The hallmark of good science is successful prediction, in advance, of the outcomes of experiments and observations yet to be made. The hypothesis, that human activities are warming the Earth, does precisely that.
In 1990, the first report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that “business as usual” would “result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1°C above the present value by 2025”. Data from Our World in Data shows that the temperature in 2025 was 0.91°C above the 1985-1995 average.
A more shocking example is that scientists working for oil-major, Exxon, predicted in 1982 that global temperatures would rise by 1.1 °C between 1980 and 2025. Forty-three years after the predictions were made, that’s exactly what was seen (2025 was 1.08 °C above the 1975-1985 average). To their shame, Exxon (and then ExxonMobil) supressed this clear and accurate understanding of climate change until it was uncovered by journalists in 2015.
In contrast, alternate explanations of climate change all fail the test of making successful predictions. For example, a paper written in 1997 successfully linked the durations of previous sunspot cycles to warming. However, between 1997 and 2019, there were two further sunspot cycles and the durations of these completely failed to correctly predict global temperatures. The average temperature in 1996-2008 was 1.2 °C warmer than the sunspot-prediction and, for 2018-2019, temperatures were 0.8 °C warmer than predicted. Utterly useless!
Conventional climate science gets the right answers. Alternative explanations for climate change do not.
