My brother, who has at least an engineer’s scientific literacy and claims to have studied the subject in depth, insists fiercely that anthropogenic climate change is not, after all, settled science, because:
Satellite and ocean-probe measurements of Earth’s surface temperature show no significant rise over the past 20 years. If terrestrial weather stations do show such a rise, it is probably because they have been gradually enveloped by the heat-sinks of growing metropolitan areas.
There is more than one model of the “carbon cycle,” of the climatic effects of increasing the level of CO2 in the air; some of these show an actual cooling effect – and, to date, no computer model of climate change has ever proven accurate enough to be useful – so, we have no ground to prefer any over any other.
Of course the ice caps are shrinking, we’re still getting out of the last Ice Age.
Any apparent warming is likely as not cause by increased solar activity.
Skeptical Science curates the scientific debunking of those already old chestnuts.
The myth of no warming since 1998 was based on the satellite record estimates of the temperature of the atmosphere. However, as discussed in the video below by Peter Sinclair, even that argument is no longer accurate. The satellites show warming since 1998 too.
While there are uncertainties with climate models, they successfully reproduce the past and have made predictions that have been subsequently confirmed by observations.
Arctic sea ice has been retreating over the past 30 years. The rate of retreat is accelerating and in fact is exceeding most models’ forecasts.
In the last 35 years of global warming, the sun has shown a slight cooling trend. Sun and climate have been going in opposite directions.
The OP’s brother seems to be clinging on to some denialist arguments from back in the early 2000’s that weren’t very persuasive even then, and now have been thoroughly discredited. Check out this NASA page on surface temperature rise, for example.
Note that nobody on the pro-science side is trying to deny that climate is complicated or that climate models can only predict overall probabilities over periods of decades, not specific events or precise short-term timeframes. But the current level of uncertainty is nowhere near high enough to embrace the OP’s brother’s delusionally optimistic hypotheses.
At this point, trying to pretend that it’s scientifically plausible that the whole problem of global warming might just be a non-issue is sillier—and far more dangerous in the long run—than President Trump’s prediction that COVID-19 would just go away in the warm summer weather.
Your brother is an anti-science idiot. Engineers aren’t climate scientists.
Tell him he’s helping to catastrophically change the climate to make it less compatible with human life due to his misunderstanding of the science and his hubris to think that his opinion is worth more than the research and effort of thousands of climate scientist. His misinformed opinions will lead to starvation, the destruction of coastal areas, and the extinction of untold numbers of species. His arguments were debunked years ago (and again, here above), and even oil companies aren’t trying to push those tired old lies.
Ask him if he would accept the opinion of a climate scientist when specing a bridge, a circuit, a car engine, or a petroleum cracking method (depending on what kind of engineer he is).