Anthropogenic Climate Change: Skepticism and why science is never settled

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Climate Change. Global Warming. Carbon Dioxide. We often hear and read it in television, radio, and printed media. The airwaves have been littered with bullet point presentations and talking points by various influential people - including the President of the US, and even the Pope - Mankind contribute to climate change. Inaction will spell humanity's doom! The science is settled. Or is it?

Carbon Dioxide, as everyone knows, is the world's boogeyman. Depending on who you ask, it accounts for around 400 parts per million, or 0.04% of the atmosphere. A rise in Carbon Dioxide is said cause runaway greenhouse effect. The scientist said so, so must be true! They even made a graph for it! Perfect correlation, right?

Well... not if you stretch the time line to 600 million years.



But wait. But the science is settled. All this information must make me a climate change denier, right? Well, believe it or not, climate has been changing regardless of human activity. Even the climates of different planets in our Solar system are constantly changing. What about Inconvenient Truth? That hockey stick is frightening! We must do something about it, right? It's the Truth, after all. And it's settled science! Well, if check Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report(page 61) we will discover that there is, in fact, a pause in mean global temperature even though CO2 has been increasing. In this graph, we can see that NASA data shows that there's a pause for nearly 2 decades.

But. But. But. That paper has been debunked by NOAA, right? So the science must be settled then, right? Err... no. It has been peer reviewed and you might be surprised with the comment. But that can't be right! There is, after all, a 97% consensus that Climate Change is man made! Yeah, sure if you are creative enough with numbers.

So, if Carbon Dioxide isn't the primary driver of global temperature, what is? Now that we've established that the science certainly isn't settled, there are multiple candidates/drivers for this: The sun, for non-obvious reasons(magnetism, droplet nucleation); ocean oscillations(El Nino/La Nina cycle); cosmic rays; water vapor. Note that these aren't definitive and we're barely scratching the surface.

Hmmm... I suppose you have a point, then. But what if you're wrong? Shouldn't we get rid of fossil fuels altogether because they're harmful to the environment? Besides, there's already alternative sources of energy! It's renewable so it must mean we have unlimited amounts of power from it, right? Probably, no.