Determining all the causal drivers of "climate change", and to what extent each influence climate is a VERY complex question. As much as many people would like a simple answer (e.g. man-made CO2 emissions are the causal factor/problem and thus decreasing those will fix "the problem"), most of the more "honest" experts are willing to acknowledge that it's NOT that simple.
As for science in general, and in particular on the point of any purported, or real, "scientific consensus", a good point made by writer Michael Crichton:
"Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus."
Japanese scientist Kiminori Itoh is the author of
Lies and Traps in the Global Warming Affair. Like many others, Itoh does not reject the notion of global warming entirely, but instead claims that the causes are far more complex than the anti-carbon crowd would have you believe.
Australian professor Ian Plimer is the author of
Heaven + Earth, a book that purports to debunk all of the major global warming "myths." "The Earth is an evolving dynamic system. Current changes in climate, sea level and ice are within variability. Atmospheric CO2 is the lowest for 500 million years. Climate has always been driven by the Sun, the Earth’s orbit and plate tectonics and the oceans, atmosphere and life respond. Humans have made their mark on the planet, thrived in warm times and struggled in cool times. The hypothesis tha humans can actually change climate is unsupported by evidence from geology, archaeology, history and astronomy. The hypothesis is rejected. A new ignorance fills the yawning spiritual gap in Western society. Climate change politics is religious fundamentalism masquerading as science. Its triumph is computer models unrelated to observations in nature. There has been no critical due diligence of the science of climate change, dogma dominates, sceptics are pilloried and 17th Century thinking promotes prophets of doom, guilt and penance. When plate tectonics ceases and the world runs out of new rocks, there will be a tipping point and irreversible climate change. Don’t wait up."
Will Happer is a highly-respected physicist out of Princeton who compares the anti-CO2 crowd to the prohibitionists prior to the passage of the 18th Amendment. While he does acknowledge long-term warming, he thinks the influence of CO2 is vastly overstated, and that the benefits of a modest reduction in it will be negligible.
In testimony to Congress, he used the following analogy to explain what he means:
"The earth's climate really is strongly affected by the greenhouse effect, although the physics is not the same as that which makes real, glassed-in greenhouses work. Without greenhouse warming, the earth would be much too cold to sustain its current abundance of life. However, at least 90% of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor and clouds. Carbon dioxide is a bit player. There is little argument in the scientific community that a direct effect of doubling the CO2 concentration will be a small increase of the earth's temperature -- on the order of one degree. Additional increments of CO2 will cause relatively less direct warming because we already have so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it has blocked most of the infrared radiation that it can. It is like putting an additional ski hat on your head when you already have a nice warm one below it, but your are only wearing a windbreaker. To really get warmer, you need to add a warmer jacket. The IPCC thinks that this extra jacket is water vapor and clouds."
Ivar Giaever, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, isn't a thought leader, per se, in the climate skeptics scene -- but the mere fact that he has come out as being a skeptic and has a Nobel Prize makes him important. His big beef is that climate change orthodoxy has become a "new religion" for scientists, and that the data isn't nearly as compelling as it should be to get this kind of conformity.
Physicist Freeman Dyson has been a giant in his field for decades. But the British-born, Princeton-based professor has gained notoriety for his "heretical" views on climate change. While he does acknowledge the mechanism by which man-made greenhouse gasses can influence the climate, he claims current models are way too simplistic to capture what's really going on in the real world.
Read this by a climate science professor who quit academia over the issues related to "climate science" in the academic science setting:
https://judithcurry.com/2017/01/03/jc-in-transition/#more-22651Website by a climate scientist that attempts to simplify some of the scientific questions for the layperson (posts going back to 2008):
http://www.drroyspencer.com/my-global-warming-skepticism-for-dummies/ Predictions: Al Gore on January 26, 2006 predicted that unless immediate drastic action was taken to combat CO2 emissioins in 10 years "a true planetary emergency" would occur, including what "CBS News reported at the time that Gore’s film predicted the worst-case scenarios would be a new ice age in Europe, massive floods in China, India, and other areas." That means that for his "scientific" predictions to be validated there are going to be some hellaciously fast moving glaciers in Europe and big time flooding in at least China and India IN THE NEXT THREE DAYS! I'll be checking the news for sure!
http://www.climatedepot.com/2017/01/22/inconvenient-question-gore-asked-about-failed-10-year-tipping-point-refuses-to-answer-enters-suv-in-snow/General sites looking at "contrary" data:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/http://www.climatedepot.com/And, unless you're an extremely fast reader, there is enough material on this to occupy you for years:
http://www.climatechangefacts.info/The first two paragraphs of literally thousands:
The Global Warming Debate - The FactsVirtually all scientists agree that the Earth has warmed a small amount since the year 1000 or, if you choose, since 1850, when instrumented temperature records became reasonably accurate and distributed in key areas of the world. An increasing number believe that any warming is so small it is indistinguishable from the noise in the environmenal data sets, and that the data have not been properly adjusted for such things as urban heat island effects (are the city temps warmer than the suburbs where you live? Has the city grown since 1850? Have the runways increased near the temp gage at your airport since 1920?), and instrument calibration. This is particularly true of the global data set, even though "urbanization has caused regional increases in temperature that exceed those measured on a global scale, leading to urban heat islands as much as 12°C hotter than their surroundings". Most scientists agree that warming is better than cooling and many believe CO2 provides important enhancements for forests and agriculture, even while also believing we should not be fouling our nest.
Our site makes every effort to present the true science of climate change. When the news broke of the Arctic ice being at its 30 year low in 2007, the same source (U. of Illinois) reported the Antarctic at its record high, but this was not reported in the media. To show the imbalance, as one reads in the popular press, we have created a companion site that presents the evidence for global cooling, just as most newspapers and alarmists present only the science that supports warming. There are many reasons to be cautious about accepting CO2 as the causative agent if there really is warming. This is highlighted by 2 papers published in March 2008. Scafetta and West showed that up to 69% of observed warming is from the sun and Ramanathan and Carmichael show that soot has 60% of the warming power of CO2. They claim both factors are underappreciated by IPCC. Many scientists believe the temperature changes are more dependent on the sun than CO2, similar to the relationship in your home with your furnace. The soot may well explain much of the Arctic melting, as it has recently for Asian glaciers.