Very interesting and exhausting exercise Andy, but if I took 100 pictures of a single shark I may know a lot about that shark, but that wouldn’t mean I knew a lot about sharks unless I looked at a broader collection of sharks.
From what I could wade through every single article you linked to derived it’s conclusions from the IPCC and it’s statistics about a consensus from Oreskes. By the IPCC’s own charter they are not a scientific or research organization but a very expensive clearinghouse for research “they” select to publish. IPCC was not created to determine if manmade CO2 global warming was taking place, “but understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.” Since they started with the purpose of working with human induced climate change way back in 1988, it would have been counter to the groups existence to not find that human climate link or they would have been out of business – and all those thousands of bureaucrats would have been looking for work. In their charter they were also to consider adaptation alternatives, but they have done next to nothing on that very important problem – even though they have admitted that it’s very possible that they (or the world) can do nothing to stop any changes.
The IPCC has also been the UN’s big hope for an international tax, so it’s continued to get huge funding to prove the need for a new funding source for the UN. Why else would so many of the IPCC recommendations from Kyoto on down be custom tailored to each nation not based on their emissions, but on what the country could afford to pay? Rather than giving a huge CO2 emitting country like China a pass to keep spewing out CO2, if they were serious about reducing CO2 they would be working on the much more economical idea of helping China bring on a huge number of nuke plants. That would be cheaper overall and would actually cut down CO2 emissions. Since the IPCC has admitted that it may not be possible to stop climate change, no matter what we do, where is their equal commitment to what happens if all their efforts at climate modification don’t work? The US has developed a detailed cost analysis and strategy to deal with the “what if” of climate change, but the IPCC is doing nothing to help the same poor nations that are not being required to make the sacrifices being asked of the US in case their great plan doesn’t work.
I look at it like going cave diving without a backup air supply because I checked my equipment over real good and made sure I had plenty of air. I have no problems with the idea that man is contributing a few percentage points to climate change, though I think it is more localized than global, but I also believe we should be working on a plan in the likely case we can do nothing about climate change. We have the IPCC stating that sea level could rise a half meter a century implying it’s due to global warming, but we have NASA pointing out that only about 1MM of that change would actually be due to global warming and the rest to other natural causes. So that’s another reason we should be working and concentrating on adaptation and mitigation issues at least as passionately as we’re going after CO2 emissions, yet those claiming to want to save the planet are ignoring the real dangers.
Our own local Florida guru with NOAA, Dr. Landsea, resigned from the IPCC because as he stated, “I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound” in response to the cherry picking of data used by IPCC and the unscientific conclusions being presented by IPCC based on incomplete research. That’s without the details yet being made public about what appears to be outright lies being presented as facts by the IPCC, or the IPCC presenting conclusions that are neither tested nor fully supported by the data and certainly not part of the origial scientific paper. As an example of the fights with the IPCC that are taking forever, many scientists complained in 1990 that the IPCC was wildly inaccurate in forecasting a sea level change of 1.4 meters, yet it took until 2001 for the IPCC to revise their estimates down to 9 cm – with NASA only agreeing that 1 mm of that was truly due to climate change. Either way we’re going to lose a lot more ocean front to errosion than to rising sea level, my sea wall is going to need to be replaced at least 4 times before my land is in danger, and why do alarmists like Al Gore feel they need to scare people by claiming global warming is going to raise sea level by 20’?
You can keep ignoring the medieval warming period as long as you like, but a large number of scientists still believe we aren’t anywhere near that kind of climate change.
