That is the equivalent of the global warming scenario. We observe for a few decades and then make pronouncements on cyclical trends that may be hundreds of thousands of years old.

As to decades and centuries long data, they do exist and are excellently discussed in a book, “Global Warming every 1500 years”(or something close to that title), which uses thousands of years of ice core and tree ring data to lay out a very strong, scientifically grounded argument that we do indeed have global warming, but it is part of a 1500 hundred year natural climate cycle, where human activities have negligible, if any, impact.

Thank you for your comments. I believe that environmental effects can be observed and we learn more about how man and nature interact all the time.

My analogy using human maladies was just to show that research and progress are always being made in all areas of science. I understand the methods are quite different, but the inquisitive minds and the technological advances are consistent.

I am not stating that the global warming theory is a sure bet … far from it. My only point is that the ice age predictions being wrong does not necessitate that the current ideas are wrong as well.

Global warming isn’t science like that; it’s a broad-scale long-distance forecast that would involve decades and centuries of accurate data to accurately predict results… when we only have a few decades of data available and the data we have is insufficient to rule out a large varieties of plausible ideas that the majority of global warming folk have… ruled out.

Now what I just wrote here reads like a lame scientist that cannot write… but I believe it is a reasonable approach.