Scientists have compared this year's climate-change fallout to "a disaster movie" - soaring temperatures, fierce wildfires, powerful storms and devastating floods - and new data is now revealing just how exceptional the global heat has been.
As with any proxy methods, they are verified with some other proxies that can be linked directly to reality. For example dendroclimatology - we study tree trunks to see how trees developed over years and we know how that connects to climatological conditions. We don’t have hundreds of thousands of years of tree data, but we have enough to verify ice cores. And there are many, many more verification methods like that (for example records of weather phenomena in historic sources). And then all of that is connected in climate models, which can join that data from different sources and which can be again verified in multiple ways.
And even the ice cores themselves are not as simple as ice melting, as there’s for example snow that falls every year and gets compressed.
So while climatology is not my favourite science discipline, with the amount of verification and validation they do, I have no problem with trusting climatological findings.
As with any proxy methods, they are verified with some other proxies that can be linked directly to reality. For example dendroclimatology - we study tree trunks to see how trees developed over years and we know how that connects to climatological conditions. We don’t have hundreds of thousands of years of tree data, but we have enough to verify ice cores. And there are many, many more verification methods like that (for example records of weather phenomena in historic sources). And then all of that is connected in climate models, which can join that data from different sources and which can be again verified in multiple ways.
And even the ice cores themselves are not as simple as ice melting, as there’s for example snow that falls every year and gets compressed.
So while climatology is not my favourite science discipline, with the amount of verification and validation they do, I have no problem with trusting climatological findings.