The process you speak of is a human one based on observationObservation of highly advanced , ultradetailed data obtained from instruments on satellites and processed by powerful computers . I get what you ' re saying , but it doesn ' t really work to compare this to the persecution of Galileo or phrenology . incredibly arrogant to assume we can in essence predict the futureThat ' s a vague statement that makes it seem like you ' re uninformed on what scientists are predicting and with how much certainty . daily we are reminded that isn ' t the caseYes , about things like IgG antibodyAmyloid plaque interactions , or neuroscience . There is an incredible amount of knowledge in science that is virtually guaranteed not to be proven wrong . We know about enzyme substrate transition state bond angle warping and things like that with incredible detail . To get to your point , we are just not going to find out , Wow it wasn ' t as bad as we thought , we kept burning fossil fuels like crazy and here it is the year 2098 and the ocean only rose 5 , those scientists in 2016 were so wrong ! We may be wrong regarding pessimism of geoengineering solutions , or an unexpectedly rapid global shift toward renewable energy . Maybe Tesla will catch on like crazy we ' ll engineer oceandwelling algae to sequester CO 2 . But if you have skepticism about how much humans are contributing to climate change , please , get past that . Humanity has been , and is being extremely irresponsible with the environment . Forerunners of the scientific community are often ridiculedGive me some examples of forerunners in the scientific community in the last 40 years who have been ridiculed . I don ' t doubt there were some who were ridiculed when opposing scientific consensus then proved thousands of experts wrong but in the last 40 years it will be about something highly esoteric like quantum physics or structural virology . Not on the scale of basic understanding about greenhouse gasses or historical climate trends . the process is innately flawed , political and subjective . The scientific process is the opposite of all three of those things . It ' s the best method we have ever had to understand reality , it ' s inherently nonpolitical , and it ' s objective .