No more than yours (see "Hitchens's razor").
Maybe provide some substantive evidence that the general scientific consensus on climate change "indicates that something is very much awry" (per your own statement).
there you go...
From the book: Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming: Second Edition: The NIPCC Report on Scientific Consensus
Introduction
Probably the most widely repeated claim in the debate over global warming is that “97 percent of scientists agree” that climate change is man-made and dangerous. This claim is not only false, but its presence in the debate is an insult to science.
As the size of recent reports by the alarmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its skeptical counterpart, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate (NIPCC) suggest, climate science is a complex and highly technical subject, making simplistic claims about what “all” or “most” scientists believe necessarily misleading. Regrettably, this hasn’t prevented various politicians and activists from proclaiming a “scientific consensus” or even “overwhelming scientific consensus” that human activities are responsible for observed climate changes in recent decades and could have “catastrophic” effects in the future.
The claim that “97 percent of scientists agree” appears on the websites of government agencies such as the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, 2015) and even respected scientific organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, n.d.), yet such claims are either false or meaningless.
Chapter 1 debunks surveys and abstract-counting exercises that allege to have found a “scientific consensus” in favor of the man-made global warming hypothesis and reports surveys that found no consensus on the most important issues in the debate. Chapter 2 explains why scientists disagree, finding the sources of disagreement in the interdisciplinary character of the issue, fundamental uncertainties concerning climate science, the failure of IPCC to be an independent and reliable source of research on the subject, and bias among researchers.
Chapter 3 explains the scientific method and contrasts it with the methodology used by IPCC and appeals to the “precautionary principle.” Chapter 4 describes flaws in how IPCC uses global climate models to make projections about present and future climate changes and reports the findings of superior models that foresee much less global warming and even cooling. Chapter 5 critiques five postulates or assumptions that underlie IPCC’s work, and Chapter 6 critiques five key pieces of circumstantial evidence relied on by IPCC. Chapter 7 reports the policy implications of these findings, and a brief summary and conclusion end this book.
Chapters 1 and 2 are based on previously published work by Joseph Bast (Bast, 2010, 2012, 2013; Bast and Spencer, 2014) that has been revised for this publication. Chapters 3 to 7 are based on the Summary for Policymakers of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science, an earlier volume in the same series as the present book produced by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) (Idso, Carter, and Singer, 2013). Although brief, this summary of climate science is based on an exhaustive review of the scientific literature. Lead authors Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, and S. Fred Singer worked with a team of some 50 scientists to produce a 1,200-page report that is comprehensive, objective, and faithful to the scientific method. It mirrors and rebuts IPCC’s Working Group I and Working Group II contributions to IPCC’s 2014 Fifth Assessment Report, or AR5 (IPCC, 2014). Like IPCC reports, NIPCC reports cite thousands of articles appearing in peer-reviewed science journals relevant to the subject of human-induced climate change.
NIPCC authors paid special attention to research that was either overlooked by IPCC or contains data, discussion, or implications arguing against IPCC’s claim that dangerous global warming is resulting, or will result, from human-related greenhouse gas emissions. Most notably, NIPCC’s authors say IPCC has exaggerated the amount of warming likely to occur if the concentration of atmospheric CO2 were to double, and such warming as occurs is likely to be modest and cause no net harm to the global environment or to human well-being. The principal findings from CCR II: Physical Science are summarized in Figure 1.
Idso, Craig; Carter, Robert; Singer, S. Fred. Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming: Second Edition: The NIPCC Report on Scientific Consensus (pp. 32-33). Heartland Institute. Kindle Edition.
Figure 1 Summary of NIPCC’s Findings on Physical Science
· Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is a mild greenhouse gas that exerts a diminishing warming effect as its concentration increases.
· Doubling the concentration of atmospheric CO2 from its pre-industrial level, in the absence of other forcings and feedbacks, would likely cause a warming of ~0.3°C to 1.1°C, almost 50 percent of which must already have occurred.
· A few tenths of a degree of additional warming, should it occur, would not represent a climate crisis.
· Model outputs published in successive IPCC reports since 1990 project a doubling of CO2 could cause warming of up to 6°C by 2100. Instead, global warming ceased around the end of the twentieth century and was followed (since 1997) by 19 years of stable temperature.
· Over recent geological time, Earth’s temperature has fluctuated naturally between about +4°C and -6°C with respect to twentieth century temperature. A warming of 2°C above today, should it occur, falls within the bounds of natural variability.
· Though a future warming of 2°C would cause geographically varied ecological responses, no evidence exists that those changes would be net harmful to the global environment or to human well-being.
· At the current level of ~400 ppm we still live in a CO2-starved world. Atmospheric levels 15 times greater existed during the Cambrian Period (about 550 million years ago) without known adverse effects.
· The overall warming since about 1860 corresponds to a recovery from the Little Ice Age modulated by natural multidecadal cycles driven by ocean-atmosphere oscillations, or by solar variations at the de Vries (~208 year) and Gleissberg (~80 year) and shorter periodicities.
· Earth has not warmed significantly for the past 18 years despite an 8 percent increase in atmospheric CO2, which represents 34 percent of all extra CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.
· No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human-related CO2 emissions. The parallelism of temperature and CO2 increase between about 1980 and 2000 AD could be due to chance and does not necessarily indicate causation.
· The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.
· Forward projections of solar cyclicity imply the next few decades may be marked by global cooling rather than warming, despite continuing CO2 emissions. Source: Idso, C.D., Carter, R.M., Singer, S.F. 2013. Executive Summary, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science. Chicago, IL: The Heartland Institute.
Idso, Craig; Carter, Robert; Singer, S. Fred. Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming: Second Edition: The NIPCC Report on Scientific Consensus (pp. 34-36). Heartland Institute. Kindle Edition.
