You obviously can't do an experiment on the entire planet to prove some ecological hypothesis, any more than you can do an experiment on the universe to prove some cosmological result.
If scientists are so great, why can't they build a fake earth, seed it with a basic form of climate change and get the Large Hardon Inseminator to pump it into space?
Of course they can be verified! Take data, build model, make prediction, compare prediction to new data 5/10/15 years down the line. As I said earlier, models used in the 90s gave predictions that underestimated the rate of warming.
This just proves how vague they are. I dare say that none of them foresaw the slight, but important, temperature decline of 2007, either, which presages the coming ice age.
Well for one thing, simply denying that it's happening at all because one group of scientists threw away some data is not really a rational response.
Well, this data is the empirical evidence in its purest form - not having access is to it makes formulating a rational response difficult, as one is not in possession of the facts. The data should be regathered.
So in the absence of the most important information, the layman is resigned to weighing up claims on the basis of the authority behind them and having
faith in their pronouncements. The problem is that the authorities have only weight of numbers behind them and, as we all know for the big questions, it is the
minority who are right (Copernicus, Galileo),
not the majority. In fact we should be downright suspicious of the majority, as they're the guys who are normally carrying pitchforks.
Ideally, I would be shooting my own scale model of the earth into space with personally configured experimentation devices relaying unsullied data back to my politically neutral, non-governmentally funded pda, but I have neither the scientific training nor the overdraft facility to enable such an ambitious project (yet).
Another laymanly response is to go meta and assess the latest scare story using the outcomes of the ones that precede it: bird flu, millennium bug, global cooling, acid rain, SARS, swine flu, BSE
LOL: damp squibs, the lot of them. This would literally be the first ever scare story to be justified. Scare stories that happen are not things that we have time to get scared about: Spanish flu, Hitler, the Great Fire of London, Arrested Development getting cancelled, Susan Boyle.