Scientific Fraud

[bcollins]

This is precisely the problem. When you do not have particular scientific expertise, it becomes difficult to determine who to trust - especially when some scientists in a field challenge the opinion of the greater majority of their peers. Who do you trust? How does the laymen determine who is "right"?

This is a very difficult question to answer. In an ideal world, everyone would have at least enough education in basic scientific techniques to be able to spot fallacious logic and poor statistical analysis. I believe these two abilities alone would make it much easier for the scientific community to convince the general public of a consensus opinion.

While I appreciate your respect for these scientists, they are in the vast minority concerning their particular opinions. Since challenging Lyle to perform his own analysis of the data, I have been perusing the academic literature so that I could better understand what the majority of the climatology community believes, as well as what the skeptics believe to be true.

When Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville shows that most of the AGW predictive models were incorrect in the climate behavior over the last 10+years I take a serious pause on how well we think we understand the climate.

The first issue concerns the findings of Dr. Christy and Dr. Roy Spencer. These climatologists published several papers that claimed discrepancies between the amount of warming measured near the surface and that measured by satellites. Here's a link to one of the papers in this series:

An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie

This series of papers is one of the primary sources of current climate change skepticism. These studies were used to cast doubt on the models and the influence of humans on global warming. These papers are still quoted today as a primary source arguing against human-based global warming.

Unfortunately, the contents of these papers were found to be filled with numerous errors. The first was addressed in a paper by Mears and Wentz:

http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/envs5...ntz%202005.pdf

with follow ups:

Amplification of surface temperature trends and variability in the tropical atmosphere [eScholarship]

https://courses.seas.harvard.edu/cli...Meyer-2005.pdf

The authors of the erroneous papers, Christy and Spencer, were quick to admit their mistakes after pointed out by their peers. Of course, correcting the errors in the originals led to new papers for Christy and Spencer:

http://www.homogenisation.org/files/..._etal_1998.pdf

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-p...su/uah-msu.pdf

An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie

In short, one of the fundamental cornerstones of climate skepticism was found to be significantly flawed. Once the corrections were made, it is interesting to note that the UAH-MSU dataset matched much more closely the predictions made by climate models.

...my analysis of the science provided is that the scientific community does not understand the relationship between human behavior and the climate's change nearly as well as they thought they did.

Well - at least a few of the scientists made significant mistakes. Once these mistakes were corrected, the consensus is now much clearer. Christy and Spencer still beat the drum, trying to save face, but in the scientific community, for scientists of their stature, these mistakes were HUGE.

When Ronald Bailey, a respected science correspondent, and Dr. James Hansen, a proponent of AGW, who works at Columbia University and NASA report these things and there isn't a immediate castigation of them I take it as fact.

I didn't see anything about Bailey in the literature, but James Hansen published the following paper in 2006 which seems to contradict the attributed statement:

Global temperature change

Where did you see a reference for Hansen's statement? It's possible he changed his mind.

(NOTE: It seems some of the links look broken, but they still work for me. If you have any trouble, let me know and I will send a URL)