Whitewavemark2, I don't think anybody, not any reputable scientist anyway, accepts climate change as 'fact'. That's not the way scientists work. That rapid climate change and the associated disruption to global weather patterns is caused by human activity is a theory based on consistency of observation, and a theory holds until observations consistently contradict it. Scientists deal in scepticism and there's a Nobel Prize, not to mention the undying gratitude of very wealthy oil squillionaires, waiting for the scientists who convincingly overturns climate change theory, but none ever has. If any scientist claims otherwise, check who's bankrolling them.
'Facts' are the stock in trade of the populist. 'Fact' says to the uninformed person that what the populist is saying is irrefutable, so don't bother trying. 'Common sense' works the same way, it says 'just accept it without question' or 'don't you worry your pretty little head about it'. Listen to the creationist dismissing evolution as 'just a theory', which is abusing the proper meaning of 'theory'. A theory is not a whim, an idea, a hypothesis, it's an explanation that has proved consistent with observations over a period of time. Evolution has held up for a century and a half. Ah, says, the creationist, but can you prove that evolution is true (I know that creationism is true because it says so in this here book, written thousands of years ago and mangled by generations of translators, and everything in the book is true because the book says it is). You can't prove a theory, you can only amass more and more observational evidence that fits. You can disprove it; a fossilised rabbit in the Devonian fossil record would do it, but no such thing has ever been found. Squillionaire mineral conglomerates like creationists and other biblical literalists; it gives them dominion over nature!
It's funny how populists never get so animated about quantum theory. It's held up perfectly since the last decade of the nineteenth century and, as the late Richard Feynman said, anybody who says they understand it is lying.
