Science is not about consensus. If it were, the earth would be flat because that was the "consensus" way back and everyone was being ridiculed and killed for thinking otherwise. Those stupid flat deniers... Then facts got in the way. Prove it. Then, prove to me that decimating the global economy is the best way to "fight" it.
No, we have known the Earth was round since the ancient Greeks. Even in the darkest Dark Ages, educated people were aware that the Earth was round.
Anyway, science is about testing hypotheses via experiments. When hypotheses are rigorously tested by various experimental means and by different people all arriving at similar results, a consensus develops. This is why we accept certain theories as scientific 'fact', like gravity, the roundness of the Earth, and these facts:
1) greenhouse gases trap heat in the lower atmosphere (not the upper);
2) they have been reliably measured in tiny bubbles trapped in ice cores going back at least 800,000+ years;
3) modern measurements show CO2 increasing in the atmosphere for decades, now surpassing levels seen for 800,000+ years;
4) We would therefore expect average global temperatures to be rising, and indeed they are based on multiple kinds of measurements.
5) We would further expect that warming caused by greenhouse gases would be limited to the *lower* atmosphere, which is exactly what we see. The upper atmosphere has actually been cooling as more heat is trapped below. This was demonstrated in 1995, and provides very solid proof that orbital/solar changes are not causing rising temperatures, greenhouse gases are.
All of this has been demonstrated through repeated experimentation by the brightest scientists around the world for decades. There is no scientific controversy. The only controversy is about what specific effects will be, when, and where. That is too hard to say with any certainty, *though models are getting better.
