Originally posted by Eric P.:
In the pre 1400s is was overwhelmingly accepted that the world was flat, how did that turn out?
Actually, that isn't true either. It was generally known and accepted that the earth was a sphere pre-Columbus. Greeks calculated the circumference of the earth quite accurately. The idea that most people believed the earth was flat comes quite possibly from the same fellow who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Any-hooo... The idea that there is some sort of consensus on global warming is just as inaccurate. Some people want you to believe the argument is over, but that's not the case. There are plenty of rational creditable dissenters throughout the ranks of climate science and meteorology.
The facts are we have around 40-some years of real empirical data on the earth's climate. Having worked with that data, it's generous to call it quality as the amount of errors included is very high, and the worldwide records aren't as extensive as the US records. There are some records that go back to the 1800's but that data is very inaccurate, sporadic, full of colloquialisms and is not acceptable for any sort of scientific use. Anything beyond this comes from dendrochronology (tree cores), or geologic sources which are not an accurate science. Studying tree cores can give you some general ideas on what the climate may have been like, but the data is more like it was a good year, bad year, normal year than anything you can use to be certain about climate.
We just don't have a good picture of the worldwide climate for the past century, let alone going back millennia.
Any science that refuses to acknowledge it's detractors and willingly accept and take seriously challenges is a junk science. The goal in any science should not be to simply be right, but to find the correct answer. If we believe there is a consensus, when there are too many questions and not enough supporting evidence we aren't going to get the right answers.
It's a politicized science which is being sanitized of all dissent to make it more appropriate for public consumption. When you hear things like '...90% sure that global warming is caused by human activity' It should be obvious that we're getting more of a press release than scientific thesis. 90% sure sounds empirical, but there's no data behind it.
I personally love the statement that global warming doesn't necessarily mean warming, but weirder weather. That's kinda ambiguous, doncha think? Weather is weird, has always been, and always will be.
The larger problem than whether or not global warming is either happening or not, caused by humans, our sun, allah, or by those delicious marshmallow peeps is, If our climate does change, how do we deal with it. That question doesn't seem to be being addressed.