Go back 50 years and 100% of doctors thought stress and diet caused stomach ulcers. We now know that's not true.
I'm not using this fact as a knock against climate change. I'm just saying consensus across academics doesn't mean they are right.
If you had said "There is consensus across academics that humans activity is mostly likely the cause of global warming" than I wouldn't disagree.
This is how science works: there's a current understanding of the world; and if you want to change that, you have to come up with the counterexamples or other scientific evidence to back up your claim. You can't just stick your head in the sand and say that since I don't believe these guys, they must be wrong.
To take your remark about doctor's a century earlier, germ theory was met with derision[1] :
> [...] Some doctors, for instance, were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands, feeling that their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their hands could be unclean.
Sometimes prevailing wisdom is discountable but sometimes it's not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Discovery_of_...
I think it could be said that it is a fact that the Earth has warmed significantly over the past century. I think the evidence suggests that the trendline is atypical of normal patterns. I wouldn't call the trendline abnormality a fact at this point, but I think the evidence is very strong.
If someone had a conclusion was "the Earth is warming but I'm not sure humans are the cause", I would say that's fine. It recognizes the facts and strong trendlines above. It goes against consensus, but if they had some interesting data to go with their doubt, I would hope this analysis would be welcome.
"Global warming is a hoax!" type statements on the other hand tends to be completely dismissive sometimes of even the facts we have.
Ive had a few chances to personally speak with some scientists and they were not 99% sure what is happening
You think 2016 wasn't hot? (surprise answer, it really freaking was, and it's getting worse: http://www.nasa-usa.de/feature/goddard/2016/climate-trends-c...)
In GR terms, strong gravity is where the uncertainty in position of field quanta sources an impossible gravitational field; this is only measurable when the energy-density is non-negligible and that requires enormous quantum numbers. In quantum field theory terms, the (general, not just electromagnetic) charge of a particle and its energy are separate quantities except for the gravitational charge of a particle, which is its energy. Because the gravitational interaction is so weak, this only matters when particle energies are very high (on Feynman diagrams, this means more than one loop of gravitons; while gravitons are massless they do carry momentum, and thus have energy, and thus gravitational charge).
The clocks in GPS satellites all rely on quantum effects, and those effects that run faster further from the Earth than they did closer to the Earth prior to launch. GNSS applications, as well as atomic clocks on spacecraft scattered around the solar system, are ongoing tests of the validity of this prediction of GR.
It is precisely because General Relativity is an effective field theory (in the Kenneth G Wilson sense of effective) in all presently accessible regimes, and has so far survived every test -- direct and indirect -- that it is extremely hard to arrive at an explanation for the effects of gravity pointing the wrong way other than non-luminous, transparent matter rather than a different theory of gravity.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, science is rarely settled. That is what makes it science, evidence is provided and notions are challenged -- indisputable axioms are very rare. Nevertheless we can still point to the results of rigorous studies and accept that their weight is enough to arrive at a reasonable assumption that global warming is real and it's not going away.
Humans are undeniably accelerating climate change for the worse. Species are dying off left and right from it. Why is this controversial?