Call me "General Skeptic". I never give any "statistics" a lot of weight because I've learned that the old saw ".. there's 3 kinds of lies - lies, damned lies, and statistics..." is true more often than not.
Being as old as I am I remember some of the same (younger) scientists telling us in the 60's how our petroleum use is causing the planet to "cool" and was already bringing on a new "ice age". They also claimed we would use ALL the remaining oil by the 1990's.
HA HA HA HA HAAAH....
Bunch of clowns, I say. We couldn't change the planet's environment significantly no matter WHAT we did. We could set every asset on fire and pollute the local areas for a short time, but then nature would clean it up. Look at Valdez (anyone remember that one?). That tanker spill was going to destroy that entire area for 100 years they said. Nope, wrong again. Valdez is a very beautiful area with lots of wildlife. Nature restored itself in a matter of a few years.
Really, HOW do you think us little ants here on this big ball can make ANY real impact? Have you looked out the window of a plane at 38,000 feet? Can you even SEE a smokestack? If you look really hard, you can see a little tiny stream of smoke emptying into this HUGE atmosphere that contains so much volume, that there's really no significant change in the chemical makeup of the atmosphere. Look at big volcanic eruptions and they put out much more pollution than we can and in the past, this planet has had periods of much greater volcanic activity, yet the planet survived and here we are.
I also question the "data" as being only a small subset of the whole. How many places are used for measurement? How do they determine the thickness of the ice? What if the ice is 20% thicker where they measure it, but a mile away (where they did not measure) it's 50% less? Most of what we call "data" is really extrapolated from a smaller set of actual measurements and then published as if they are true measurements...
Scientists are men just like you and I and guess what, they are prone to "stretching the truth" to get the research $$$...
George Carlin on Global Warming...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flpPrRO1Tho