Right on queue bigmal, I was expecting the 'network', if not the 'greenhouse mafia', to join in the fray.

Come up with a better solution to disseminating the science and you will have my ears ... otherwise, you and your cohorts are just windbags full of CH4 contributing to GHG emissions.

Personally, I look at the scientific papers - you ... well, you just haven't a clue.

As for Snowman, what a joke ... he has even added his name as a PhD scientist in the letter to the UN ... delusions of grandeur!

So it's all some sort of elaborate evil political conspiracy after all?

How fortunate that the (completely natural?) melting of the Arctic ice and 10,000 years of Siberian permafrost came along at just the right time to fool so many of us.

If nothing was happening to explain those sorts of events, some people would be demanding an explanation and making claims of top level cover-ups. They would probably be dismissed as conspiracists or attention seekers.

When it happens the other way round, others raise their voices in doubt.

Maybe some things don't need complex explanations to make simple sense.

As Dylan said - "you don't need a Weather Man to know which way the wind blows".

With your obvious lack of objectivity and understanding as to what real professional domains do, you would be wasting your time reading anything scientific..or perhaps thats why the standards are so low.

There may be nothing wrong with the theoretical processes involved with the IPCC, so why do they need to lie and obfuscate around the truth.

Why do they need to make such blatantly misleading statements if the science underneath is so good..as you imply and try to defend.

Here's an idea, lets agree that the weight of opinion has swung to the side of "climate change is bad and, shucks, it's a' happenin folks", and like the adaptable folk we are consider this:

1. Economically viable oil supplies will run out, sooner or later.

2. Shut up already about oil shale and oil sands - they only become viable when oil is prohibitively expensive, ooh, like soon.

3. Shut up about bio-diesel and ethanol - they are expensive, the production takes up land better used for food, and until they make it commercially out of garbage not food, it aint a reasonable alternative. Oh, and I like to be able to afford food AND use transport. They shouldn't be mutually exclusive.

4. Other countries are getting the jump on us in the green/non-fossil oil dependent energy stakes (Europe with wind - check out those Scandinavian folks, America and China with solar, Brazil with biofuels - and yes I know they cut down the Amazon for a lot of that, see my third point).

5. We are getting left behind in the future energy technology stakes.

6. Ohh...yes, we are getting left behind because we are not investing enough in new/alternative technologies. Did I say that already?

The IPA, I mean the AEF, needs to start seeing the business advantages in getting on the alternative energy bandwagon now. Not because it saves the whales and the red parrot (although they are cute and they taste even better), but because there is an economic benefit to all this change.

Disruptive economic events like this one (and it will be disruptive) produce winners and losers. We need to get to making cars and not buggy whips (and yes I know motor vehicles are not the best image when discussing climate change but I hope the analogy is clear).

The fact that the climate change issue has descended into a bar room brawl indicates that the large volume solid science is being overwhelmed by an even larger volume of shoddy science and spin. Science's credibility is being destroyed by spin artists and hidden agendas.

First, there were much more than 62 reviewers for chapter 9. McLean and Harris have only counted the reviewers of the second order draft and ignored the more numerous comments on the first order draft.

Second, they mislead by giving the impression that 60% of the reviewers disagreed with the IPCC, but half of the comments (572 of them!) were made by Vincent Gray, with 97% of them rejected. Only 16% of the comments by other reviewers were rejected. Gray was also responsible for most the rejected comments on the first order draft. Examples of Gray's rejected comments include:

Insert after "to" "the utterly ridiculous assumption of"

Insert after "Bayesian" "(or super-guesswork)"

Insret before "Calibrated" "Bogus"

Third, as Richard Littlemore points out, it is pretty dodgy for the NRSP to complain about "vested interest" when their own vested interest is so blatant. But how did McLean and Harris come up with their claim that 55 of the reviewers had "serious vested interest"? McLean gives details in a piece published by the SPPI (an oil industry funded think tank that apparently does not count as a vested interested to McLean). Scientists were declared to have a vested interest if they were an IPCC author, or an IPCC author of a previous assessment, or if any of their work was cited by the report, or if they worked for a government, or if they work for an organization that gets government funding, or if they have a "possible commercial vested interest in the claim of man-made warming". Basically that leaves amateurs like Gray and McKitrick. In one of his comments Gray asked them to cite one of his Energy and Environment papers. Fortunately it was rejected, or he would have been ruled out as well.