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Notes -
Actually, we do! Antarctic ice-cores let us get a surprising amount of information about the climate of the earth in the past. Similarly, other fields can tell us really interesting things as well - if you encounter lots of fossils of creatures that only lived in tropical rainforests in a place that is now a desert, that is useful information. Similarly, noticing lots of aquatic/fish fossils on ground that's above the waterlevel can tell you things as well. There's a vast wealth of information about the past available to modern scientific inquiry.
I personally believe in global warming - I can't see any other reasonable conclusion when you look over the data we have available to us. Historical changes in temperature and the association with atmospheric carbon dioxide seem fairly undeniable at this point. I don't think that climate change is going to cause Venus Earth or the end of the world, it is going to have a significant impact on human society due to how dependent we are upon the climate as it stands. There will be winners and losers, but at the same time I highly doubt anything is going to actually fix it - there are too many economic, political and military incentives to burn fossil fuels, and most of the current proposals from the left to deal with the problem essentially boil down to letting Goldman Sachs make more money while limousine liberals pay large sums of money to try and avoid facing up to their own massive contributions to the issue.
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