[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Originally Posted by White Doors

Point being - there is no consensus that the current warming of temparatures are human caused AT ALL.

OK--this is my second try at a response--I had a slight problem with the browser crashing a while ago.

"Consensus" implies that most scientists believe that global warming is happening, at least in part from human causes. Is it your contention that MOST climate scientists do NOT believe those things to be true? Really?!?!? And do you seriously think that a single article in a minor Canadian journal, whose topic is a single data set, can effectively dispute this?

At any rate--I spent some time at the "Friends of Science" website that you linked above. As you might predict, I was less than impressed. For one thing, it's important to look at the whole picture when evaluating academic discourse. Anybody can have a website. When you're looking at a website, you should look for some clues to its validity--beyond merely trotting out the credentials of their members. Creationists have numerous PhDs that they trot out in their websites and for public appearances. That doesn't make them right. Nonetheless, even you would have to admit that the motley collection of retired engineers and aging professor emeriti is a pretty far cry from a significant sample of climate scientists.

One simple clue to the fact that this is a single-issue fringe website is in its mission statement. If you click the "about us" link, you'll learn that

[Friends of Science] offer critical evidence that challenges the premises of the Kyoto Protocol and present alternative causes for climate change.

As you see, "Friends of Science" are not really "friends of science" at all. They (gasp) have an agenda, which they are good enough to reveal to us in their own mission statement. Add to that a quick google.scholar search of the so-called "scientists" that they have collected onto their advisory board.

Let's start with Dr. Tim Ball. The bio on the "friends of science" website refers to him as a "retired" professor--never mentioning that he left the University of Winnipeg in 1996 to become a hired gun for the National Centre for Public Policy Research--a notorious conservative think tank.http://www.nationalcenter.org/

A quick search of Dr. Ball's career yields many letters to the editor and policy papers drafted for think tanks and published on their websites. Publications in refereed journals? Those pickings are rather slim. It appears that "Dr." Tim Ball's real academic career ended some time ago. Now--do you thing that may be because he's a fringe scientist?

The story on Sallie Baliunas isn't much better. She's an astronomer, not a climate scientist, first of all--and is another notorious proxy for right wing think tanks. She has one paper on the subject, which was widely panned, leading to the National Academy of Sciences to conclude (as noted in a NY Times article on the subject, that

the Soon-Baliunas paper, published in the journal Climate Research this year, has been heavily criticized by many scientists, including several of the journal editors.
The editors said last week that whether or not the conclusions were correct, the analysis was deeply flawed.

One refereed publication, and even the journal editors are disavowing it.

The "Friends of Science" aren't looking so friendly, suddenly.

I could go on--but instead, let me exhort you to try an experiment. From now on, instead of using Google to search for articles on Climate Change, use "Google Scholar." That will weed out the websites that aren't refereed and don't present real research. You might find that to be a schocking discovery. What you'll find is that there is indeed debate on the topic of global warming: but the debate is about how fast it's happening, not about whether humans are causing it (there are a range of factors but the consensus is that since 1949 human factors are a major contributor) or whether it's happening at all.

Also, look at it this way: many of the scientists who now say "global climate change is happening, but it's not bad, and we're not the cause" are the same ones who 10 years ago were saying "global warming is a myth." Don't be duped by fakers--if you limit your reading to real, reputable journals--I'm talking Science and Nature and their ilk--you'll see that the facts tell a different story than you have so far.