels are actually amazingly constant when you properly correct for isostatic rebound.
You are told that the selfsame 'rising sea levels' are going to drown all these beautiful tropical islands that are massive tourist destinations... yet they never mention that atolls and islands almost identically situated a few hundred miles away from said tourist destinations are *not* experiencing any sea level rise at all. Turns out that when you drain the fresh water lens beneath a tropical island and kill off the various reef fish that are critical to maintaining the coral sands (yet which make the water murky and not so 'perfectly sparkly blue' like the tourists want to see) you see the islands, which are little more than piles of sand, start subsiding and washing away. Who knew?
The Great Barrier Reef is supposedly dying, yet it turns out that multiple scientists are now finding that to the contrary the reef is healthy, the bleaching episodes are cyclical and natural, and that those sounding the alarm are being incredibly tricky with how much they cherry pick data.
That incident where walruses were supposedly killed because of climate change shifting bear habitats? Turns out they were panicked over the ledge by the photographers who took the images using very low altitude drone flybys to startle the beasties. Shades of the Lemming myth there, eh?
The truth is that we have only the tiniest sliver of high quality data with which to make any evaluations. We simply do not know much of anything. The only truly high quality climate data collection system in the United States only went online in 2005, and is showing a slight cooling trend in the temperature anomalies.
For your information, there are two climate measurement networks in the United States. The United States COOP network, which formerly was known as the Historical Climate Network (USHCN) which has spotty data back to the 19th century yet suffers from serious issues with tracking station locations, equipment, methodology etc. As a result the data from COOP is actually preferred by climate scientists, ostensibly because of the age of it, but in actuality because they can use the myriad issues with the dataset to justify massive massaging of the data via adjustments. By the raw data, the 1930's were significantly warmer than today (funny, ever hear of some little issue called the Dust Bowl? Yeah... no longer taught in schools, wonder why?) but via massive adjustments to the data they can get the results they want (UNPRECEDENTED GLOBAL WARMING HOTTEST YEAR EVER!). In fact, the entire claimed climate trend exists almost completely in the adjustments. If you eliminated the COOP raw data completely and simply plotted the trend of the adjustments, you get a shocking correlation to the claimed 'warming'.
This situation is made worse by just how horrific the siting is of many of these stations. You'd have stations where the thermometer housing was sitting next to a massive barbecue pit, or right next to the exhaust fans of a dozen air conditioner units chilling a server room, or on blacktop next to where delivery trucks idle their engines while making deliveries. Or in the other direction, in a palm grove directly next to irrigation nozzles that spray relatively cool water right onto the housing. Ya think that there are going to be problems with this data?
The alternative is the United States Climate Reference Network. In the early 2000's, due to revelations about just how bad the USHCN was, Congress funded the USCRN. In this network, every station is carefully sited on dedicated land selected for being representative of 'climate regions', each state has multiple such stations in each 'climate region', all stations continuously log data, all stations are equipped identically, laid out identically, protected from encroachment via significant easements and fencing, and kept fully maintained with complete logging of any work done. Yet you will *never* see USCRN data used by any climate scientists who supports the supposed consensus about Climate Change. Never.
It's too new, they will claim (it's now almost 15 years old, and we only have full US coverage in the USHCN for 20 more years than that). Yeah... right. They just know that they cannot even vaguely justify adjusting this data (Time of Observation bias... ummm, continuous monitoring, time of observation is 'every minute of the day'. ToO is the climate teams goto adjustment to jiggle with data.)
Because of just how little data we have directly, especially in comparison to the age of the Earth, the normal solution is to find climate proxies that you can use to estimate past climate. This, however, is an art, not a science, and is fraught with serious issues. For example, none of the proxies around actually show any correlation to climate conditions for which we have corresponding hard data. The entire gist of 'Climategate' can be summed up with 'Hide the Decline'. The proxies completely failed to match up to current conditions, so they misleadingly pasted in the current data and waved their hands frantically hoping nobody would ever notice.
Don't get me started on the problems with the proxies themselves (Did you know that the entire historical climate chart that you see over and over again is based on ONE SINGLE tree from Siberia? Yeah, didn't think so.) From cherry picking which trees to use, to a sorting algorithm that will only surface 'hockey sticks', to use of a data set that they people who created it said was corrupted (oops, they hadn't realized that the 'pristine' sediment core had been massively screwed up by multiple bomb detonations since the pond they used turned out to have been used for weapons testing in WW2...) and even then they had to turn the data upside down to create the hockey stick.
For those trying to use the precautionary principle to argue for action anyways, despite the demonstrated bad faith of the proponents of the theory. Why are you so concerned, when the only cause for concern is what is being trumpeted by the very people who you admit have constantly acted in bad faith and dishonesty? Why do you believe anything you hear from them?
