Thinking about Carl Sagan’s “baloney buster” piece, I came across this article in The New York Times written by a geologist/journalist. She did a wonderful job of baloney busting by clearly highlighting all the scientific evidence showing that climate change is real and that this assessment has strong consensus among climate scientists. They see the data as incontrovertible. These data include: 150 years of global temperature measurements, satellite data from the 1970s, tree-ring samples, ice-core and earth samples, sea-level rise measurements, flora and fauna monitoring, and atmospheric and oceanic analyses–all pointing to the same conclusion–that it is getting hotter and we are the major contributors.
The “smoking gun” is the fossil fuel signature of atmospheric CO2 molecules. “Fossil fuels are too ancient to have any carbon-14 left in them, so if they were behind rising CO2 levels, you would expect the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere to drop, which is exactly what the data show.”