The Climate Change Climate Change

All that being said the people who promote global warming as a serious issue that we need to do something about could be right of course. It could also be that they're missing some key piece of information that they don't even know exists. The unknown unknowns here seem impossible to get your head around for something as difficult to understand as climate change.

I'm not sure where you find information that isn't biased one way or another on this topic. I've pretty much given up.

As for as the facts are concerned, the idea that all information on climate change is poltitically motivated is itself a lie spread by certain forces within society.

As far as policy is concerned, the role of environmental groups is to create recommendations on how to manage limited resources among multiple stakeholders who want to use them. Some of the more leftwing environmental groups believe that their job is just to protect the earth, whatever that means, but the more mainstream ones are in the business of solving tragedy-of-the-commons problems like climate change. They are probably you're best bet for sound policy advice, albeit they often on specific tactics.

edit: @EnvDefenseFund has some good tweets about what is going on today.

How has global warming fared on the accuracy front? Terribly. We were promised monotonically rising global temperatures for the next hundred years, and instead, they plateaued, then dropped, only ten years into the predictions.

As an outsider, the rest hardly matters. Why the predictions were wrong is something for the scientists to go work out. Explaining away the wrongness with "whys" doesn't change the wrongness, it only explains it.

If you think I'm wrong, show me the prediction from 2000 or so that actually matches what happened to the real climate. Show me the error bars that the global temperature is still within. (Most global warming graphs don't even have error bars, which itself is pretty telling.) As far as I know, you can't.

Explaining that failure doesn't change the fact of failure. If the last ten years is "mere weather", then the error bars should have reflected that.

That is how you judge science as an outsider. You may not understand materials science, but the bridges the materials scientists help build behave as they predict (mostly). You may not understand organic chemistry, but plastics behave as such people predict. You may not understand political science, but the real world only sort of acts as they predict, so their science is less reliable.

You may not understand climate science, but their predictions completely fail to come to pass. Fairly routinely, too. Make your conclusions about the validity of their science based on that. You don't have to be a climate scientist to do that. (As it happens, it is the same standard they should be using themselves, and the field's apparent refusal to do so is also very telling.)

(Where no predictions can be made, there is no science. Sometimes that's just the way it is; economics isn't going to be a very real science anytime soon. There's nothing wrong with that, there's only something wrong with according it the belief levels in the predictions made by the field that should be reserved for real science.)

Not only that, but I heard that if not stopped, Global warming would make cats chase dogs, Jerry Springer would retire, and leprechauns would roam in large bands across the earth, spreading death, destruction, and lucky charms.