Yes, it is the Chicken Little syndrome. You can scream anything and people are going to believe you. Especially if they are not aware of the facts. And our educational system is set up to cause ignorance. A recent study showed that 51% of Democrats didn't know that the Earth went around the Sun once a year. Think about that. These people vote. We are getting officials elected by an electorate that doesn't even know a basic of life. When I went to school we had in our class a functional idiot. I am serious and not name calling. His I. Q. put him in that category, not name calling. Even he knew the Earth went around the Sun and what the seasons were about when he was in the third grade.

Now we spend all this money on education and what do we get? An ignorant populace. Is this by design? One can only assume YES!

Just like in Chicken Little's case the fear factor is among the ones who are not aware of the facts. So the AGW or Climate Change faction take great advantage of this ignorance factor and change it into a fear factor.

“Hundreds of billion dollars have been wasted with the attempt of imposing a Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory that is not supported by physical world evidences...AGW has been forcefully imposed by means of a barrage of scare stories and indoctrination that begins in the elementary school textbooks.” -- Brazilian Geologist Geraldo Luís Lino.

Then once you get fear, you get CONTROL!

"Fear is the most debilitating of all human emotions. A fearful person will do anything, say anything, accept anything, reject anything, if it makes him feel more secure for his own, his family's or his country's security and safety, whether it actually accomplishes it or not...."

"It works like a charm. A fearful people are the easiest to govern. Their freedom and liberty can be taken away, and they can be convinced to believe that it was done for their own good - to give them security. They can be convinced to give up their liberty - voluntarily."

―Gene E. Franchini, retired Chief Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court

Yes it is a very deadly illusion. So what do you scare them with? An illusion is just another term for a lie.

Joseph Goebbels,

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

It is an old formula. Lie to them, keep them in fear, then control and tax them into submission.

Ha! Ha! Just look at Stephanie. Obviously she doesn't realize that Al Gore has substantial financial interests in fossil fuels. She sounds just like she got out of Climate Science 101 and has take in what her communist professor said without questioning him.

Little do these college kids of today realize that Science is against them.

I'm not going to deny the value of your question, but I will tell you why you yourself can prove that there is no hoax here. You can learn from any school you like the methods to extract and measure carbon dioxide from ice cores. You can learn how to drill into ice that has been frozen, full of air bubbles, AND date the part of the ice that you are working on. Then you can find out how the concentration of CO2 in the air has risen since before we began burning fossil fuels. You can measure, by finding out the emissions of factories and cars and whatnot, how much carbon dioxide is going into the air on any given day in any given location. You can set up your own instruments somewhere, and over the years, see how your readings go up. Basically, you can prove it to yourself that what we burn doesn't just dissolve, it goes into the air and stays in our planet's atmosphere. And you can research CO2 and find out how the gas behaves, how it traps heat.

This is why science is beautiful. You can discover things for yourself, where as in politics, you are told how to think.

As you said, the instruments to show us our weather are fairly new, but temperature and weather have been recorded for hundreds of years. And even the space images have been coming for 50 years, and we can see how much ice we've lost, in places where it was once plentiful. Google Alps glaciers, where mountain people in Germany, Italy, etc... have understood and written about the lay of the land for years. Visit and image of any world glacier you choose in 1900, and then in 2000. See with your own eyes. What you don't understand, spend a few hours researching.

You are a skeptic, so be one. Look for yourself, rather than listening to ANY crowd. But look at MANY sources, not just your usual ones.

**OH, and if you really believe in a power structure behind the president, think of the richest men in the world, and see where they are invested. In FOSSIL FUELS. They are the ones denying what millions of instruments across the world are objectively recording.

For an example of extreme weather this one is difficult to beat: