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The number of environmentalists who are sick of the climate change alarmists is quickly rising, because crying wolf is a sure way to turn lay people who cannot independently evaluate the evidence against the broader cause. I stopped looking at temperature data a long time ago because there are so many instances of retroactive and obvious "adjustment" to turn the curve into a linear increase over the past 80 years.

The Earth is something like 4.5 billion years old and has had an atmosphere for maybe 4 billion of that (obvious guesses based upon geology, nobody was there). We have temperature and CO2 data from ice cores going back 400,000 years. That is 0.001% of the history of Earth's atmosphere. Further, our data on sun spots and more broadly on the energy imparted to the Earth by the sun goes back 400 years (with fragmentary evidence going back ~2300 years) or 0.0000001% of the history of the Earth's atmosphere. Further, our ability to piece together the relationship between volcanic events and global temperature remains nearly absent, as science still argues about the atmospheric effects of large eruptions in recent history (Thera, Taupo, Baekdu, Samalas and Tambora).

The one number that I watch is oceanic pH. High school chemistry teaches us that a giant, buffered system like the ocean can absorb enormous amounts of acid or base (in this case CO2 in the form of H2CO3<=>H+HCO3, so tiny changes in pH are worrisome. Further, because the numbers are tiny and most folks don't understand logarithmic scales, there is little incentive to doctor the data. We are adding amounts of CO2 to the Earth's atmosphere in a way that has changed the CO2 concentration in the air and dissolved in the oceans in ways that we haven't seen for at least 400,000 years, and changing how we interact with fossil fuels (essentially stored up solar energy) is likely wise from a CO2 and "finite resource" perspective. However, the alarmism and invented certainty that we see today from certain people is bravado, not science. The most scientific phrase of all is "I don't know", not "my best guess is."

The current fad of treating climate scientists as modern prophets rather than a sober appraisal of what they can actually prove is troubling, and the correct answer is to demand proof, not to dismiss their findings. The unintended consequence of demanding belief in oneself based upon one's credentials rather than one's evidence is that people can dismiss or accept one's claims as though they were a unified whole. "Science denial" is bad, but it is the same variety of error as "Science belief"; a sober appraisal and constant re-appraisal of the data is what gives science its explanatory power, not "they've been right before, so I be they're right now."