I found time over the weekend to finish listening to this lecture from Stephen Schneider. It’s slightly dry, admittedly, but it’s also an extremely good overview of why environmental scientists are confident about the data regarding climate change and its anthropogenic causes. The lecture covers everything from common data sources that are mentioned as falsifying climate change proof, the methods we’re using for collecting data, to how models are built and what is done to validate them. I enjoyed this lecture both as a crash course in the philosophy of science as it relates to “proving” something and also as a relatively brief overview of what we know.

Schneider was a contributing author to the IPCC summary report, has consulted on numerous administrations regarding climate science, has co-authored hundreds of scientific papers and generally knows his stuff.