I agree with a lot of this. But I think we have quite a bit of data on the last 50 years, and a reasonable amount on the last 100 or so. Many of the causes people have proposed have clear fingerprints that can tell us how much they account for.ken_sylvania wrote:The thing with "predictive science" is that we really can't do a controlled experiment. I can research the properties of a particular element, including how it will react with other elements. We're trying to make an educated guess about what will happen if Co2 levels in the atmosphere rise, but we really don't know for sure. We don't have all the details about what caused previous warming and cooling cycles.
I think we have much less data on the exact conditions before we could directly measure them. We can guess. But a lot of what we say about the distant past is speculative in the same way as predictions about the future. The time period we've been able to best measure is the recent past.
But we can track these predictions over time. I've been seeing these debates since 1990 or so, and back then I wasn't sure that I believed scientists who predicted global warming. Here's what has been happening as we debated these things in political circles for the last 25 years:
So if I had to rely on the last 25 years to determine who was right back in 1990, I would go with the people who predicted global warming.
And if I'm not sure, I would go with the people who say that you should clean up after yourself instead of polluting the atmosphere without worrying about the consequences.