There's a good reason to be a climate skeptic, especially if the reported data are unreliable (from the Telegraph). According to this article, there have been systematic adjustments upward of the temperature data from weather stations all around the world.
Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.
He adds,
Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded.
I'm not a global-warming denier, but I certainly am skeptical, and stories like these just add to my skepticism.
As Bjorn Lomborg has written so often, basic air pollution is a much more serious problem in developing economies.