Stopping the evolution of scientific research when it's convenient

A favoured way to avoid debate about global warming is to stuff ones ears with cotton, while proclaiming the issue has already been decided upon because there is consensus in the scientific community. Lawrence Solomon, writing for the National Post, has been chronicling the deniers and concludes diversity is in jeopardy.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC [the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.

What of the one claim that we hear over and over again, that 2,000 or 2,500 of the world's top scientists endorse the IPCC position? I asked the IPCC for their names, to gauge their views. "The 2,500 or so scientists you are referring to are reviewers from countries all over the world," the IPCC Secretariat responded. "The list with their names and contacts will be attached to future IPCC publications, which will hopefully be on-line in the second half of 2007.

An IPCC reviewer does not assess the IPCC's comprehensive findings. He might only review one small part of one study that later becomes one small input to the published IPCC report. Far from endorsing the IPCC reports, some reviewers, offended at what they considered a sham review process, have demanded that the IPCC remove their names from the list of reviewers. One even threatened legal action when the IPCC refused.

HT: Paul McKeever, leader of Freedom Party of Ontario.

I, Lisa, multicultural resident of Mitchieville and London, Ontario, atone for my sins. I failed to produce Friday Manflesh last night and I did not alert the proud citizens of Mitchieville to the danger of petri dish meat.