There is no 99% or even 97%. That number gets tossed around from a much criticized paper by John Cook, IIRC. The question being asked is not what you think and the manipulation of the numbers to achieve the oft quoted percentage is laughable. Those who break out that number are typically clueless. Human activities have been altering the climate for a long time. You need to look no further than the urban heat island effect. There are, however, two actually important questions to ask: How much of recent temperature increases are anthropogenic and are we facing a dire situation in the future? The answer to both questions is "we don't know". Increasing CO2 does yield temperature increases because it changes the radiative transfer balance in the atmosphere. By itself, however, this is not enough to create the catastrophic effects that some claim are just around the corner. There would need to be positive feedbacks in the atmospheric/oceanic system from CO2 related temperature increases in order to create a dire situation. These are the types of climate dynamics that are not well understood and therefore difficult to numerically model. The catastrophic predictions for the future are based on numerical modeling. This is still an area of research. We are about 12,000 years into an interglacial period and temperature and sea levels can be expected to continue to rise. Anthropogenic warming is likely to be a positive perturbation on this trend.
Full disclosure: I am a retired research meteorologist who developed numerical atmospheric models for NASA and the National Weather Service.
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Originally Posted by MartinSE
Imagine, 99% of the world's scientists are just in a big conspiracy to milk money from your pockets. Of course, they are. Who else could possibly have a horse in this race?
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