Heyas WW,
You've hit upon a pet peeve of mine: the unfliching acceptance of "studies". People hear "well, the data says..." and they buy off on whatever comes next, without performing ANY critical thought as to what they are listening.
I have no position on "climate change" (the new PC term since "global warming" is a hard sell to people in the north freezing their a$$ off this year). Any meaningful dialog is so politicized by people who really have NO idea on how true scientitic research is conducted, hacks who are grubbing for grant money (on which, in many cases, THEIR compensation is dependent on) and people who are out to make a profit from fear.
If you look at the data, a statistically significant portion is corrupted. Much of the temperature collection that was conducted in the past was done by cooperative farmers and other well meaning, but un-trained citizens. There's no calibration of equipment, no standards for sensor placement, or vetting of collected data. Even the "studies" themselves admit that there are swaths of data missing, and have substituted "computer modeling", for which there has been ZERO verification. Look at hurricane track prediction. Computer models for the SAME data have wildly varying outcomes.
Does this mean that "climate change" is not occuring? No..what it means is NOBODY can know, because the data so f'ed up. I might as well say that global warming is caused by lack of pirates, because hey, it feels warmer, and they are generally fewer pirates than there were in decades past. This year, there were more pirates (tankers off of Africa and such), so that's why we had a cool year.
The late, great Carl Sagan used to teach a class at Cornell in Critical Thought...how to analyze arguments and data to really determine if a argument is valid. Something like that should be required for anyone to open their pie hole.
Nu