Climate change is 100% real. Take humans out of the picture and the climate still changes. The tectonic plates move at their sub-glacial pace and change the shape of the oceans, change the direction of ocean currents, change how long a major current is near the equator or not. All of that has dramatic changes on the world climate. No one with any honest sense of curiosity could disagree. The climate changes. Fact.

Now, about 20 years ago, the data about whether or not humans were a significant cause of the current phase of warming was tenuous. However, today, while there are some tenuous conclusions out there, there is a vast wealth of evidence that points to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). I.e. human-caused climate change.

The count of carbon particulates in the air shot up during the US industrial revolution. Those particles take insane amounts of time to filter back out of the air. The boom the US and other countries had in their economies during that period was paid for with that carbon in the atmosphere. The wealth of industrialized nations was built on the back of mass-scale pollution that is still present in the air.

Historical temperature readings may or may not be accurate, and as ong said, it's hard to know which is which. However, modern analysis of ancient objects, like ice cores taken from Antarctica, allow us to draw conclusions about centuries of climate activity on the Earth using modern methods and techniques. We don't need to have been there, back then, with our modern instruments to know what the temperature was. We are clever bitches who can figure that shit out. We can't know what the temperature was in London in 1800, but we can know the average global temperatures in 1800. We can know the amount of carbon-based sediment precipitating from the air throughout history and see the massive spike that happened about 100 years ago. Clever. Indirect, but reliable measurement.

AGW is real. The evidence is overwhelming. It wasn't 20 years ago, but it certainly is today.


The news media telling us what it is and what to do about it is 100% fucked up.
The news media tends to either deny it exists in the first place or to suggest that driving less or turning off your lights when you leave a room is going to make a difference. Both are hogwash.
End-level consumer behavior is a tiny percentage of contribution to AGW. Nothing we can do in our personal lives will make a big difference. It's big companies and factories and trans-oceanic shipping using a grade of fuel so low that they aren't even allowed to burn it except in international waters, which is where they spend most of their time, anyway. Shit like that that goes off the scale of what you and I can affect by changing our behavior.
The solutions must come from politics and regulations that are going to cost businesses a fuckload of money. They're doing what they do now because it's cheap and they can get away with it. Alternatives are more expensive. That's going to piss off a LOT of people to make happen... and the political will is lacking, or at least trudging along far too slowly to matter.