Is this an intentional straw man? No, you're not told to trust the people because they have a certain job title and trustworthiness. You're told to look at the data, which is overwhelming and consistent across multiple years and teams. It is the exact opposite of lack of reproducibility.

> Is this an intentional straw man? No, you're not told to trust the people because they have a certain job title and trustworthiness.

Are you joking? Are you seriously making the claim that one of the persuasive approaches used in the "public realm" (media, discussions, etc) isn't that we should fight climate change because scientists have almost unanimously decided it is a real thing and we must do something?

If scientists are telling us something, we sure as hell should listen, at least two reasons being they are the experts on the subject (why wouldn't you listen to experts), and the subject is so immensely complicated that an average non-scientist person wouldn't have a chance of "looking at the data" and forming a reasonably correct opinion.

But now you are telling me no one is suggesting I listen to scientists? I could easily google thousands of articles/papers/blog posts/internet discussions where people are doing just that, but you are telling me no, that content does not exist.

What is it about this topic where otherwise reasonable people seem to go off the rails?

Your comment suggested that the title and reputation of a scientist was the fundamental reason you are "told" (in a somewhat conspiratorial big-brother fashion) to listen to them. And that - because sometimes mistakes are made - you can't trust an overwhelming consensus. That's obviously not true, and furthermore it's not the fundamental reason to listen: the fundamental reason is that it checks out. People have done gone and checked the papers/data. There have been multiple systematic reviews of other existing studies. It's not a single novel result. The massive consensus on this issue is the replication.

If you're not an expert and don't want to invest in becoming one, it's totally rationale to trust a network of experts to - roughly speaking - do their work properly. I'm sure you can find plenty of people advocating that. But my default position would be not to trust a single novel result, regardless of how smart or prestiged the authors were. Strong claims require strong evidence. I rarely hear any scientist or advocate saying otherwise.

The only thing that is consistent and overwhelming about that data is the amount of energy put into falsifying and massaging it to support the chosen narrative.

If you can still, edit/remove the presumption of falsification and your argument has merit. I too percieve group think in climate change narratives, while not necessarily disbelieving the data. We are wrecking our environment, exact detrimental effects are still uncertain.

I'm sorry, but given that we're gold fish looking out of the bowl from the inside; trying to predict the future from vague memories of the immediate past; we have no clue what's causing what in this mess. Any one who claims otherwise is an ignorant prostitute, doesn't matter if they're aware or not. There are huge monetary incentives to pushing this agenda, and plenty of bullying to get people to walk in line. Have a look around today, and most scientists seem to agree that we're rather heading into the next ice age.

"There are huge monetary incentives to pushing this agenda"

I couldn't agree with you more.

I also do not buy into the "it's all your/my fault" marketing, b/c it is using guilt and fear to distract focus from the financially incentivized policy makers to the easily swayed mob... one group has the power to effect change, the other has been deluded to believe it can(rare exceptions occur, often over-embellished by Hollywood). Follow the money.

I also see the brown cloud every day over the city I live near. I know from education and experience the only unchecked growth of an organism/group in the natural order is cancerous and parasitoidal in nature; ie: it ultimately kills the host element. The world is full of Thomas Midgely Jr's who would have me believe the exact opposite of what they also know is true, how to find the truth? I don't. I edify myself, I take personal responsibility for my actions and I try to stay away from these MSM and online discussions... try being the operative word.

I see your skepticism - at the same time - I take the data as 'crudely directional'.

'On the whole', it would rather seem we are doing some damage. We don't need perfect predictions to get that.

Second - is the issue of 'risk'.

If there were a 1% chance that your child would be kidnapped if you let them play at the park past 11pm, would you let them do it? No.

Given the level of existential risk inherent in climate change, even if there is a small chance that the climate-alarmists are correct, we basically have to confront the challenge.

Rationally - we should have a very low risk threshold for activities that constitute existential problems for us all.

I'm hugely skeptical of so many specific statements about climate change, especially the politicization and obvious 'group think' - it drives me nuts.

But at the end of the day - 'it looks like in general' there is a problem, and 'even if there is a small risk of it' - we have to do something about it.

Which is how I manage to swallow it all.

So we should take it 'with a grain of salt' but we have to take it, kind of thing.

"Have a look around today, and most scientists seem to agree that we're rather heading into the next ice age."

What scientists are you talking about? Also, didn't you JUST claim "we have no clue"?

By the way, global warming is not the case of some weird uptick in data correlating with some other data being interpreted as causally linked. In the case of global warming, it's really common sense (if you're trained in physics): We understand the infrared spectrum of CO2, and that by absorbing and retransmitting far infrared, it acts to slow the radiative transport of heat. This can be shown in the laboratory. Now, normally you think of the atmosphere being in a steady state, as plants grow they absorb CO2 (converting it into their cellular structure), and as plants die and are digesting or decay, CO2 is ultimately generated. A small amount is buried, but the amount buried is small compared to the overall cycle in a typical year, such that the atmosphere is roughly in equilibrium over the near term, although over the very long term (hundreds of millions of years), CO2 levels have dropped. (By the way, stars generally increase in brightness as they age, so when the CO2 levels were much higher, the Sun was dimmer). This buried carbon becomes fossil fuel, such as coal. Humans dig it up and burn it, but we've really only got good at this process on a large scale within the last 100-150 years (and even in the last 75 years, we've improved productivity by roughly an order of magnitude such that it takes a tenth as much manpower nowadays).

People about a century ago realized that the rate at which we were digging up this long-buried carbon was faster than the rate it was absorbed and buried naturally (makes sense, as the coal was produced over hundreds of millions of years), thus causing the CO2 level of the Earth to start to increase and thus the greenhouse effect to increase. It was just a side note at the time, a whimsical thought about the far future.

But today, the CO2 level has already dramatically changed since the 1800s, and we've also noticed that hey, we can see that predicted temperature rise as well, faster than would be explained just by coming out of the last ice age. This is a totally unsurprising finding if you know the infrared spectrum of CO2 and the rate at which fossil fuel is produced and burned (8-10 cubic kilometers of coal, 3.5 cubic kilometers of oil, about 4000 cubic kilometers of natural gas every year). You can reproduce the change in CO2 level over that time if you assume that roughly half of the carbon we burn every year is absorbed (by ocean, rocks, etc) and the other half stays permanently in the atmosphere.

That CO2 produces an insulating effect on the atmosphere is an indisputable fact. Earth would be much colder without this fact, and you can test it in the laboratory (and this effect is why Venus is hotter than Mercury, even though Mercury is much closer to the Sun).

That humans produce a very large amount of CO2 (i.e. significant fraction of atmosphere's total CO2 over decades) by burning long-buried fuels is an indisputable fact.

That the CO2 level has increased dramatically over the last 100 years is an indisputable fact.

The conclusion is that there MUST be some level of warming from human activity even before you look at the temperature data (which ALSO indisputably shows significant, off-trend warming over the last century), although the exact amount you'd expect depends strongly on the details of our climate system, such as feedback effects (both positive, i.e. increasing the effect, and negative, i.e. stabilizing or counter-acting the effect) from clouds, ice cover, vegetation changes, etc. We DIDN'T have to merely /guess/ at the causality direction after the fact once we saw that all the CO2 was not being fully reabsorbed, as it's a direct physical consequence of the infrared spectrum of CO2, something we can measure in the lab and even replicate from first principles quantum mechanics if we really felt like it. The fact that we observe warming is, to me, just the final validation of what we already knew would happen if we pumped a bunch of CO2 in the air.

By the way, I laugh at the idea that scientists (who can study anything and get grants one way or the other... and are pretty darned poor compared to similarly trained colleagues in the oil and gas business) have a "huge monetary incentive" to push this "agenda" but that somehow, corporations with tens of trillions of dollars worth of fossil fuel assets on the line don't have a similar agenda... I mean, the difference in financial incentive is absolutely absurd!

This to me is a really compelling argument, I wish this approach was more common.

A nitpick:

> I laugh at the idea that scientists...have a "huge monetary incentive" to push this "agenda"

I'm guessing a bit at what you're thinking here, but I think it could be argued that not losing your job could be considered a "huge monetary incentive". I've certainly experienced extreme "peer pressure" to sign off on something that I disagree with before, the idea that office politics literally doesn't exist in the field of science seems quite unlikely to me.

Oh sure, but it's not related to global warming per se. And specifically, the monetary incentive, in terms of actual dollar amounts, is absurdly tilted toward those who hold vast fossil fuel portfolios.

We have no clue whatsoever? Hmmmmmm.

A deliberately sceptical person goes and reads the climate literature, and forms their own opinion based on all the information available.

... and then they move to high ground.

By reproducing the results? Because I'm quite certain most, if not all people do not do that.