Inevitable global warming rant

OK, saw this, got pissed off and just had to this it off my chest...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6263690.stm

Apparently, there's a majority of UK adults out there that think that we scientists are exaggerating the whole climate change thing. That in itself isn't the thing that pisses me off or is even unexpected really; collective denial is a powerful force when people are presented with something they don't want to hear. The thing that really annoys me is that the army of staunch disbelievers out there will somehow treat this as evidence that we are in fact making it all up, that somehow the science can be voted incorrect.

As far as they're concerned, we're just making this up to get more funding and the government is happy to play along because it gives them more things to tax. I can't comment on the latter (they could have a point there for all I know) but the thing that ticks me off about the former sentiment is that it shows a profound lack of comprehension of what climate science actually is. The whole scene moved on from the questions of whether the earth is getting hotter or colder and whether it is or isn't a result of human activity a very long time ago. Now the funding agencies are paying us not for simple yes/no answers but to actually attach numbers to the situation. Governments want to know exactly how much hotter it is going to get, which cities are going to be underwater by 2100 or which countries' populations are going to be displaced by drought so they can plan for the future. This means that beyond making wild theories, we have to put numbers on things and most importantly, these numbers have to be right.

The key thing here is that this involves taking detailed account of everything - solar cycles, the earth's orbit, the biosphere, ocean currents and of course man-made emissions. It just happens to be that the man made stuff is the biggest change in recent years. However, this is the bit that the press and the general public don't seem to pick up on - they seem to think that we're solely in the business of creating headlines and scaring people silly and that all the work we do is simply a means of achieving that.

Well, OK, that could be said about a minority of scientists; our line of work is by no means immune to media whores and they exist on both sides of the debate. However, if you want a balanced culmination of the state of the credible science out there, I suggest going to the IPCC report's faq (link below) because that's what it's there for. I actually know a handful of the authors personally and if nothing else, I can vouch for at least those ones not being sensationalists or part of some mad conspiracy or anything. The vast majority of scientists out there would rather be right than famous - history has judged the incorrect but noisy ones very harshly (faked clones and cold fusion anyone?).

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Pub_FAQs.pdf

For my part, as much as it galls me to admit it, I'd love us scientists to be wrong and the deniers to be right because that would mean we won't be spending our coming decades living in a crappier world (although we'd have a lot of humble pie to eat). However, given that every single climate model out there comes up with more or less the same answer to the original yes/no questions stated earlier, I'm not counting on it.

Rant over.