The Amazon is burning

That's not what the actual "science" says. Or more accurately, that's not what the reporters of the "science" that have dumbed it down enough for lay people to understand it say. Those second-hand reports about the consensus re "science" have claimed only 'we think there's been an increase in temps since the industrial revolution of about one degree and we think it's because of the higher CO2 in the air.'

Exactly, even if it's only one degree that's a vast amount of energy in the atmosphere which wasn't there before. Now that temperature has indeed fluctuated over geological time for many reasons but never at a rate of a degree in a matter of centuries. That's enormous.

We can't prove causality on basic principles, there is simply no way of doing that outside of a lab setting with control of the variables regardless of what is or isn't true. However the absurdly narrow window of probability for the evidence all correlating the way it has (and yes, I'm in the habit of reading journal articles, not just "leftist news") simply doesn't allow for any reasonable person with a grasp of the situation to draw anything other than the stated conclusions.

The climate is changing rapidly, it has started doing so in almost perfect synchronicity with industrialisation and the rate of change is proportionate to the volume of industrial activity.

All the stuff I bolded is just supposition. There's been no scientific evidence to conclude any of it (empirically).

What would qualify as scientific evidence by your estimate?

Something beyond "if ... thens."

A better or more reliable measure of ancient (or historical) temps than 'tree rings.'

EDIT: anyway, it's all academic, I strongly support nuke energy, the best way forward even if it turned out I was wrong and all the global warming alarmists turned out to be right.

Then why are you linking to a blog which completely disagrees as evidence?

Where did trump touch tutle?

Ok, so assuming you understand the scientific method the only way to establish causality is to eliminate all but one variable under controlled conditions and systematically alter it to observe the consequences. We would then repeat this using enough individual instances to aggregate the chances of a fluke. Even there there's an implicit element of probablistic reasoning, in hard sciences such as physics the statistics are taken to be implicit, aggregated over samples of millions of particles.


So how exactly would we do that with regard to climate change?

The simple answer is we can't, it's fundamentally impossible because we have a sample size of one and no way of controlling all the variables. But by that logic we also can't prove smoking causes lung disease or over consumption of junk food causes diabetes, which arguably they don't. We can't isolate people in labs to systematically give them cancer or heart disease. They are causative factors, not isolated causes, but they are damned well linked factors despite us technically having a sample size of zero.

What we can do is isolate parts of the picture and examine them both in terms of the underlying principles and observation in practise. When we've done that to enough parts thoroughly we can start to eliminate alternative scenarios until the number of viable scenarios is reduced and that has been done exhaustively over the course of many decades, despite "the establishment" you like to refer to leaning heavily against progress. After all there are vastly better funded vested interests here aligned against climate change science than there are supporting it.

When we do that jigsaw puzzle and the pieces increasingly suggest one particular scenario there comes a point at which there's no logical reason to support an alternative unless you are invested somehow in that alternative. We're past that point.

Climate change is real, it's happening in ways and at a rate not available to nature. It's been doing so in perfect synchronicity with human industrial activity. Denial is logically akin to denying the link between smoking and lung disease, we may not have the exact details and the nuances but we know damned well the link is there and in what direction it's playing out.

This is from Michael Shellenberger, not Forbes, but he’s a respected, scientific, statistically numerate environmentalist (albeit not respected within certain communities - Greenpeace and the Sierra Club (at least in CA) can’t stand him because he’s pro-nuclear). He ran for governor or CA last year as a Democrat (and a rather more progressive one than I would ordinarily have liked) and I regret not voting for him because he hid nuclear-to-solve-global-warming stance.