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But 3) is the most well-attested part! It’s the whole reason Al Gore could get up on stage and point to those sawtooth curves. I don’t think I’ve seen an argument that the planet is actually cooler than it was before the Industrial Revolution.
If 3) is hard, the correct response is not to throw up our hands and let God decide. And there are some skeptics out there trying to make their own models say, yeah, it’s alarming but okay. Here’s a feedback mechanism, here’s a reversal, we’ll be alright if we bring back bunker fuels. Stuff like that.
But the mainstream version of climate skepticism is to accuse the people working on 3) of being paid degrowth shills who hate America. You can see it all over this thread. The motte is that spending money on climate research is wasteful and rewards the wreckers. The bailey is that it’s all fake and gay by default. Is that truth-seeking behavior?
I think your food analogy is wrongheaded. What you’ve seen are the fads, the contrarians, the countersignals. The people selling something by contrasting it with a mainstream. Climate science is the mainstream! That’s why so much time and effort has to go into discrediting it! The dynamics are completely different than the market for fad diets.
I honestly have no idea what part of this is sarcasm or an actual argument. I think the use of italics and exclamation marks makes it hard to tell if you are speaking clearly or using them to imply you don’t really believe that argument.
Sorry. No sarcasm was intended.
My understanding is that the warming itself is easy to measure. We have thermometer records going back to the 1800s and reasonable proxies going back further. This would make 3) well-attested.
I do not believe that 3) is controversial. I have seen people argue that 3) was correlated with, not caused by, 2). I have also seen people accept 3) and then propose 4) it won’t be that bad. Those are both consistent positions, and I respect the people who are trying to seriously find evidence for them.
It's true, but pretty uncommon to have exactly the same thermometer in exactly the same location (within the same environs) for even a few decades -- datasets like HADCRUT are heavily massaged by true believers, and the longest-term measuring locations tend to be in areas particularly vulnerable to urban heat-island and other local effects. Also the areas said (by current models) to be expected to experience the most local warming are sparsely populated (pretty polar) and have limited historical data of any kind.
I'm more "so what" than full-denier -- but I think "we don't really know with high certainty how much average global temperatures have increased since the 1800s" is a pretty viable position.
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