Climate change... Much ado about nothing?

MEANWHILE THE FORESTRY COMMISSION CUTS JOBS DUE TO LACK OF FUNDS AND THERES NO ONE LEFT TO DEAL WITH FORESTRY MANAGEMENT, NUMPTIES THEN LIGHT SILLY THRO AWAY BARBYS, ARSONISTS LIGHT FUNNY LAUGHABLE MINOR FIRES... BUT NO ONES CLEARED THE BONE DRY BRUSH... BECAUSE OF A LACK OF FUNDS, BUT WE HAVE ENOUGH MONEY FOR A 6M A DAY HOTEL FUND...... SO THE INNEVITABLE HAPPENS. SIMPLE.

I will if you can show me where the BBC have said that global warming causes trees to self combust. 

So, are you now saying that you accept the sentence you've highlighted in bold, but you don't like the decisions that the government have made with regards to spending priorities?

It is. If nobody scientifically important said so you wouldn't believe it.

Science or at least scientists have been wrong many times before.

The problem I have with climate change is that it is a highly charged political problem. There are similarities politically with Covid because both require incredibly far reaching political decisions. Mass house arrest ("lockdown"), huge transport, eneregy and recycling changes etc. That doesn't mean I disagree with it, but I'd much rather scientists stick to their job of being scientists rather than attempting to influence how we should live - that's for us and our proxies (politicians) to decide based upon scientific evidence.

Of the two climate change questions (A: is the climate changing in the way it is said? and B: is it caused by negative manmade intervention?) you would think A would be the easiest to prove. Why then is there no site I can go to that provides a nice user interface for anyone to play with the data without having to write their own software. I asked this on here before and got some links but none of them would answer even basic questions. e.g. For a given place and time of year, graph the temperature at that time of day over the past 100 years and give me the basic stats (bounds, mean, variance etc). e.g. Y axis is temperature. X axis are discrete days e.g. 1950 3 March 7pm, 1951 3 March 7pm, 1952.....etc.  Allow people to play like that to get a feel for it.

There appears to be nothing.

It is. If nobody scientifically important said so you wouldn't believe it.

Science or at least scientists have been wrong many times before.

But that's how science progresses! Someone, somewhere thinks that the current scientific concensus about a particular issue is wrong and sets out to prove it's wrong - if successful, science moves on and a new concensus forms until someone else comes along and proves the new theory wrong...

The problem I have with climate change is that it is a highly charged political problem. There are similarities politically with Covid because both require incredibly far reaching political decisions. Mass house arrest ("lockdown"), huge transport, eneregy and recycling changes etc. That doesn't mean I disagree with it, but I'd much rather scientists stick to their job of being scientists rather than attempting to influence how we should live - that's for us and our proxies (politicians) to decide based upon scientific evidence.

The problem is that humans (and especially politicians) have a reluctance to change if that change is "uncomfortable". Look at how easy it is to postpone decisions which might result in something unpopular with the population in general, not to mention the insidious lobbying from commercial interests that might be affected. It's rare that any politician makes a decision based upon scientific evidence!

The theory of human activity affecting global climate has been debated for decades, with warnings from the scientists of the growing body of evidence to prove the theory and the catastrophic impact if human behaviour is left uncontrolled. After decades to trying to warn of the dangers and being ignored, why would you be surprised if scientists become more vocal and refuse to "stick to their job of being scientists rather than attempting to influence how we should live"?

Of the two climate change questions (A: is the climate changing in the way it is said? and B: is it caused by negative manmade intervention?) you would think A would be the easiest to prove. Why then is there no site I can go to that provides a nice user interface for anyone to play with the data without having to write their own software. I asked this on here before and got some links but none of them would answer even basic questions. e.g. For a given place and time of year, graph the temperature at that time of day over the past 100 years and give me the basic stats (bounds, mean, variance etc). e.g. Y axis is temperature. X axis are discrete days e.g. 1950 3 March 7pm, 1951 3 March 7pm, 1952.....etc. Allow people to play like that to get a feel for it.

There appears to be nothing.

Err - NOAA and the Met Office have vast amounts of data monitoring environmental variables. In the 1980s, my partner worked for the International Energy Agency on a project for sulphur dioxide transport in the atmosphere so I'm well aware of the data - I have a collection of meteorological records for recording stations in the UK going back to the 19th Century which is exactly what you're asking for. (I used them for something much more mundane - to select the best retirement location!)

But studying the raw meteorological records won't be of much help - climate change is too subtle because the trends are overwhelmed by "weather" - that's the day-by-day, hour-by-hour effects of an extremely complex atmosphere. Identifying climate changes within the variability of the weather data demands an immense research effort with vast amounts of data and computational resources. And then there's the reliability of the data over time - you mentioned 100 years: it was an American colleague who brought me abruptly to a halt with his comment that any recording station cannot be relied upon to be consistent over this length of time simply because the surroundings of the recording equipment will have changed - stations that were originally in a small town, he used the example of Phoenix Arizona, are now in the centre of a giant metropolis with their own unique climate. I'd guess that only the data from offshore lighthouses would give a consistent record across decades.

But don't let me dissuade you from looking - try the Met Office's Hadley Centre.