Ho - what a laugh. You've naivete is remarkable. Most academic pursuits are highly political including the sciences. I've been on the receiving end of this one - you are simply wrong. Your credulity is the basis for much of the misplaced trust in the "consensus of science".
Science can't be lumped-in with such academic pursuits as History or Economics, which certainly are politicised. Science is built brick by brick on establised foundations, with each brick relating to the others around it. It can't be suddenly revised and re-arranged, as History can. The science behind AGW isn't one single brick that can be removed without repurcussions rippling through the whole structure. In fact, one of the greatest difficulties for the anti-AGW camp is doing that - removing the theoretical basis for AGW while leaving the theoretical (and practical) basis for other subjects intact.
Consider, for example, one of mhaze's expressed idiocies. Unconvinced - and why should he be? - that CO2 has the same physical properties
outside the laboratory as inside it he proposes an experiment which involves firing an infrared laser into the atmosphere and observing how much infrared is reflected back by CO2. (Yes, I know, but waddaya gonna do?) What kind of infrared laser, one wonders? The obvious candidate is a CO2-laser. Infinite regression looms ...
There
have been attempts to politicise Science in the past - the most obvious being by the Nazis, and we know where
that got them. Science could not have progressed as far and fast as it has over the last few centuries if it was politicised. It would have spent far too much time and effort up blind alleys.
IMO the bias is most evident as a lack of published opposing views rather than primary errors in the peer reviewed work. Still this flaw is a fatal to the truth.
A rather more obvious reason for this lack is tht there's nothing there to be said.
So your local water district and waste disposal services tell your local govt what it wants to hear ? No, bureaucracies regularly ask for more money for more projects and expansion. Of course the UN has a need for power, and one classic method for a power-grab is fear-mongering. It has worked for J.Ceasar as well as G.Bush; why not the UN ? I am NOT saying that this is the predominant motive nor am I saying the IPCC report is wrong. I am pointing out that the UN could be motivated to promote the most scary scenario for the purpose of consolidating more power in the UN.
The IPCC was established under the auspices of the UN, but it was national governments that wanted it. The UN - as in so many matters - is merely a useful forum. The UN has no power, and isn't going to get any. It's a ramshackle construct riddled with nepotism and careerism. What can it gain from falsely exaggerating - or manufacturing - AGW? National governments negotiated the Kyoto Protocol, and national governments signed-up or didn't. The UN has nothing to do with this (nor anything important, really).
Unlike water supply or waste disposal services, the IPCC is something national governments can easily do without. If it exaggerated AGW those governments - which have their own scientific advisers - would gladly shut it down. After all, who needs AGW? Governments have enough to contend with as it is. Throwing climate change into the mix when economic growth is the be-all and end-all is not something anybody ordered. They would like it to go away, but their own scientific advisors have persuaded them that it won't.
Also unlike normal services, the IPCC doesn't ask for money to fund projects or expansion. It's
institutions that do that, institutions such as NASA, universities, and other research centres. That's where the work is done that the IPCC collates and reports on to national governments.
By that definition we know almost nothing about climate. Most data of past weather is based on secondary evidence, whether tree ring, plant range of gases trapping in ice - all of these wash out the temporal peaks and produce only evidence for averaged climate.
We know a great deal about climate - it's long been a matter of immediate human concern, after all. With the scientific advances of the last couple of centuries, particularly thermodynamics, we've established the principles behind it.
So your basis for evaluating the truth of an argument involves determining a concensus ? Asking all the politicians ? If so you should not be posting to a forum dedicated to debunking fallacious beliefs. You are instead promoting methods that leads directly to fallacious beliefs.
I certainly pay attention to a consensus that is unwelcome to the group involved. A comfortable consensus is easily ignored, but when people become convinced of something they'd rather not be so - and there will always be siren voices telling them that it ain't - I take notice. Very few people - and even fewer politicians - are attracted to the idea that AGW is a constraint on industrial growth. Any more than they were when smog, acid rain or ozone depletion were brought up. Those were smaller issues than AGW but there was still enormous political inertia when it came to even acknowledging that there was a problem. The same inertia has been evident with AGW and yet it's been overcome. That's significant.
No it's not evidence of anything special at all and you should try hanging out with actuaries who have actually studies statistics. Your claims show a ridiculous misunderstanding of basic probability. Having several improbable events appear in a short period does NOT change the underlying probability. Such things are effectively guaranteed to happen over long-enough time periods. Mis-recognizing a series of improbable random events as a pattern is precisely what conspiracy theorist do, not actuaries.
I rather think actuaries at some of the oldest and most prestitgious City insurance institutions have a firm grasp of statistics, including Poisson distributions.
You must compare the odd-seeming result against the chance that these are normal variation within the original statistic. Yes, 3 century floods in a decade is improbable but it really must occur once every 10k years or perhaps much more often if there is a clustering of non-independent events. Just because you observe this after a few millenia of historical observation does not make the statistics wrong and no competant actuary would claim so.
A competent actuary would indeed consider that. They're not looking to calculate profits over thousands of years, they're looking to the middle-term. If these events fade into the statistical background over time that will be taken into account, but right now there's an alarm-bell ringing. Check out weather-related insurance premiums and red-lining - in a very competitive market.
I don't need the AGW religion and I'm too old to be scared by ghost stories.
Religion? Ghost stories? It doesn't require gullibility to be convinced of AGW.
You'll need to produce the same sort of statistical demonstration that other sciences require.
Isn't statistics an academic pursuit? And thus sullied, in your opinion, by political considerations? Are these "other sciences" somehow unsullied?
There seems to be a degree of inconsistency between your first paragraph and your last.
