Quote:
Originally Posted by NatCh
As someone who has evidently followed the topic closely for some time, I wonder if it seems to you that the minority opposing opinion seems to be growing in scientific circles or not?
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Speaking as a scientist (although not an atmospheric physicist) and someone who has kept up with the debate, my view is definitely
not. What has happened is that a number of popular
pseudo-scientists (eg Michael Crichton) have been very vocal in spreading their misinformation through the popular media.
Keep up with "real" science through publications like
New Scientist or
Scientific American and you'll get the real information, which is now overwhelmingly that Global Warming is a real effect which is being heavily influenced (although perhaps not caused) by the greenhouse gas emissions of modern society.
We have a lot more data on historical climate change than you may perhaps be aware of. Dendrochronology (the study of tree rings) gives us a continuous record of climate (at least in western Europe) for around 7,000 years, and the study of ice cores from places like the Greenland ice caps can give us rainfall information, and let us analyze the composition of the atmosphere, going back at least 100,000 years.