re: #12 Charles

Yep, those dumb scientists. With their dumb peer reviewed papers. Idiots!

Charles, you’re beginning to sound very much like the people you critique. Nobody, ever, should be free from critique because of their occupation.

You also place too much faith in peer review. Peer review does not check the facts, it’s not a recalculation of the science - it is simply a case of looking for glaring fundamental mistakes. Peer review didn’t pick up Hansen’s 1934 “Warmest year in the US” omission because the reviewers (as per normal) are not provided with raw data. Neither will peer review pick up cases of deliberate fraud like Mann’s Hockey Stick Graph.

In fact, in a poll of 3247 scientists funded by the US National Institute of Health, 5% admitted to throwing out data that was relevant but contradictory to their previous research on the topic, 10% admitted to inappropriate citings of work done by others, 15% admitted they had changed a study’s design or results to satisfy a sponsor, or ignored observations because they had a “gut feeling” they were inaccurate.

Furthermore, the same poll revealed that 0.3 percent admitted to faking research data, and 1.4 percent admitted to plagiarism. But lesser violations were far more common, including 4.7 percent who admitted to publishing the same data in two or more publications to beef up their rsums and 13.5 percent who used research designs they knew would not give accurate results.

You can read the full article here and read the results of the poll here

Scientists are not infallible.

Especially relevant is the fact that the models used by the IPCC are not actually scientific models - they are economic GCMs. Basically, the IPCC assumes economic growth rate vs CO2 output and graphs based on historic trends. There’s a vast problem with this and you should know it - have you ever seen anything bigger than a 2-year economic model have any degree of accuracy? And then drop CO2 output on top of that with a relationship to temperature that is not mathematically defined and you have an almighty shemozzle.

This is exactly why the IPCC has proven wrong in the last 10 years with regards to global yearly temperatures - it assumes too much about what it doesn’t know. You can’t graph what you do not understand yet this is exactly what the IPCC is doing.

For example:

The dimensions of the problem can be illustrated by the case of South Africa. In 2000, this country’s GDP per head, converted from nominal values using exchange rates, was only 12% of the U.S. level. By 2050, the A1 marker scenario projects that the per capita income of South Africans on this basis will have reached more than four times the U.S. level in 2000, and about twice the level that the U.S. will have reached in 2050. And by 2100, this scenario projects that the per capita income of South Africans will be approaching twenty times the U.S. level in 2000, and more than four times the U.S. level at the end of the 21st century… . The total output of goods and services in South Africa in 2100, according to these downscaled A1 scenario projections, will be comparable to that of the entire world in 1990.

Because it’s such an indefensible position (with study after study critiquing the IPCC’s modelling) there has been a need to create an illusory consensus and correlation - none of which are justifiable scientific methods. For example, the chapter concluding that humans are the cause of GW was written by less than 55 scientists, most of whom peer review each other’s work and who have worked on joint studies - creating a level of familiarity and bias.