From what I hear, there has never been a scientific consensus on this subject.
There has been a liberal consensus, pushed by liberal politicians, Hollywood idiots, liberal talking heads on TV, and other assorted left leaning people. They are behind global warming because they have been told that is what they should think. But a consensus of liberals on some subject is very different than a consensus from the scientific community.
My personal path was when I saw the odious Al Gore choose this as his public issue in the late 1990’s.
My simple logic is - when perhaps the stupidest politician on the planet chooses an issue to sustain his career, you know the whole thing is foul.
I’ve been proven correct ever since.
I have read that the first politician to jump on the AGW bandwagon for political reasons was Maggie Thatcher.
Was looking for arguments for switching GB from coal (unions were giving her fits) to nuclear.
“Please allow me to recount the details of my personal path to CAGW scepticism. I have never previously found myself at odds with the scientific mainstream and at times it feels quite odd. Perhaps others here have similar experiences?”
That’s it?? Maybe more lies on the other side of the link?
“I have never previously found myself at odds with the scientific mainstream ...”
Fear not, you are not even close to being at odds with the scientific mainstream. Only the MSM claims that there is a “consensus” on this, and remember that MSM folks report what they hear without question because a simple differential equation is something forever beyond their meager intellect.
Besides, review a bit of history and check out the “consensus” for plate tectonics, the theory of atoms, and either of the relativity theories.
The purpose of science is not “consensus,” but a testable theory which can accurately predict.
The climate change gang of jokesters have an unequaled record of lying, data altering, and inability to correctly predict.
AWG is an excuse for the Progressives to squash energy production to spread Americas wealth world wide, and get rich on the process.
The rest is all smoke and mirrors.
What explains the move from the “impending ice age” concerns of the 1970s toward the “impending global warming” concerns of today?
The communists are better organized.
I was extremely distrustful of it from the very start, as soon as it began to clearly mirror the 1970s scam by (butterfly expert and science fraud) Dr. Paul Ehrlich. His infamous “the population bomb” hysteria.
(His very name is a slur of Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich, one of the greatest scientists in history.)
His thesis went way beyond that of Thomas Malthus, in predicting that soon the Earth would have a human population well over 8(?) billion, that all our resources would be exhausted, and that starvation, pestilence, pollution and horror would slaughter billions, and all of it in the 1980s. Kind of a Soylent Green world.
So, he suggested that the world needed an authoritarian, one-world regime to prevent human birth at all costs, including contaminating food with drugs that caused sterility, forced abortions, etc.
The dude was (and still is) a monster.
Yet on closer examination, he also advocated many of the same “solutions” proposed by the MMGW hysterics today.
And the two things together is indicative of scoundrels.
1) There is a problem that will create enormous destruction.
2) Everyone must do exactly as I say, because only I have the solution to the problem. Any other ideas are heresy.
Importantly, they spend almost all their time on getting political power and money, and none on the actual problem. And if someone says, “There might be a problem, so here is an easy, cheap way of solving it”, they have to be stopped at all cost.
Because the bottom line is not the problem, or solving it; but to amass totalitarian political power and money. They figure that if they can achieve *those* goals, the problem will solve itself.
Two things did it for me.
One, I read reports referring to warming on Mars, and Pluto, and Jupiter, and various moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
And two, I saw that scientists who wanted to investigate any possible link between planetary warming and solar output were attacked and mocked and accused of bad faith.
And I thought, that’s weird. Wouldn’t scientists want to study something like that?
Did not get past the title. I am already full up with Al Gore Weariness -why read about how it took someone even longer to reach the same position?
It is the passion and emotional investment that betrays their dishonesty. They don't want to debate and don't want to hear opposing views. Their ideology tells them AGW should be true, therefore the matter is settled.
Like medicine (Obamacare), politics should not influence science.