Originally Posted by
Endus
The thing is, it's not faith. You don't hang your hat on one idea, and if you're wrong, you burn in hell for eternity, unbeliever. You take a look at the facts, you see what you can model based on those facts, you use those models to make predictions. If you get more data, you improve those models, continuously.
Plus, we need to be clear about what we're talking about. "Global warming", or more accurately, "global climate change"? That's a fact. It's observed, and it's happening all over. Storms are getting worse, climates are going out of whack, etc. It gets a bit more squirrely when we debate why it's happening, which is why there's a lot of yak over "anthropogenic climate change", meaning "shit we did" rather than "shit that just happened", basically. There's definitely environmental factors, too. The issue is, it's difficult to draw firm lines between them. For instance, if we raised the global temperature slightly from anthropogenic reasons, this will cause some ice melt, raising sea levels and increasing the surface area of the oceans, leading to greater precipitation in general. It also leads to icecaps receding, which darkens the planet, and this means more heat energy from the sun is absorbed by polar waters rather than being reflected by the highly reflective icecaps (that's why they're white. I'm not talking mirrors, just why black clothes feel "warmer" in the sun than white clothes; they absorb the sun's heat better.)
A lot of those are natural processes, but we may have tipped the scale anthropogenically. It's like a bear on a tightrope. You might not be able to throw the bear, but you can poke him and make him fall. Saying "there's no way you could throw a bear to its death" doesn't mean you didn't cause it.
The data on this is conclusive. Figuring out precisely and exactly how and why is a bit more uncertain, but we still can't predict weather with any concrete certainty, either. A lot of science is about saying "well, it could be as low as X, or as high as Y". That's not being uncertain, it's recognizing that we don't have access to every variable, but even given those variables we haven't identified and controlled, we can still identify a range that we're statistically confident in.