The geocentric model, the heliocentric model, keplers laws, newtons laws, the luminiferous aether...all of these were established scientific concepts that later turned out to be inaccurate. When you learn a new thing and discover a new model, the previous state of the art is necessarily wrong to some degree.
I will absolutely grant that scientists for centuries have made prevailing wisdom out of untested hypotheses. I'm just pointing out that climate change is neither prevailing wisdom (of that kind) or an untested hypothesis.
I'm quite sure that there's a lot more to discover in climate change akin to how there was a lot more to discover after Newton described his laws of motion. That does not mean we should commit the Nirvana fallacy and disregard our current efforts as fruitless, untrue or unhelpful when they are the complete opposite.
On the other hand, the claim that rising CO2 levels are responsible for a majority of the changes in the earth's temperature could be "completely wrong".
... and in what sense is "the sun is the center of the universe" not completely wrong?
In the sense that you can make a lot of really accurate predictions about the motion of the planets, with a heliocentric model. For that matter, you can get a lot done proceeding from the assumption that the Earth is flat because, to a reasonable approximation, Earth is flat.
In a sense that there's no obvious preferred reference frame (and if you believe Einstein, there's none at all) for the universe, so you may as well pick up the sun to be (0, 0, 0).
Also, as long as you adjust for the observable evidence, the only difference between heliocentric and geocentric model is how much are you willing to complicate your maths. Those two descriptions can always be translated into one another.
This is really an important point many people miss about science, and well, about thinking itself. There are many equivalent ways to describe a given phenomena, taking into account all available evidence, and the model we pick as "official" is usually the simplest one.
I think the fact that the climate is changing isn't what some people have a problem with. Of course it is changing, we see it happening and know about cases throughout history (the "Little Ice Age", the Medieval Warm Period). What people have a problem with is being told they have to do something about it.
You initially observe some phenomenon. You do not have an immediate explanation for it. You come up with an explanation for that phenomenon. You cannot then use the original phenomenon to support your explanation. In order to test your explanation, you must figure out what else must happen if your explanation is true. You then devise experiments, or find other, different observations, which can falsify your explanation. That is, if the experiments come out a certain way, or you observe certain things, you can rule out your explanation. If, instead, you cannot rule out your explanation, but the other things your explanation predicts to happen does happen, then those new observations are experimental evidence that support your explanation.
The consequences already are catastrophic. But the impact doesn't directly affect most people, and even if it does, the reasons can still be obscured.
How so? BTW please don't highlight normal catastrophic things like droughts or hurricanes as those have obviously always been with us.
Even if CO2 were implicated, this issue has absolutely zero to do with the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
So anthropogenic CO2 (we know it's anthropogenic because of satellite measurements showing seasonal variations around population centers) caused anthropogenic climate change. Even if an unknown effect serves to counteract the massive greenhouse effect of all of our CO2, temperature is only one effect of climate change. There is also changing ocean currents due to meltwater changing salinity and temperature of the ocean, shifting of precipitation to other regions creating droughts and floods, the aforementioned acidification, etc.
2013 holds the longest number of days on record between hurricane landfalls.