[couchnaut]

So -according to Landsea- IPCC (an international scientific organization) is moving in ways that are more political than scientific. Weird and disturbing. Weird because I'd expect such an organization to be gravitating towards big industrial nations' interests if we're to assume that they are susceptible to lobbying - not the other way around. Disturbing because if they are doing politics rather than science then we have a different kind of problem which is that the bodies of experts that we should be trusting on very complex subjects are not to be trusted and I don't know where that leaves us as a society.

I'll accept the point of not putting forward very well researched links but to my defence: 1. Climatology is far from my expertise. As is microbiology, or nuclear power or space exploration. And that's why I'm ok with paying people (from my taxes) to have an educated opinion on such matters. 2. as you probably know it's quite difficult to find who are the generally respectful scientists (remember dismissing a whole lot of them just a while ago (IPCC)). 3. I -sorry about that- thought that we're past scepticism on the subject as I have only seen that attitude only in conspiracy theorists (right or left leaning). 4. I pitted the problem as a problem that can (or at least should) be solved in the same way that humans have been improving their lives - with ingenuity and a mind for the society as a whole.

Anyway - thank you for your long and researched answer and I sincerely hope that Landsea is right because I don't believe that we're about to change anything in our ways any time soon.

[glenra]

The IPCC is supposed to summarize the state of the existing literature, but it was born political, tends to attracts eco-activists of all sorts and relies more than it should on "grey literature" - unrefereed "reports" written by ecological organizations. The IPCC also to some degree generates the consensus it is supposed to be merely reporting on, in that the lead authors have been known to push specific articles into print supporting "their side" of things and delay articles supporting "the other side" with IPCC deadlines in mind so that their side gets the last word. That's one part of the process where excess alarmism gets to creep in. On the other side, your sources are correct that the result then gets massaged into acceptability. The "summary for policymakers" in particular is the result of political compromises - various country's representatives argue about it and then the rest of the document in some cases gets rewritten to reflect what the summary says, leaving nobody happy.

Nonetheless, the IPCC documents aren't terrible and do tend to be worth reading if you really want to know what's going on.

On being "past skepticism": The most credible skeptics tend to be "lukewarmers". They believe reality is a bit more complicated and uncertain than has been portrayed, they tend to suspect climate sensitivity is a lot lower than the models predict and they tend to be suspicious of doomsday claims generally. But almost nobody at this point doubts "CO2 is a greenhouse gas" or that the planet has warmed, so all those "97% agree!" articles miss the point - the skeptics "agree" too.

A couple good blogs for credible "skeptical" views are: http://judithcurry.com/ http://climateaudit.org/

And a good blog for credible "alarmist" views is: http://www.realclimate.org/

(the most popular source for skeptical views is probably http://wattsupwiththat.com and the most popular source for alarmist views is probably skepticalscience. Those sites are indeed more readable and approachable, but the extra readability in both cases comes at the cost of (1) oversimplification of main posts, (2) attracting much dumber comments. So browse those sort of site with care and don't believe what you read there without checking it. )