http://www.pbs.org/w...ate/singer.html
You're not saying they're dishonest, are you?
I'm not saying that they're dishonest at all. No. No one has been caught falsifying data. No one has been caught falsifying calculations. But inevitably, when you have a particular point of view--(and this works both ways--you tend to suppress facts or data that disagree with your point of view, and you tend to favor data, observations that support your point of view. You become selective in the way you present your observations.
Take an example. Take the UN Science Advisory Group, the IPCC. In their report--which is a very good report, by the way...which is close to 600 pages without an index, so no one really reads it except dedicated people like me--there's a five-page summary of the report that everyone reads, including politicians and the media. And if you look through the summary, you will find no mention of the fact that the weather satellite observations of the last twenty years show no global warming. In fact, a slight cooling. In fact, you will not even find satellites mentioned in the summary.
Now, why is that? These are the only global observations we have. These are the best observations we have. They cover the whole globe. The surface observations don't cover the whole globe. They leave out large chunks of the globe. They don't cover the oceans very well, which is 70 percent of the globe. So you see, the summary uses data selectively, or at least it suppresses data that are inconvenient, that disagree with the paradigm, with what they're trying to prove. This happens often, unfortunately.
Now, you'll also notice that people who are skeptical about global warming generally do not have government support for their work. They don't have to write proposals to government agencies to get money. They tend to be people who have other sources of income. They might even be retired and live on pensions, or they might [have] other sources of income that do not depend on writing research proposals to federal agencies. And if you look at research proposals to federal agencies, you will find that people who write a proposal saying, "I'm going to do research to show that global warming is not a real threat"...they're not likely to get funding from any of the government agencies.
Do you think, then, this is no longer operating as "normal" science, that there's some kind of pathological mechanism here?
I think climate science is on its way to becoming pathological, to becoming abnormal in the sense that it is being guided by the money that's being made available to people. I don't blame people for accepting money. And the people who take the money and do research, by and large, are doing very competent research. [But] you'll find them very careful not to speak out against the global warming "threat"--(I'm putting "threat" in quotes, of course. And you'll find also that when they do speak out, as many of them do, they suffer consequences. They lose support. And I can give you examples of that. Or they have other consequences that are equally disagreeable. And if you're a young professor at a university and want to get tenure, or if you want to get a permanent academic position, you must do published research. And to do published research, you must write proposals to get money to do the research. So you're locked into a vicious spiral here. You have to go along with the current wisdom that global warming is a threat. Otherwise, you're not going to get the job that you want.
Anything else? . . .
Let me say something about this idea of scientific consensus. Well, you really shouldn't go by numbers. I think it's significant to straighten out misconceptions. One misconception is that 2,500 IPCC scientists agree that global warming is coming, and it's going to be two degrees Centigrade by the year 2100. That's just not so. In the first place, if you count the names in the IPCC report, it's less than 2,000. If you count the number of climate scientists, it's about 100. If you then ask how many of them agree, the answer is: You can't tell because there was never a poll taken. These scientists actually worked on the report. They agree with the report, obviously, in particular with the chapter that they wrote. They do not necessarily agree with the summary, because the summary was written by a different group, a handful of government scientists who had a particular point of view, and they extracted from the report those facts that tended to support their point of view.
For example, they came up with a conclusion--the only conclusion of this 1996 report--that there's a discernible human influence on climate. I don't know what that means. Nobody really knows what that means. On the one hand, it's easy to agree with a statement "a discernible human influence on global climate." Sure, why not? Nights are getting warmer. Maybe that's it. On the other hand, it certainly does not mean--as politicians think it does--it does not mean that the climate models have been validated, that there's going to be a major warming in the next century. It does not mean that. And they don't say that. They just imply it.
RD,
There you go again posting FACTS instead of group opinions. 
Did you hear about the well known environmantal "priest" who is buys carbon offsets from HIS OWN COMPANY!
He pays himself to fly his own private jet.
You gota love it.
I'm going on a "calorie offset" diet.
You don't have to actually eat any less, but you have to give a dollar to a skinny person.
I may need to check. 
