Unfortunately one of the things that makes this sort of debate hard is that climatologists lie pathologically, and do so as a group over long periods of time. The moment you start citing information or arguments from them (eg. from Wikipedia) you're going to end up citing false claims without realizing it. I realize that may seem like a bold claim, and I too once struggled to accept what was happening. But it is the case.

For example, you're quoting climatologists' own opinions of their accuracy but I already said that they don't follow proper scientific practices, so their claims about their own accuracy are useless. The error bars are enormous. If the measurements were really so accurate we would not have events like this:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700

in which they released a new version of temperature history that changed it so drastically the 21st century went from "no trend" to "strong warming", or

https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...

in which they reveal they can't even decide how hot it was in 2016, and routinely reannounce old temperatures in ways that invalidate world records! If you compare old datasets to new datasets (and I mean for the same years, not in the sense of newly added data) then climatologists just changing their mind about the past has doubled reported warming over time:

https://realclimatescience.com/alterations-to-climate-data/#...

Scientifically this is nonsense. If they develop doubts about the accuracy of old observations they need to widen their error bars. What they actually do is "fix" the data to bring it into line with what they think should be happening and then report tiny error bars, but you aren't allowed to do this if you're doing real science.

Hopefully you will read those links and recalibrate your understanding of the honesty of climate academics.

> Secondly global cooling/new ice age was a pretty fringe theory even in the 60s and 70s.

No it wasn't. Again, I'm afraid climatologists are lying to you on a scale you probably don't believe is plausible, but they are. Pick random papers from those years and read them, or see the analysis below. You'll see discussion of global cooling was standard, as it had to be because the official government temperature datasets at that time showed temperatures in steady decline since the mid 1940s. They no longer show that cooling period because they were edited to remove it. Or do the same exercise for news reports. It wasn't fringe, it was the consensus of the climatological community in that time and widely reported as such.

Wikipedia won't tell you any of this because any attempt to actually correct the record is immediately reverted. There's an enormous collective effort to keep people in the dark about the history of the field. Even just a few days ago I called out an article about beaver dams for lying about global cooling, where the lie is easily detectable just by reading the original paper they mentioned. They claimed it was a pioneer paper that helped change belief away from cooling towards global warming. In fact it reported global cooling as an undisputed fact and didn't talk about man made climate change at all. They lie because they know people won't check, and they think it's for the greater good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38612992

> every single year since 1965 more papers have been written and published predicting global warming than cooling

It wasn't the case. This is yet another example of how climatologists lie to you. The trick here is twofold:

1. Peterson et al arbitrarily ignored a lot of papers.

2. Some papers were classified incorrectly. For example one paper stated that whilst there had been some warming overall since the 1850s, there had also been a long period of cooling in the 20th century, this paper was classed as supporting global warming and not global cooling. But global cooling as a phenomenon was referring to the period since the 1940s. Back then it was widely accepted that the world had warmed as it came out of the little ice age up until the end of WW2, when it then began cooling again.

There's a better analysis here that uses a 3x larger database of papers, and it shows that the media in the 70s weren't simply making up a fictional, non-existent scientific consensus. That would have been extraordinary, after all. There was an overwhelming majority of papers talking about cooling in that period.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/19/the-1970s-global-cool...

Climatologists lie about this because after they changed their mind, they never went through any kind of field-wide rigorous post-mortem process. Papers weren't retracted, careers weren't unmade, procedures weren't changed. There's no way to square their present day claims with the reality that they used to believe the world was cooling in the mid-20th century, when fossil fuels were being burned on a massive scale. So they deny it, cover it up and attack anyone who double checks.