Global warming skepticism

Global warming skepticism is the position taken by a number of scientists that use the scientific skepticism model to evaluate the scientific consensus that global warming is caused by human activity, and that this is unprecedented in the history of the earth.
The mainstream consensus on global warming
According to the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global surface temperature has increased between and during the 20th century. It is the position of the general scientific community that most of the increase is due to human activity. IPCC projections indicate that the temperature is going to continue rising.
Skepticism arising from epistemology
Science, it is admitted, does not and can not produce absolute and unquestionable truth. Continual questioning, skepticism and experimental evaluation is the hallmark of normal science. Skepticism towards the GWC that can be derived from epistemology or from the philosophy of science is stronger than it is against most other fields of science. Indeed, climate science, or climatology, relates to and depends on many scientific disciplines, such as astrophysics, chemistry, ecology, geology, geophysics, glaciology, hydrology, oceanography, and volcanology.
Epistemology and the philosophy of science explore the conflicts between truth, knowledge and beliefs, widely held or not, and the means that should be used for determining when scientific information has adequate objective support.
Climatology is, by necessity arising from the high number of different sciences on which it depends, a scientific field that is subject to a considerable epistemological doubt. Philosophically, this would mean that the findings of climatology, more than for most other sciences, are less likely to be knowledge.
*Valerio Lucarini, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) : "The intrinsic difficulties in building realistic climate models and in providing complete, reliable and meaningful observational datasets, and the conceptual impossibility of testing theories against data imply that the usual Galilean scientific validation criteria do not apply to climate science. The different epistemology pertaining to climate science implies that its answers cannot be singular and deterministic; they must be plural and stated in probabilistic terms".

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