The great thing about global climate change science is that it helps to popularize environmental problems. The problem with global climate change science is that it's a wide and varied field that's hard to separate from politics. And the only people that really stick in peoples' minds negatively or positively are the ones that have political agendas. Which stinks like New York City's trash shipments.
But it's a mistake to think every scientist has a political agenda. True scientists will argue til they're blue in the face that science is all about peer-review and proof and can't be conducted under the auspices of political gain, because it ruins the integrity of experiments.
Like in every academic field, you can find a whole host of ideas, experiments and results. Results that are similar which are worded differently, which politicians and lobbyists use to their goals. Research on the same subject can be run differently and have differing results. People will even use the same argument to prove two different things.
The most important thing to remember is that global warming science has been around for 30 years, back when NASA scientist oh-what's-his-name started blowing the whistle, and was continually rebuffed. (see BBC's article on global warming scientists getting hushed) Global warming science has only really hit the popular mindset in the last 10 years.. Thus, it's still very much a young science that is developing its methodology and standards. The discipline will define itself with time. It has to, for the sake of continuing the discussion, assessing public policy and its own sanity.
So where and how do we find the truth in climate change science reports?
Truth
might be found in the moderation of two extremes. Or perhaps it is found in finding the research done by professors/researchers whom you already know and trust.... Or you can read everything yourself, do a few experiments. The fact is that most scientists do believe that human-made emissions do have a warming effect on climate. The quabbles exist over whether humans caused global warming, how much they contribute to it, and how severe the problem is.My whole shebang is that ultimately, it doesn't matter.
We need to cut emissions anyway, whether it's for global warming or public health. Emissions from cars and coal are on the top polluters to air quality. They result in billions of dollars in health care from all sorts of illnesses. (see National Institute of Health and EPA articles here)
Industrial waste and fertilizers, deforestation and strip-mall-building has endangered our open spaces, our farming and degraded our water systems. We should be working on these things because they are real demonstrated effects of real problems with solid research with real tangible solutions. Waiting around for people to reach a 100% consensus on how much humans contribute/cause global warming before acting is silly. Let's fix what we can while we can with the knowledge we have.
Ultimately, there's no way to tell how much of the global climate change effect is from humans. My argument is that it's all moot, and if we start working on our real problems, it'll help us to cut emissions, which in turn, may help.
