FloridaJohn

The point of this topic, however, is that neither of those things actually happened. One guy had a problem with some office politics, and wrote on his personal blog his dissatisfaction. The climate change deniers took that post and created a completely inaccurate story that was not based on the guy's original problem. He even later clarified that those stories were inaccurate.

I guess you got your answer!

Here is Dr. Muller's reasoning behind his change of mind from being skeptical to joining the scientific consensus: The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic by RICHARD A. MULLER "CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."

For comparison, we can see here that Lamar Smith makes $174,000 per year.

Here's an interesting article that talks about the money climate scientists make and how they get that money. If climate scientists are in it for the money, they’re doing it wrong "So, are there big bucks to be had in climate science? Since it doesn't have a lot of commercial appeal, most of the people working in the area, and the vast majority of those publishing the scientific literature, work in academic departments or at government agencies. Penn State, home of noted climatologists Richard Alley and Michael Mann, has a strong geosciences department and, conveniently, makes the department's salary information available. It's easy to check, and find that the average tenured professor earned about $120,000 last year, and a new hire a bit less than $70,000. " "If they really wanted to make money at Penn State, they'd be coaching football or basketball. If they wanted to make money doing the sort of data analysis or modeling of complex systems that climatologists perform all the time, of course, they should go to Wall Street. "

Definition of denier : one who denies <deniers of the truth> Simple Definition of deny : to say that something is not true : to refuse to accept or admit (something) I don't see anything about the holocaust in there. Please do not make connections where none exist.

Here's a summary of some of the research:http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=57 That link summarizes eight different peer-reviewed, published papers that specifically assign the human contribution as a percentage. Notice that many of the studies show the natural contribution to be a cooling effect. That means for the earth to warm, the human contribution has to be greater than 100%.

It's cheaper to prevent the sea level rise than to try and adapt to it.

James Hansen was misquoted in that article. The author admitted that he misunderstood what Hansen was saying, and reported it differently than what occured.

90% of the public has no idea who James Hansen is. I would be interested in what predictions you are aware of that he made that haven't come true. I find that stuff very interesting.

OK. That sounds like a good plan. What method do you suggest for assessing a paper on it's merits?

I wasn't using the Journal Impact Factor to judge any particular scientist's work, I was using it as intended as laid out in your link: "The impact factor, a number calculated annually for each scientific journal based on the average number of times its articles have been referenced in other articles, was never intended to be used to evaluate individual scientists, but rather as a measure of journal quality." But if you don't like using Impact Factor, I am open to other methods. Since we know that there are "fake" journals out in the wild with little to no peer review of articles, and mainly serve to create confusion on politically sensitive topics, there has to be a way to separate the good journals from the bad. What do you suggest?

This one seems like a legitimate paper. The journal has an Impact Factor around 6.9 or so (depending on year), and it appears on Google Scholar showing 21 cites to this paper. An ECS of 1.5 is within the range from the last IPCC report, so this is considered a "mainstream" position. There are probably other papers that show this result, too. I will note that this is also the highest ECS on your list. So of the seven papers you listed, you have one hit. You can see that there is not much support in the scientific community for ECS values of less than 1.5.

Well, I'm afraid that's about the only place you are going to find critiques these days. What were you expecting, stone tablets? I'm not sure what qualifications you are looking for, but here's a short bio of the guy who wrote the Skeptical Science critique. He's seems well qualified to me: "Dana Nuccitelli is an environmental scientist at a private environmental consulting firm in the Sacramento, California area. He has a Bachelor's Degree in astrophysics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Master's Degree in physics from the University of California at Davis. Dana has been researching climate science, economics, and solutions since 2006, and has contributed to Skeptical Science since September, 2010. He also blogs at The Guardian, and is the author of Climatology versus Pseudoscience. He has published climate-related papers on various subjects, from the build-up of heat in the Earth's climate system to the expert consensus on human-caused global warming." Here's another critique of Lindzen and Choi 2011 that mentions a failed peer-review of the paper at another publication. Unfortunately the link to the peer review notes is dead, but this blog post (I know, sorry) does summarize what was in it. A couple reasons. First, Google Scholar has not indexed this paper. That may not mean anything, but when I searched for the authors name, the exact title of the paper, and the authors name and title of the paper, nothing came up. If other scientists were referencing that paper, it would be coming right up. Second, I am unable to find an Impact Factor rating for this journal. I checked several different sources for that, and none of them even listed the journal. This leads me to believe this is a fringe journal, so it's quality is suspect. Like I said earlier, it isn't hard to make a website look like a legitimate journal, so for me, I require some way to corroborate the legitimacy of the journal before I can take it seriously. That's why I'm skepical of the paper. You may have different standards than me, but I'm not going to put much stock into a paper no one has apparently heard of.