Initially, an allegedly general consensus of scientists created the "global warming" alarm. Several years and a billion dollars more research, they discovered that certain areas were experiencing significantly lower temperatures a la Kunming's cold snap, that murdered a lot of our trees, so the alleged group of scientists then changed their story from "global warming" to "climate change".
Do the irresponsible environmental activities of humankind affect climate, of course. But so do erupting volcanoes, massive wildfires, and I have absolutely no idea about the impact of nuclear meltdowns, polar reversals (allegedly our poles reverse polarity every few thousand years). The south pole was allegedly quite green (according to the ZhengHe legends) a few thousand years ago.
The reason climate change is still controversial is we're never sure if the reports are self serving sensationalist decision-based data (data cherry picked to support a biased decision), or data-based decisions.
The moon is allegedly the same age as the earth - 27% the size of the earth (roughly), and yet looks like a comet and asteroid war zone - the earth is significantly larger - why doesn't the surface of the earth even remotely resemble that level of celestial body strikes?
Just lucky?
Obviously, I have way too much free time on my hands to ponder such oddities - the point being - our snapshot of time is a razor thin slice of the earth's history. To take a data sampling of that size and attribute or draw conclusions on climatic conditions is truly brave science and and incredible feat of scientific data extrapolation, similar to the astounding and monumental alleged "gay gene" discovery decades ago - an epic example of decision-based data, aka biasing data to support a pre-disposed pre-biased decision - which is still reverberating as alleged scientific fact, even today.
So - in my equally arrogant opinion - I don't really know what to believe, but I do believe that instead of being parasitic surface dwellers, I'd rather be or strive towards a para-sympathetic surface dweller, until some stochastically improbably event snuffs out life, yet again, and the earth recovers, yet again, with or without us.