Climatologists have influence and funding because of their claims about temperature trends. But the records from individual weather stations are aggregated into regional and global timeseries by climatologists themselves, giving them intense conflicts of interest. If the graphs they computed wandered up and down in ways not linked to human activity they'd be no more important to the world than the people who classify beetles. So they have a strong incentive to edit the data as they aggregate it, and they do.
Climatology didn't really exist before WW2. From the end of the war to about 1975 the world was cooling. The then-new field discussed it extensively and projected the trend forward to predict a new ice age. See it by doing a historical Google Scholar search. Watch out that in the beginning they called it "climatic change" not "climate change".
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo...
Here's an example paper from 1973, shown in the first page of results for me but you can pick any, there are thousands and they all say the same thing: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1974...
CLIMATIC CHANGE SINCE 1950
Published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers
ABSTRACT
The mean temperature for the Northern Hemisphere had a warming trend from 1890 to 1950 and a cooling trend since 1950. The eastern and central United States had colder temperatures in 1961–1970 than in 1931–1960
Claims like that are everywhere in the pre-1975 literature. Climatologists warned the US President to prepare America for a new ice age (https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/20...). Papers and news reports show the graphs of temperature they were using and the cooling trend is very clear. Modern temperature graphs look totally different and don't show what they were talking about. The reason is that starting around 2000 climatologists developed a culture of editing data to make it look like the world was warming. They alter the data by cooling the past and warm the present.
This has been noticed many times over the years, by different people.
Example: In 2021 NOAA announced a new global world temperature record which was lower than a previous world record they had announced. Someone queried this and NOAA told them that the temperature time series is a "reconstructed dataset", meaning every time they add a new month's data they recompute the entire historical record. This is a nonsensical violation of causality but the statement was attributed to their "climate experts". https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...
Example: In the first decade of the century, the practice of changing temperatures was still new and rare, but recorded temperatures had stopped going up. For a few years climatologists did nothing in the hope the unpredicted pause in global warming was temporary but it continued. By 2013 Der Spiegel was reporting on the "crisis" in climatology. "Data shows global temperatures aren't rising the way climate scientists have predicted. Now the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change faces a problem: publicize these findings and encourage skeptics -- or hush up the figures." https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientist... Two years later they chose to edit the databases to delete the pause and asserted it had never happened: https://bibbase.org/network/publication/tollefson-climatecha...
The temperature record has been fake for a long time. No claims about temperature records can be trusted because they might change their mind about how hot it was on a certain day retroactively, years later.
