Fergus Brown. I think your’ll find the Judge came to a slightly stronger conclusion than you suggest. The film certainly did reduce a complex subject to a manageable form much like Foxnews does in a two minute piece on any subject known to man, namely using fear as a weapon to put a viewpoint across and see how the public react. Let us not forget Al Gore is no scientist. He flunked some sort of science education at college and now professes to be expert in his now chosen field. He is a polititian pure and simple and you have fallen for his propaganda as have millions of others worldwide.
You mention global temperature measurement being incorrect. Strange that because it is actually. Using land based observations have proved to be biased towards the view put forward by the warmists. Check out the surface stations across America and see exactly where they are sited (next to air conditioning system exhausts, next to black tarmac roads, runways and all manner of unsuitable places where real and proper scientific methods of analysis is impossible. Satellite measurement however is very different and will show the true extent to warming of our Planet, namely none whatsoever of any significance. So 1998 was a hot year- what on earth does that prove?
The IPPC is not a bete noir but simply a extreme and disparate group of like minded individuals who hold an agenda based on hysteria and single issue policies which will end up inevitably costing us billions and billions of tax dollars.
Rather like a religion it will trample on regardless not happy until the whole world is converted to its cause.
In the meantime millions will die as much needed funds and expertise are channelled into fighting a non-existant threat to the detriment of real issues such as poverty, malaria and other deadly diseases, famine etc etc.
The great game of Man-made global warming is merely an intellectual game played out by those in power, those making vast sums of money through instruments such as carbon trading and biofuel production and the lower orders who fall for the hype and believe they can actually “save the world and stop global warming”.
It simply disgusts me.

On the subject of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. It would be wrong to suggest that the film is any more than a populist summation of the principal points and ideas. As such, it has to do ’short cuts’, and use cinematic techniques to make its points. I think you will find that the judge concerned came to the simple conclusion that the film was correct in both its detail and its message. He did not identify any ‘errors’ himself, but simply commented on those aspects of the film’s presentation which the plaintiffs had claimed to be ‘errors’.

I would hardly characterise the film as the zenith of climate science, or even of the presentation of the case for AGW. It is merely the best known of the recent attempts to reduce a complex and important subject into a manageable and comprehensible form. This it seems to de reasonably well.

The temperature record: yes, temperatures can go down as well as up. Yes, there have been times when the mean global temperature was higher and lower than it has been recently. But if I had a temperature of 103, I wouldn’t claim that I was well, simply because my temperature could have been 105. Perhaps you have a physical mechanism in mind which accounts for the shape of the graph of global mean temperature over the past 100 years or so? Perhaps you wish to suggest that this measurement is incorrect?

The point of the original post on which this dialogue was founded was that, in the face of the physical evidence of global warming, vis a vis the previously unrecorded melting of a once apparently stable cryosphere, it seems pointless claiming that the science (at least of temperature measurement) is somehow not capturing the essence of what is happening in reality.

No. 1934 was a hot year in the 48 contiguous US states. Get the facts right, please. Please specify the top ten (or twenty, of you wish) years of global temperature… Clue. Number one is either 1998 or 2006.

I am not sure how you think the IPCC operates. The list of people involved in the AR4, for example, is in the document. The sections give the lead authors and editors, and the contributions are listed on the references and bibliographies of the chapters. It is about as open and transparent a process as it can be (which is not to say that some of the editorial panels don’t involve considerable politicking and shenanigans…). If you wish to establish the IPCC as some kind of bete noir, you might as well write off the faculties of just about every university where scientific research is carried out.

Tony, if there were a few dozen, or a few hundred, pieces of evidence in support of a hypothesis in some other discipline, it would be considered to have some status or validity (having been rigorously scrutinised a number of times in the process). To suggest that there are tens of thousands of pieces of supporting evidence because it is in the interests of each and every competing institution to promote something which has dubious merit but is expedient is rather perverse, and a misrepresentation of how most this work is funded.

That’ll do for now.