This is a serious study of how the climate is changing based on the best available estimates of past global and sea surface temperatures. There is no doubt that the Earth's climate is warming. The analysis I will present in this book strongly suggests that CO2 is partially responsible for this warming. However, the global temperature record does not support the "climate catastrophe" predictions you will hear from the "consensus of scientists". The data do support the conclusion that global temperatures are going to remain fairly stable for the next 50 years. The "global warming" due to CO2 will be offset by a downward trend in temperatures caused by natural cyclic variations in climate.The estimated global temperature data, such as that maintained by the UK Met Office in conjunction with the Hadley Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, is the only actual hard evidence we have that the Earth's climate is changing. These data do not provide any evidence about what is causing the climate to change, but they do provide evidence about how the climate is changing. I am going to use standard data analysis tools to coerce that data into giving up its secrets about how the climate is changing.This study provides several really significant results. Good news for the planet and its inhabitants. Bad news for the politicians and "consensus of scientists" who believe that greenhouse gases, CO2 in particular, will soon cause a "climate catastrophe" of biblical proportions. These predictions are based upon an erroneous interpretation of the global temperature record that even a lay person unskilled in technical matters will be able to understand.This book is composed of two main parts. In the first part, a new model of climate change based on actual measured global temperature data is developed and validated. In the second part, this data based model's predictions of future temperatures are compared with the predictions produced by the IPCC computer simulations and endorsed by the "consensus of scientists". I will show that the IPCC predictions are entirely incompatible with the measured temperature data. I will show that, in order to make their computer simulations appear to match recent global temperatures on Earth, the IPCC has had to inflate the warming effect of CO2 by a factor of 5X. And it is this 5X multiplication of the effect of CO2 that is responsible for the IPCC's "climate catastrophe" predictions. The actual climate data refute the assertion that such a "catastrophe" is immanent.