But surely one person's "shoddy science" is the scientist-responsible's firmly held belief? I read enough to know that among climatologists worldwide there is a lot of debate about the precise mechanisms responsible for global warming, but the significant majority of these scientists agree that humans have caused major climate change. I'll take the liberty of quoting directly from the aforementioned PDF:
In the journal Science in 2004, Oreskes published the results of a survey of 928 papers on climate change published in peer-reviewed journals between 1993 and 2003. She found that three-quarters of the papers either explicitly or implicitly accepted the view expressed in the IPCC 2001 report that human activities have had a major impact on climate change in the last 50 years, and none rejected it. [Random bold highlighting by yours truly.]
In today's climate (har-dee-har) everyone's an expert, and this is the real problem. Just as it is senseless to ask a non-lawyer's opinion on Hammersmith & Fulham LBC v Monk (1992), it is senseless to ask the opinion of a non-climatologist on the IPCC. Therefore I am left with little choice but to accept climatologists' beliefs, and it would be arrogant in the extreme for me to say, "IMHO, Global Warming is a part of the normal Earth climate cycle" (to quote the unfortunate Quagmire).
It's time to have some basic respect for people who spend their working lives trying to understand something.
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