You specifically said that climate scientists had made predictions that hadn't come true. Now you repeat again that we don't have a good track record. Which predictions in particular are you talking about? How good do our predictions have to be for you to accept them as good enough?
What is your evidence for the current course not being catastrophic? How are you defining catastrophic? To the human species? Or to the daily lives of a couple of billion people? Those are quite different, and the first at least isn't seriously being suggested by scientists that I'm aware of.
And to be honest, as far as I'm concerned one must seek out predictions that have come true, quite selectively. If you randomly sample the ones that have completion dates in the past, they are almost uniformly false. You speak as if you feel yourself in a position of moral authority, but I do not accept the moral authority of people who choose words over the plain science.
And there's always the big one... those big curves drawn where temperatures go up, up, up over this entire century, where instead they've stayed flat, flat, flat, and we've fallen out of most of the confidence intervals (and very nearly out of the rest). The spinning on how this really is what we predicted all along is getting quite mind boggling. No, the temperature trend of the last 15 years is never what was predicted. It is merely what actually happened.
Goodness help us all if those who think the solar activity level actually sets our temperature on a several-year delay are correct, and the global temperature starts going down. How will that be spun, I wonder? (Though that is merely one possibly theory. At this point I consider the late-1990s catastrophic model that still dominates the discourse plainly false, but it remains rather unclear what is true. I'd still put quite a bit of probability on "the chaotic system is fundamentally unpredictable past a few years" myself. It's been the smart money for the past 20 years and I don't see a lot of reason to move it.)
Since 1975, global average surface air temperature has increased at a rate of 0.17 deg.C/decade (estimated by linear regression using either the NASA GISS or HadCRUT4 data sets). But the rate of increase hasn’t been perfectly constant over that entire time span.
As a matter of fact, there’s a 15-year time span during which the rate is notably different. Fifteen whole years!!! By at least one calculation, the difference is “statistically significant.”
That 15-year time span covers the years 1992 through 2006, during which the rate of warming was 0.28 deg.C/decade. That’s a lot faster than the warming rate from 1975 to now.
What was your position in 2006, given that 15 year trend? Is your argument that when the 15 year trend is above the longer term trend it's due to natural variability and doesn't indicate a long term change but when it's below then it's due to a real shift and that global temperatures are about to start going down?
Wait, so you're saying the predictions made 15 years ago about the last 15 years are wrong but that's okay because 15 years isn't enough time to make an accurate prediction?
What is your evidence for the current course not being catastrophic? How are you defining catastrophic? To the human species? Or to the daily lives of a couple of billion people? Those are quite different, and the first at least isn't seriously being suggested by scientists that I'm aware of.