Yeh, that was always bullshit. Here's a lesson. There's never consensus in science. Real science is always messy. Whenever you hear "99% of scientists say" then you're being lied to. ALWAYS. Usually by some political hack who's telling you something that's a lie and trying to hide that lie by saying scientists said it when in reality they didn't.  

Which brings us to climate change. Now one thing about science, especially modern science is that it's become highly dependent upon models. You have a bunch of inputs that you enter into a computer and it spits you out a result. That's basically a model. Models are a necessary evil to understand the dynamics going on in complex systems. Data collection can be noisy. One set of data can make you believe something is happening, when it's not. You can filter out noisy data collection by collecting a lot more data.  

But sometimes, you try to eliminate noise from your data. Suppose you're trying to collect data of the temperature on a particular day in one particular place and you have 12 thermometers. 11 read 71-73 degrees and one reads 0 degrees. Well if you included the 0 in the average, you'd get a less accurate result than if you omitted the 0 degrees, because that thermometer is obviously not functioning correctly.  

Now suppose you're not looking at 12 thermometers, but instead you're looking at 4,000. Which ones do you omit? That's not such an easy question to answer.  

The fact of the matter is whatever you include in your model is going to highly influence the result. And if your model is bad, the result is bad. Period.  

So when you're collecting data, in order to do it well you have to find ways to omit compounding variables. Because if you don't, your data is shit. And how do you make climate data shitty? All you need is a little asphalt.

Ever walked outside bare foot in the middle of summer at high noon and walked on the street? Did your feet get burned? Cities tend to have a lot of asphalt. And as a result, cities are a lot hotter than less urban areas. Asphalt, car engines, air conditioners, all of it contributes to making cities warmer than the surrounding areas. So when climate scientists set up thermometers to figure out the temperature of the earth, where do you think most of those thermometers are? In cities.  

Climate scientists keep warning us that the earth is getting much much hotter much much quicker than ever before. We're all going to die! But guess what? The cities where most of those thermometers are? They have gotten a lot more urban and built up over the last several decades. You add more asphalt over time, it gets hotter in that particular place.  

Now, of course, climate scientists aren't dummies. They know that asphalt gets hot. But they thought that they had controlled that variable by adding non urban thermometers to the data set. So over all, everything averages out, and we can ignore all this asphalt screwing up our data collection.  

Well, the problem is that particular assumption was never tested. That is until now. A new paper just came out, and it looked at global temperatures and it completely excluded urban thermometers. This shouldn't matter because if global warming was really happening at such a fast rate, non-urban thermometers would also show it. But if the asphalt was skewing the numbers, then the non-urban thermometers would show a lower rate of heating.  

What did the paper show? The urban/non urban thermometers showed heating had increased by 0.85 degrees C, while the non-urban thermometers showed heating had only increased by 0.55 degrees. In other words, the climate doomsday cultists were saying that the earth was 35% warmer than it really was.