Consequently, whether they are academics determined to hold on to their tenure, journalists doing the usual newspaper beat up, or politicians travelling on the politically correct bandwagon, our opinion leaders flood the community with dire predictions and dodgy evidence.
Every time a beach erodes on some Pacific Island or a jerry-built shack falls into the sea we are told the oceans are rising, despite the fact that citizens of Holland, Venice, and Bangladesh have not noticed a rise of as much as a millimetre.
All is due, we are told, to mankind sinning against the Earth Mother Goddess by burning fossil fuels and creating a runaway greenhouse effect and 99% of scientists say so.
Historically, 99% of scientists "knew" that the Earth was flat, that the Universe revolved around it, that the human heart and not the brain was the place of thinking and reasoning, that malaria was caused by bad air, and that Galileo and Copernicus were fruitcakes. All this has resulted in lots of energy being spent chasing after the wrong rabbit.
Water vapour creates a much stronger greenhouse effect than CO˛ and other greenhouse gases, while as for the latter, all human activity only accounts for 5% of the greenhouse gases released annually in to the atmosphere.
Human industrial and technical activity is far out-produced by farting ruminants - cattle, deer, zebra, wildebeest, kangaroos etc, so closing down coal fired power stations or banning motor vehicles will not amount to much - just a fraction of that damned 5%.
What is glibly overlooked in the debate is the infinite variability in the Earth's climate over millions of years.
Geological history indicates that for millions of years, ice ages have been the normal situation, while the interglacial periods such as we now enjoy are relatively short intervals between them.
It was significantly cooler 10,000 years ago and it might be said correctly that we are still emerging from the last ice age, an event which may well have wiped out the Neanderthals.
20,000 years ago, during the last glacial period, the dry windswept desert basin that is lake Mungo in western NSW was a watery Garden of Eden teeming with fish and wildlife, but there have been constant fluctuations.
Greenland was habitable by Norse settlers for the early part of the Middle Ages before a return to colder conditions.
There was a little ice age in Europe during the Napoleonic Wars at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century when the River Thames froze over during winter at London and fairs were held on the ice. If not greenhouse gas, what else?
What else has happened on a cyclical basis like ice ages?
Well, there have been regular reversals in the Earth's magnetic field at intervals ranging from as little as 5,000 years to as much as several millions of years with an average of around 200,000 years (the last being around 700,000 years ago), all identified by the magnetic signature in cooling materials containing iron, from pottery to lava and basalts, which can be historically or geologically dated.
And the precise location of Earth's magnetic poles vary, the North Pole by an average of 10 metres a year, but latterly 40 metres a year.
Hundreds of years of such movement are recorded in the ship's logs of Royal Navy warships kept by the British Admiralty.
A full reversal can take as long as 5,000 years to complete, with weird effects going on, like the Earth having several different magnetic poles at the same time.
Also, since the 19th century, the intensity of the Earth's magnetic field has decreased by 10%.
Whether this signals that another reversal is imminent is not clear, as this may be a normal variation, but this decrease could still be enough to account for the slight global warming detected over the same period.
Weakening of the Earth's magnetic field results in a decrease in dangerous radiation being directed to the North and South Polar Regions where they produce Auroras, and an increase falling on the rest of the planet - the solar wind and what were popularly known as "cosmic rays".
During a full reversal, it would result in a dramatic increase in radiation-induced cancers, perhaps resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths annually, and kinky effects from the multiple magnetic poles, like dramatic Aurorae being seen from Cairns or Tahiti.
That this increase in radiation can have significant effects on the Earth's weather processes and temperature has been totally overlooked by the global warming movement, which seems to be dominated by masochists driven to atone for imaginary guilt and able to duck and weave to avoid inconvenient facts.
And the mechanisms involved in the role played by the magnetic/radiation duo will undoubtedly be established by accident during research directed at something else, as the scientific establishment, like petrol sniffers on a high, are too busy inhaling greenhouse gases to dream of being politically incorrect enough to look elsewhere.
Remember that Alternate Universe got there first.