rstuart, while you recommend only considering evidence from 'climate scientists who have spent their scientific lives trying to understand and predict climate', you must include the addendum that they are totally independent of government.

here's another link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming

and another
http://www.tulsabeacon.com/?p=462

or how about this one
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/05/31072-american-scientists-against-agw.html

'100 or so' for, 31072 against!

Austin Powerless: "'100 or so' for, 31072 against!"

I presume this is your idea of a little joke.

The web page you pointed to is somebodies attempt at sarcasm. The point in case you missed it is the list of 100 scientists were not in fact scientists at all. He did that to highlight the fact while the while web page the 31072 figure came from http://www.petitionproject.org/index.html proudly claims:

31,486 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhDs

this is definitely a joke. It should be self evident from that statement alone.

Admittedly it wasn't originally intended to be a joke. It started out as a serious attempt by a sceptical scientist (pharmaceuticals) to demonstrate there was real scepticism among scientists toward AGW. Although the numbers took impressive at first sight (9,000 PhDs!), when you realise the USA graduates 45,000 new PhDs graduate each year it actually begins to look like the reverse. There must be something like 1,000,000 PhD's in the US, and only 9,000 disbelieve in AGW? Errrk.

So to get the numbers up the petition project started allowing "signing" via the web some time ago, and when they did that they stopped verifying the background of the people signing. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine Obviously that figure of 9,000 is inflated, and the 31,486 figure is, errr, a joke?

But you got the joke, right?

All those people who do not believe in global warming, include all those who do, but say man has nothing to do with it, answer this.
Why are the leaders of 100 plus country's at this conference?
Are we to believe they are plotting against the world?,us, just planning to tax us?
What if you are wrong?
What if it is too late already.
What if China and India are heard?
They rightly, say the co2 in the air now came from industrial nations, that they have a right to develop, to continue to put their share up there.
Ludwig's population growth is going to be fixed, in a massive kill off of millions.
Sell our uranium, build nuclear power plants and see pollution drop massively, do nothing and die.

Leaders all over this planet are too blind to see as are the people who vote for them. The scientists follow the money trail made by the blind leaders & the voters. Climate, Law & Order etc is governed by that trail & as soon as some smart operator finds a way to make money out of decency all our woes will be over. Quite simple really.

examinator, just thinking that the thrust of your initial post was about who or what should be “validated” for scientific issues. I had thought that you would progress to your list of nominations.

A bit slow in responding, sorry, am traveling

Rstuart,

According to your criteria, Doherty with a Nobel prize for medicine cannot be taken seriously with regards climate change.

My position is that scientists in technically similar fields have the ability to evaluate and comment on the validity of the data available. Unfortunately, as Doherty rightly says, climate change beliefs are mostly emotionally based. This often leads smart people to "find" the results they were looking for rather than an unbiased evaluation. This also applies to the so called climate experts.

The whole purpose behind the peer review system was to precisely to have the data reviewed by someone that was not emotionally invested in the outcome. As far as climate change is concerned such a person is difficult to find.

This has lead to the proliferation of wild unsubstantiated predictions such as starvation in Aus by 2100 etc.