Global warming is a subject of much interest, both politically and socially. There are regular summits on the topic attended by world leaders from both developing and industrialised nations, the most recent of which was held in Paris. During these meetings intense negotiations take place that will inevitably have an effect on people’s everyday lives, dictating the kind of cars we drive, where we shop and how we use energy around the home, but is this personal policing really necessary?

It seems strange that given the enormity of global warming’s supposed impact, its propagandists spend more time discussing the emotive issues involved, like lost polar bear habitat and coastal erosion, than they do investigating the genuine science. Sceptics point out that predictions made even twenty years ago, have yet to be realised and that has led many to doubt whether the earth is actually heating up at all. So, aside from the scaremongering and opinion, which scientifically proven facts can be referred to in order to throw light on the subject?

The arguments around global warming have been raging for such a considerable amount of time that we are now in a position to assess the earliest predictions. On closer inspection it’s clear that many of the events which were forecast have not taken place, and, in fact, some have followed an entirely different path.

The most famous of these doom laden forecasts was made in 2007 by former US Vice-President Al Gore. In a speech he made when accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, Mr Gore said 'The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff’ and asserted it would have vanished by 2014. However, information from an agency which is co-funded by NASA, the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre, reveals that in 2014 5.62 million square meters of ice cover was still visible, an increase of around 50% since 2012.

In March 2013 a report by writer and scientist, Dr David Whitehouse, was published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, suggesting that in the preceding 17 years the temperature of the earth had remained for the most part fixed. He concluded that this stability was at odds with the current model of predicted climate change, explaining that: “The standstill is a reality and is not the result of cherry-picking start and end points. Its commencement can be seen clearly in the data, and it continues to this day.”

Phil Jones worked at the University of East Anglia as Director of their Climate Research Unit (CRU). In 2009 a series of leaked emails between him and three other climatologists appeared to suggest global warming was nothing but a conspiracy. Indeed, between 1945 and 1975 there was a downward trend in temperatures, which resulted in some newspapers, like the LA Times on 15 January 1970, even predicting the rise of a new ice age. When the eventual increase came, it only lasted another 22 years until 1997, which would not indicate a swing towards warming on the scale some would have us believe.

Last year Patrick Moore the Canadian ecologist and former member of environmental campaign group, Greenpeace, argued that: “There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years.” He went on to point out that 5 million years ago, way before the existence of even the earliest humans, carbon dioxide levels were 10 times higher than they are currently.

Back in 1998, 31,000 US scientists from many different states all signed a petition to reject the global warming agreement which was negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, during 1997. The men and women, many of whom have PhD level qualifications rejected the idea that human behaviour was causing higher temperatures. In a separate move, 1000 other individual scientists from across the globe lent their support to a study which publicly challenged the accepted wisdom of global warming. The Climate Depot Special Report was finished in 2010 and consisted of 321 pages. The authors highlight their concerns regarding ‘fudged data’, ‘a barrage of scare stories’ and the ‘dysfunctional nature of the climate sciences’, illustrating that in the scientific community there is very little consensus on the issue.

Many of the politicians, writers and cultural commentators who have made predictions about the impact of climate change have based their assertions on data which is now considered flawed. These models of global warming are almost all based on guess work and many, especially those foretelling of large changes, have been shown to be inaccurate.

Dr Roy Spencer has a PhD in meteorology and has worked at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre as a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies, now his work with them is continuing with a role as a US Science Team Leader. However, when asked about the climate models currently in use, he claims that the policies they led to ‘have failed miserably’. This was after he had investigated 90 climate models and matched them up with more precise satellite temperature data. When the best models we have of climate change are fundamentally flawed, it follows that the predictions we make using them will also be inaccurate.

There is more than enough uncertainty about the existence of man-made global warming to allow us to doubt it, or at the very least be sure it is not as serious as we've been led to believe. Many people feel the figures on climate change have been massaged by various governmental and commercial agencies for political or financial gain. There are powerful forces behind environmental causes, but do a little digging and the truth quickly becomes clear.