Speaking of science stuff

The BBC reports:

Climate change caused by human activity has been detected on a local level, an international group of scientists says.

The researchers compared temperatures in North America between 1900 and 1999 with what one might expect if man had - and had not - had an influence.

And in the last 50 years, the rise in temperature is just what one would predict if man-made greenhouse gases were having an impact, they claim.

The research is published in this week's edition of the journal Science.

It's an indication of how much influence corporate attitudes have over policy and perception that "global warming" - more accurately called human-caused climate change - can still be dismissed as "speculative" or "needing more research" or even, as one thing I read a while ago put it, the invention of "Chicken Little environmentalists." It's true that there is much about the insanely complicated fluid dynamics of weather and climate which is still not understood. But the fact is, we do understand some and the studies based on what we know, no matter how the variables are tweaked, overwhelmingly point in the same direction: We are screwing around with the climate on an unprecedented scale and in a way all but guaranteed to have disastrous results.

But actually doing something about this would require a significant change in our wasteful, fossil fuel-sodden energy lifestyle, a prospect that send shivers up the spine of every self-respecting member of the Big Oil/Gas/Coal/Nuclear cartel and all of their supporters, stooges, and sycophants. And so we have a cloud of mostly-corporate funded nanny-nanny nay-sayers, eagerly abetted by a corporate media more interested in "controversy" than fact, who harp on every admitted limitation of a model (an admission any reputable researcher makes as a matter of course), every gap in knowledge, every supposed contradictory data point, to claim climate change is at best unproven and more likely nonexistent - just like their soulmates the creationists, who insist that any gap in knowledge about the precise details of evolution of individual species means the who thing is a myth.

And on those rare occasions when they're really pressed to the wall, the corporate flacks will fall back on the argument that yes, well, the climate is changing, maybe kinda sorta, but it's all "natural" and so nothing can be doing about it and so nothing should. (Why, even if a natural cause was to blame, it means we should do nothing to try to ameliorate the effects goes, for obvious reasons, unexplained.)

"Where's the science?" they keep screeching, so loud that they've successfully kept many people - including, sadly, some on the Left - from hearing the answer that the science is all around us in piles of research and reports, of which the linked article is but one more. Human-driven climate change is a fact, a fact we ignore at our, our children's, our grandchildren's, our great-grandchildren's,... peril.

Update: Minor edit for clarity.