One final point on this thread and then I am spent.
I want to give you another example, specific to AGW, where your blind faith in "authority" and "academic review" are badly misplaced.
Here is the background.
As part of COP3, the IPCC needed variables to project CO2 emissions in order to obtain climate forecasts. Part of this process included macroeconomic forecasts for the global economy (note that this is my area of particular academic extpertise). From the growth forecasts came forecast for CO2 emissions, which naturally will rise as incomes and production rise over time.
A range of scenarios were constructed, from low growth to high growth. Low growth, was supposed to give a lower bound to expected CO2 emmission growth.
This task was completed by 53 authors and 89 "expert reviewers".
Let me type that out again for you Yeti.
This was subject to expert review by 89 people.
This must be the Gold Standard, should it not Yeti? How could anybody ever question work by 53 expert authors and published by the IPCC and reviewed by 89 expert reviewers.
Here is the problem. It is wrong. Hard as it is to believe, just about any undergradute economist should be able to spot the glaring error in the work, simply by looking at some of the strange results (just like the disappearence of the medievil warm period in Mann's paper).
The result that alerts a redaer to a problem is that the economic growth projections imply that by the end of the century, countries like North Korea, Libya, South Africa, Algeria would be wealthier than the US.
If you accept that this is.. well... unusual, then you dig a bit deeper and audit the data and process. A couple of authors, by the name of Castle and Henderson did this and published their result in, wait for it,
Energy and Environment (you still haven't spelt out why anything published in this journal does not even deserve to be read - but I digress).
Without getting bogged down in the detail, the original work made some pretty stupid errors at an early point in the data work and the result was forecast growth rates for the global economy and hence CO2 emissions that were far too high (and this is in the "low growth" scenario).
I think this is worth pointing out, because this is serious and at the heart of IPCC claims and resulting policy. Within the range of forecasts for CO2 emissions driving the IPCC climate forecasts, the "low CO2 growth" scenario is underpinned by ludicriously
high economic growth assumption. The
lower bound depends on assumptions that would be excessive even for an
upper bound.
Just like M&M vs. Mann, there is now some tit-for-tat going on about this issues that is still not resolved. However, the IPCC have presented nothing yet that can satisfactorily counter Castle and Henderson's work. As an expert watching this evolve, my position is that the IPCC work must now be placed in question and the results set aside until this is resolved.
So you see, the review process and authority are not infallible. In fact, when there are people like you around Yeti, who seem to lose all ability to think in the face of this process, it is a massive failing.
This is how The Economist appraised the situation:
Making matters worse, the panel's approach lays great emphasis on peer review of submissions. When the peers in question are drawn from a restricted professional domain—whereas the issues under consideration make demands upon a wide range of professional skills—peer review is not a way to assure the highest standards of work by exposing research to scepticism.
A lack-of-progress report on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
I think that puts the point well.
Anyway, that is long enough. I doubt you'll digest the contents of this, because it is not published in Nature.
[edited to correct spelling]
