“If it’s science, then pose a working theory and then build experiments to test.”
Your point is absolutely right on. The question is not whether climate change is occurring or not. The question (as stated in the article) is about human-triggered climate change.
The alleged “trigger” by human activity is through the emission of CO2 in the atmosphere. The greenhouse gas theory and ALL of the general circulation models predict that warming in the atmosphere (the tropical troposphere, to be more precise) will proceed at a higher rate (3 to 4 times) than the surface rate. This is reasonable because, if the warming is due to CO2 in the atmosphere, the atmosphere will have to warm first. This is the prediction. However, observations show that the atmosphere is warming at a lower rate than the surface. The exact opposite of what the theory predicts. Therefore, “Science” would conclude that the warming trend (if any) is NOT driven by greenhouse gases and therefore NOT the result of human activity. The prediction and experiment has been done, and failed. This is but one prediction/experiment. There is at least one other that I am aware of which also yields the opposite of the prediction.
I’ll give you a more practical application that would serve nicely as an experiment.
On any ship with a US flag, if you have a CO2 room for fire suppression, the door to the space that houses the bottles MUST have a kickplate door hatch insert. If you do not, it is a massive safety violation, so much so that you’d have your Certificate of Inspection pulled.
Why?
Because, if there is a CO2 leak, you’ll never know it. It’s odorless. The only indication something is wrong is that you’ll start to feel light headed.
The kickplate insert is there so you can pop the plate out and late the room drain off the CO2 that’s built up in the space. Hate to say this, but I didn’t mind bringing shorter inspector trainees with me into those spaces because they’d get woozy first. (Canaries, if you will).
CO2 is heavier that O2. It settles to the bottom of the room and builds up like a pool filling with water. Oilers would go into check the space, bend over to check a gauge and then pass out, and never wake up.
Now, if we KNOW this is science, and we have a regulation in place that is based entirely on this science, how can it be the official position of ANYBODY in the US government that CO2 is, and can be, a sizable enough percentage of the upper atmosphere that it could have the slightest effect at all on climate?
So you can take a position on this matter from the standpoint of science vs faith, to start. Nobody, not even the most strident will argue that public policy of this sort of magnitude should be based on faith.
Fine, so you are back to science. You can then be agnostic - you haven’t seen any science in one direction or the other that would indicate that man-made chemistry is causing warming, and that you’d support such inquiry.
Until that day, however, raping people’s wallets on a hunch isn’t prudent.