[good_gnu]

What you see here is a common argumentative tactic by climate change deniers: "Scientists have been hysterical about global cooling in the past and that has not happened. Therefore claims about climate change in general are not to be believed."

I refer you to the wikipedia article on global cooling for reference. Especially take into consideration the line chart at the very top.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

With regards to the Paul Ehrlich quote I would add that he is not actually talking about climate change at all but overpopulation.

[at-fates-hands]

> "Scientists have been hysterical about global cooling in the past and that has not happened. Therefore claims about climate change in general are not to be believed."

a. Not a climate denier

b. I never said anything like you are referring to. I never inferred that since its cooling, climate change shouldn't be believed.

c. What I AM saying is the earth's temperature has swung in both directions in a fairly cyclical manner for thousands of years before heavy industry. The earth's temperature warmed when there weren't ANY humans on the planet.

Even going back some 1.2 milion years, scientists still are not sure what caused the change:

"The Mid Pleistocene Transition is a most important and enigmatic time interval in the more recent climate history of our planet," says Fischer. Earth's climate naturally varies between times of warming and periods of extreme cooling (ice ages) over thousands of years. Before the transition, the period of variation was about 41 thousand years while afterwards it became 100 thousand years. "The reason for this change is not known."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105081228.h...

I would also add the Clean Air Act has done a ton to improve the US and the amount of pollution they contribute.

https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/progress-cleaning...

We as a country can do a lot, but what about other developing countries? What are they doing to help reduce pollution and greehouse gases? If we're doing all we can, and other countries aren't following suit, then our gains become minimal and the march towards this catastrophe will continue, unabated.

[wlll]

It's pretty easy to find scientific papers that make the claim that solar variation is likely to make a small difference compared to human cause climate change.

> Any reduction in global mean near-surface temperature due to a future decline in solar activity is likely to be a small fraction of projected anthropogenic warming. - [Ineson, S.et al. Regional climate impacts of a possible future grand solar minimum - https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8535]

> We as a country can do a lot, but what about other developing countries?

It's a difficuly question, lead by example? Change anyway, because the more time we have to develop countermeasures the smaller the magnitude of the problem will peak at? I don't know, but waiting for all countries to fall into line isn't going to work.

[blancheneige]

so what you are saying is that in hindsight it's easier to see which side was making exaggerated claims?

[wlll]

That's not what I read into the response at all.

What good_gnu did was point out the logical fallacy commonly used by climate change deniers: "something is false simply because a proof or argument that someone has offered for it is invalid" (a full description http://www.csun.edu/%7Edgw61315/fallacies.html#Argumentum%20...).

The number of warming and cooling studies over time would suggest to me (and this is my interpretation) that climate was a (relatively) new field back in 1970ish, people were still working out what was going on, how to study it, and what the data meant, and over time as these things have become clearer the trend towards warming has become the most arrived at interpretation.

Though I'm sure there have been exaggerated claims in the past, nothing that good_gnu said leads to "what you are saying is that in hindsight it's easier to see which side was making exaggerated claims?" being an accurate summary.

[jamez1]

It's proof that the process of research in climate science has large flaws, much like the other social sciences. Given they still do things the same way, why would you expect this time it's different?