Of course the 97% figure itself is bogus (but not "fake news" a Newspeak phrase meaning in standard English "anti-lefist or anti-globalist propaganda or disinformation from non-state sources") -- it's not 97% of scientists, but 97% of peer-reviewed papers from a somewhat old sample that obviously excluded Russian papers. In Russia climatology is based on solar astrophysics, rather than general circulation models of the earth's atmosphere, and they are expecting global cooling. The survey was also taken before recent empirical work in the Arctic that found that all of the computer models used to justify hobbling the West's economic growth and shift power over energy use and development from the market to the government severely underestimated the change in Arctic albedo, due in part (perhaps almost entirely) to "light absorbing impurities" (i.e. soot).
I quite favor soot as an explanation, since it, unlike greenhouse gasses, explains the asymmetry between the Arctic and Antarctic -- continental Antarctica has been cooling through the entire period AGW polemics was being hawked to justify expanded government, while the Arctic has been warming. Why more soot in the Northern Hemsphere? Coal burning in China and to a lesser extend Russia and India (together with more land-masses for forest fires to contribute to the process). Of course this means that the observed climate change -- Arctic warming, not global warming -- is anthropogenic, but not by the means proposed by Western (possibly excluding Danish) climatologists. And not in a way that justifies suppressing fossil fuel use in general. Of course the fix -- getting the Chinese People's Congress, the Russian Duma and Indian parliament to pass analogues of the American Clean Air Act and the executive in those countries to actually enforce it -- doesn't provide a way of concentrating more power in Washington and Brussels.
I hope this thread will not be dragged down by the usual postings of assertions that human activity cannot change the climate. Plainly it can. I am grateful for that fact, since before the Corps of Engineers built lots of dams and provided the Great Plains with lakes, winters were colder and summers hotter than they now are here in Kansas.
