> What are those "declarations of doom" specifically? What are you actually talking about?
Well just look at the kind of debates that were going on even back in the 90's, so much talk about total melting of ice caps, sea levels rising to catastrophic levels, unrelentingly sweltering summers. A veritable apocalypse on the horizon, basically.
> From my point of view, climate development went pretty much as predicted >40 years ago-- there is absolutely ZERO reason to assume that the greenhouse effect is somehow a collective hallucination or much weaker than we think.
Maybe an over-reaction would be a more succinct way to describe it. Huge political decisions, past, present, and future are being influenced by the hysteria surrounding this "climate change crisis".
> Consider e.g. Hansen et al in Science (1981): https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1981/1981_Hansen_ha04600x.pd...
> And compare e.g. with https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/global-left-...
> If you look at their predictions, made >40 years ago, then these match the actual development pretty well, and these first papers also said basically the very same stuff that climate scientist are saying right now (but with less detail).
> So again, what are these goalposts that have been moved?
I do concede that the work of Hansen et al is rather compelling. The CO2 predictions were indeed spot on.
The goalposts I was referring to are the claims being made to push certain agendas. When temperature changes turned out to be arguably much milder than expected, the political discussion turned from "global warming" to "climate change". (Soon it will be "climate variability"?)
> So your point is that both greenhouse effect and human CO2 emissions happen as described, but ALL of mainstream science is completely wrong about the effect size? What gives you ANY confidence in this?
> IF your theory is "climate change is a collective hallucination, all data supporting it is fudged" then this would give some easily falsifiable predictions:
> - There should be no change in longer term median temperatures: This is simply not the case-- the trend is in most places ALREADY obvious enough that you can see it by simply taking an arbitrary city and looking at the annual mean temperature.
Again, I am not arguing that humans have had no effect on the environment whatsoever. But I do think that the whole thing has been overblown somewhat.