Why do I need to provide the evidence? The current situation — the status quo — is to continue to use fossil fuels as we have been without significant change. The position that is supposed to prove themselves is that opposed to the status quo. They have to prove 1) the earth is warming, 2) humans are the cause, or at least a significant contributor to it, 3) it is in our best interests to slow or reverse the warming, 4) it is within our ability to slow or reverse the warming, and 5) that the specific actions advocated will have the desired effect without excessive negative unintended consequences.

Until the last couple of decades, they had a little evidence of 1 — although now that isn’t as strong — hence the change from “global warming” to “climate change”.

There never has been a good case for 2–4 — although some very good propaganda has made it so that the people who provide research grants are convinced enough that any scientist that needs funding (and that is almost all of them that aren’t retired or whose income comes from something other that research grants or university salaries) is willing to join the consensus so they can keep their job.

Since the global warming adherents have the “Scientific Consensus” drum to beat — they feel that they don’t really need to do 5 — after all, if it doesn’t help, surely doing something, anything, is better than doing nothing until the seas boil and water covers the earth…

But in the interests of education, here is a brief summary of the evidence.

Carbon Dioxide being a constituent part of the atmosphere is basic physical science. It is proven hundreds of times a year in American middle school experiments. If it wasn’t there — plants would not be able to conduct photosynthesis to convert light into chemically stored energy.

According to the Bulletin of The American Meteorological Society, water vapor (which varies significantly by location) contributes 36–72% of the greenhouse effect in any given area. By contrast, the same source estimates Carbon Dioxide impact as 9–26%.

Oxygen in its Ozone form is toxic enough to use as an alternative to chlorine to treat water. Again — this is basic chemistry.

For many years scientific consensus is that bad air could cause disease — hence the names “Cholera” and “Malaria” — although many others were attributed to bad air, or vapours.

Similarly shortly after the discovery that light acted as a wave, scientific consensus was that there had to be a medium for the light waves to propagate through — since sound waves and water waves — every other wave we knew of propagated through a medium.

If you look at the medical texts of the last half of the 20th century, they teach that stress induces ulcers — it was the scientific (medical) consensus of the time. That is why doctors would prescribe relaxation and lowering stress to people who got ulcers. The Doctor who discovered that it was a bacterial infection instead got the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005.

The last 17 years of steady temperatures come from NASA’s global atmospheric temperature measurement program.

That there isn’t a statistically significant difference between 17 and 20 when you are talking about variation is a basic statistical test.

Compare the biodiversity of the arctic tundra with the biodiversity of the African Savanna, or the biodiversity of the cold Gobi desert with the biodiversity of the warm Sonoran desert. Even the biodiversity of the temperate rain forest of the Pacific Northwest with the biodiversity of any tropical rain forest you choose. The warmer environment has more different species.

During the previous historical warm period, Scandinavian peoples settled and built farms in Iceland and Greenland, and found so many grapes growing in Newfoundland that they called it Vinland. Europeans in general had so much excess wealth (because their crops were doing so well) that they could afford to build (or at least start) numerous great medieval cathedrals. England lost the deep pool of Welsh longbowman because the Welsh were so rich they spent their time partying in the markets instead of practicing their archery. And the monsoons in SE Asia were so predictable and steady that the greatest civilization in that region, the Khmer Empire was able to get organized.