The IPCC uses 40 climate models, averaged, to reach their conclusions. None of these 40 models can accurately predict the past, much less predict the future. So basically the IPCC uses the formula average of 40 wrong models = right answer. That just fails on its face.

Then we consider the fact that for the past 10+ years the IPCC's predictions have been completely wrong, despite CO2 emissions increasing faster than its "worst case" scenario.

We also consider we have accurate temperature measurements only for the last 30 years from satellites (since 1979). Ground-based measurements have massive amounts of urban-growth bias and error ranges that clearly outstrip the 0.6 degrees C of warming recorded using such methods over the last 130 years. Even if these measurements were accurate, 130 years, while it seems long to humans, is less than a blink of the eye in terms of climate and geologic time.

I don't know whether global warming is happening or not. What I do know is the people who claim to know for certain what the temperature will be in 2100 are full of shit. Try getting what the temperature will be next week right first.

As I said earlier my post was only a rebuttal to the claim that very few real scientists support anthropogenic climate change, I believe that many real scientists do think anthropogenic climate change is happening and have been posting to say that this is the case. Those are not nations that are signing the report, its the national academies of those nations - things like the Royal Society. Scientific organizations - not governments.

You're arguing against me on a subject I'm not arguing for in is topic. I never claimed that consensus made it true, I'm claiming that the large amount of support in the scientific establishment for anthropogenic climate change proves that very many real scientists do believe it to be happening.

I honestly don't want to be drawn into a debate on climate change because I know that I would be woefully under prepared - I do not have an extensive knowledge of the subject and as such am willing to leave it to people who have a better understanding of it to debate it.


Just to summarise - this entire post train came from me arguing against this post;

"Very few "real" scientists will make the claim that increases in man made CO2 are leading to long term cataclysmic changes to the climate based on a short term warming trend and unproven climate models."

That's the only thing I was arguing against - not on the claim of whether it is happening or not.

Wait, you have to give your name if you are peer reviewing something to do with global warming?

That's like basically saying your going to blacklist someone if they disagree with you. There is a reason these things stay anonymous.

So you only posted to make a tangential point about an issue you openly claim to know very little about? 

Meanwhile the body you point to for your example of how there is scientific consensus has openly debased the meaning of science with their review process and you see nothing wrong with it? Do you actually believe the IPCC is deserving or requiring of a special peer review process where the people who review a paper need to be scrutinized but the people who are picked by the IPCC to contribute do not need scrutiny...and don't even have to put their name on their work during that process? 

Furthermore, do you see nothing wrong with the fact that what the IPCC calls its group of "top scientists from around the world" are not actually held to any standards that would be indicative of such a group?  And that on at least one occasion "rent-a-scientists" (for lack of a better term) have been used to fill in when a true expert of renown in his field was willing and able to handle the duties but turned away so that those with nearly zero knowledge of the field could have a go at it?

If you can honestly say none of that even phases you then you will have made a better case for AGW being a religion than I ever could. Of course not everything IPCC is terrible and I'm not even suggesting they should be ignored (although they should follow normal peer-review standards at a bare minimum).  What I am doing, however,  is making the point that placing your faith blindly in a single organization, particularly one that is so biased, is willful ignorance.  You don't know why you believe what you do...you just do and you can always point to the trusty IPCC who can know why you believe the way you do ....for you.  This concept is so prepostrous to me....but maybe I'm the abnormal one for thinking that an uninformed opinion is worth even less than the effort you put into it.  And even then I'm at a loss as to why a one-legged man would enter an ass-kicking contest to begin with.....but I digress....

Finally, what HappySquirrel said is absolutely true.  There is absolutely nowhere near a consensus saying that AGW is going to cause catastrophic warming.  There is still significant debate about whether it is even anthropogenic but beyond that there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the debate about the severity of any potential impacts is about as far removed from the notion of "settled" as it possibly can be. We could debate till we're blue in the face about a consensus of mild anthropogenic warming (there really is no authority on the idea of a consensus...mostly because it isn't a real metric)....but when you qualify it as "catastrophic" you're just plain wrong to think there is a consensus.

@Kasz,

It's specifically to do with the IPCC review process.

What Happy said is blatantly not true. Many 'real' scientists do believe in anthropogenic climate change and that it will have a catastrophic impact.

I don't see how you can claim that societies such as the Royal Society, which have released statements strongly in support of the findings of the IPCC, do not consist of real scientists. Real scientists do believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.

Also I do kind of agree that consensus is a touchy word when used in cases where there is still significant debate and perhaps I shouldn't have used it, how about 'the majority scientific opinion is that anthropogenic climate change is occurring'?

If the peer review process has been twisted by the IPCC it is a bad thing, can you please provide a source other than Prof. Reiter for it though? As well as the top scientists thing?



Also yes I am arguing a point that is not directly related to the OP. I don't see whats wrong with that? Also I don't know a huge amount about the mechanics of climate change which is why I would find it difficult to debate it, I do know that plenty of scientists do have the same opinion as voiced by the IPCC. I only argue about things that I actually know enough about =P.

Talk to geologists, geophysicists, solar physicists or any expert in a hard science related to climate that is dependant of quantifiable evidence (where hand-waving and computer models don’t cut it) and you will find almost no support for man-made global warming leading to catastrophic outcomes.

The problem with "Scientific Organizations" is that science doesn’t happen in committee, so these bodies exist to serve a purpose outside of creating or promoting good science. There have been scientists who were upset by groups like the IPCC because their work was misrepresented to produce misleading and unsupported conclusions, and other scientists who can’t get their peer reviewed and published paper included in their report because it acts as evidence against the conclusions the IPCC wants to make; and being that a large part of science is making a dispassionate evaluation of your hypothesis looking for evidence of whether it is (or is not) supported, ignoring contrary evidence is not scientific.

I personally know nothing about the Royal Society, but many so-called scientific bodies have no scientists in decision making positions. The IPCC (for example) decides what is to be included in their summary for policy makers by bureaucrats, and there are no scientists involved in writing the summary either. On top of that, very few of the scientists who end up working for these organizations has neither the education or experience to speak out authoritatively on subjects like Global Warming; a board made up of 5 experts in fields unrelated to climate is not any more qualified than 5 layman to make conclusive claims about anything. 

That's not strictly true. I'm a geologist and I believe there is certainly evidence to suggest that man-made global warming is a possibility. In my department at university many lectures/professors do believe that human induced climate change is real, however, there are many others who do not. I think the biggest common misconception amongst people in regard to scientists in this issue is people thinking we claim to KNOW what will happen. Most scientists I know (and my own opion) acknowledge that there is strong evidence to suggest a correlation between greenhouse gases and temperatures and that therefore there is a real possibility that human emissions will induce warming. The big question which non of us know the answer to is how big the effect will be due to endless feedback mechanisms which we cannot predict. It could range from an inconsequential increase up to several degrees (obviously the media only report the worse case predictions).

I completely agree with you about certain "Scientific Organizations" where politics plays a far bigger role than actual science.

EDIT: Reading through your post again I think I misunderstood your point of view slightly. As you say, there are probably not a great many scientists who believe in truly catastrophic outcomes but there are certainly those who believe that rather severe outcomes are a possibility. Again that word 'possibility' is probably the most important in this whole debate as no one can accurately predict what will/won't happen.

No one can stop the squirrel tag team beat down

I hate off topic so much.

But anyway for lulz - http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/6287/The-Age-Of-Stupid-2009-Directed-By-Franny-Armstrong-McLibel

Happy covered the point about consensus fairly well so I'll leave it as is for now since addressing your other comment will somewhat address this as well.

As for sources...well for the full tour you can go look at the review comments which are available online (I'll discuss some below).  So that should cover the issue about reviewers being denied anonymity while those accepting/rejecting comments are not named as you can see it directly for yourself.

As for the lack of criteria, Appendix A to the Princinples Governing IPCC Work.  Section 4.2.2:

4.2.2  Selection of Lead Authors
 
Coordinating Lead Authors and Lead Authors are selected by the relevant Working Group/Task Force Bureau,
under general guidance and review provided by the Session of the Working Group or, in case of reports prepared
by the Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, the Panel, from those experts cited in the lists
provided by governments and participating organisations, and other experts as appropriate, known through their
publications and works. The composition of the group of Coordinating Lead Authors and Lead Authors for a
section or chapter of a Report shall reflect the need to aim for a range of views, expertise and geographical
representation (ensuring appropriate representation of experts from developing and developed countries and
countries with economies in transition). There should be at least one and normally two or more from developing
countries. The Coordinating Lead Authors and Lead Authors selected by  the Working Group/Task Force Bureau
may enlist other experts as Contributing Authors to assist with the work.
 
At the earliest opportunity, the IPCC Secretariat should inform all governments and participating organisations who the
Coordinating Lead Authors and Lead Authors are for different chapters and indicate the general content area that the person
will contribute to the chapter.

Thats the entire section.  They devote specific effort to making sure that undeveloped countries get a say about who Lead Authors will be, but they put zero language into specifying (ie specifics) how one who wishes to participate as a lead author demonstrate's their competence as a "top scientist" although the selection is reviewed (ie general guidance)...but again without specific criteria.    The selection process is thus clearly delegated below the procedures policy level here and as such the IPCC no longer has control or reasonable certainty as to the qualifications of its "experts".  As such they have no basis for which to make the claim of "top scientists" and arguably they could be questioned on referring to them as scientists at all since the criteria for what makes an expert is also not defined.

Driving more to the heart of the issue, about how representative the IPCC truly is (or isn't), here is an analysis done on the review process of the SOD of AR4.  The part I think is most noteworthy is as follows:

Part 6 - On the Attribution of Climate Change

Chapter 9 is the single most important chapter of the entire report because it is where the IPCC
states, "it is very highly likely that greenhouse gas forcing has been the dominant cause of the
observed global warming over the last 50 years".

The IPCC leads us to believe that this statement is supported by a large number of reviewers.  We
often   hear   reference   to   2,500   scientists   supporting   the   IPCC's   findings   but   that   number
supposedly includes about 1,500 acting as chapter editors.  Earlier it was shown that a total of 308
reviewers, individuals or government appointees, reviewed parts of the WG I report but even that
figure is far higher than the number of reviewers for chapter 9.

In fact only 62 reviewers commented on this chapter. Nineteen reviewers made just 1 comment
and 18 made between 2 and 5 comments, and that total of 37 reviewers is 60% of the total. Just
10 reviewers made more  than 20 comments  for  this,   the most   important  chapter of  the entire
report, and yet some of these were typographical errors that were missed by many reviewers.

They go on to point out that 7 of the 62 were also authors of same chapter and were incidentally all authors or co-authors of cited papers used within the chapter.  Another 19 of those reviewers were those whose papers were also cited, another 5 were authors of other chapters in the report, etc....  In total out of the 1158 comments made on the chapter just shy of half (572 or 49.4%) came from one individual, while comparatively representives of the US Government made only 113 comments.  It is worthy of note that those 572 comments made by the single reviewer were questioning the findings of the chapter.  But perhaps most staggering is that only 5 of those reviewers commenting on Chapter 9 actually endorsed it, with another 5 endorsing specific sections of it.

The stats given by the analysis for chapters other than 9 are that some 308 individual reviewers participated (once duplicates, such as those due to listing comments for both the individual as well as the government they represent, are removed).  Of those 308, some 214 reviewers commented on 2 chapters or less.   And only 5 reviewers, specifically 3 individual revewers and 2 government reviewers, commented on all chapters, while only 49 of the 308 reviewers had more than 50 comments in total (most comments are 2 to 3 sentences or less).  This is far from the impression given of "thousands of top scientist" that are supposedly pouring over and debating material maticulously.  Particularly when the key finding is only reviewed by a small fraction of those reviewers.

If we are to really dig in we can find that some of the rejections to comments egregiously break protocol:

REV: Most of the evidence suggests the opposite—increased heating at the surface relative
to the troposphere. There is some suggestion that the trends in the troposphere may be
underestimated (Sherwood et al.) but the corrections have not been made and thus the
ultimate outcome is unknown.
RES:Rejected. We are working with the CCSP report.

The problem here?  The CCSP report was not peer reviewed and should not be used as citation in a peer review process.  Even if it were used a more specific citation would be in order.  In fact they reference the CCSP report several times in their comments to reviewers.

To go to your specific example of the British Royal Society for a moment, I would say it is actually a great example of how over-representation of the position is actually accomplished.  That is to say that an organization's top level can make a statement on behalf of its members ....even though they may not actually agree.  The British Royal Society is of course necessarily influenced by politics because over 2/3rds of its funding comes from parliamentary grants, as a result individual member's voices should be given weight, not the society as a whole.  Similar proportions are true for similar societies all over the world.  Just to be clear I'm taking issue with proclamations that are in the form of a press release and are not substantively driven documents.  Where it concerns literature for peer-review I think weight should always be given until the individual(s) are found to be untrustworthy on an individual level and not based on a possibility of political bias of their affiliations because there points either will or will not have merit...regardless of any bias that exists.  In short merit driven discussion by individuals is the foundation of science and should be given weight, while proclaimation based narrative of a few who claim to speak for the many is the antithesis of science and should be doubted, questioned, and ultimately given very little weight.