The reason I'm skeptical about the hypothesis "burning fossil fuels is likely to cause significant and disastrous climate change in the future" is that it's all based on simulations which can't be tested against experiment.
There are also empirical observations - such as the facts that burning fossil fuels release measurable amounts of CO2, that CO2 behaves as a greenhouse gas, that CO2 content of the atmosphere observed over many years has been rising steadily, and that this correlates with the historical record of fuel consumption.
Frankly I'm sick to the back teeth of 'let me explain what skepticism means' arguments. I've been interested in climate change for something like 15 years now, although I am not an activist of any kind. And all I ever hear from the 'skeptic' lobby is that they 'need more data,' but never any willingness to state what sort of confidence intervals they would find acceptable or why their models are any more reliable, or even any predictions of their own. About the climate that is. For some reason, almost all skeptics feel qualified to declare that climate mitigation efforts of any kind will be a huge economic disaster without presenting even the most rudimentary economic argument for why this should be so.
This is how we end up with would-be presidential candidates who intone platitudes very similar to yours about falsifiability and standards of proof in between holding prayer meetings asking god to send more rain and revive the national spirit.
And if the hypothesis of significant anthropogenic climate change turns out to be false, then this makes very little difference to our ability to explain existing experimental data.
Fine, with so many alternatives it should be no trouble to make some clear and testable predictions that will blow the anthropogenic theory out of the water and settle the debate. We have plenty of satellites and observation platforms measuring solar output, cosmic rays and so on.
There are also empirical observations - such as the facts that burning fossil fuels release measurable amounts of CO2, that CO2 behaves as a greenhouse gas, that CO2 content of the atmosphere observed over many years has been rising steadily, and that this correlates with the historical record of fuel consumption.
Frankly I'm sick to the back teeth of 'let me explain what skepticism means' arguments. I've been interested in climate change for something like 15 years now, although I am not an activist of any kind. And all I ever hear from the 'skeptic' lobby is that they 'need more data,' but never any willingness to state what sort of confidence intervals they would find acceptable or why their models are any more reliable, or even any predictions of their own. About the climate that is. For some reason, almost all skeptics feel qualified to declare that climate mitigation efforts of any kind will be a huge economic disaster without presenting even the most rudimentary economic argument for why this should be so.
This is how we end up with would-be presidential candidates who intone platitudes very similar to yours about falsifiability and standards of proof in between holding prayer meetings asking god to send more rain and revive the national spirit.
And if the hypothesis of significant anthropogenic climate change turns out to be false, then this makes very little difference to our ability to explain existing experimental data.
Fine, with so many alternatives it should be no trouble to make some clear and testable predictions that will blow the anthropogenic theory out of the water and settle the debate. We have plenty of satellites and observation platforms measuring solar output, cosmic rays and so on.