Eunuchswear's Journal: Talking to a climate "skeptic"

So, I see this: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1552564&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=nested&cid=31170808

I do not agree that the IPCC is 99.999% correct, I have very low confidence in the IPCC

Meteorologists' models make huge assumptions, they must. I won't believe a thing they've said until they clearly state their assumptions and make at least some attempt to find error bounds.

As an example, what do they use for the C02 absorptivity of sea water in their climate models? What temperature sea water? What salinity sea water? At what rate does the sea water mix? What percentage C02 in the water? What percentage in the Air? What temperature air? What wind velocity?

He's obviously read lot's of the literature, and seems to have some relevant questions, so I ask him what papers he's read that give him such a low opinion of climate scientists rigour:

That's the problem, I haven't even been able to find the papers to read. There are some whitepapers on the IPCC site, but I would like to find peer reviewed papers.

So, how, if he hasn't found any papers can he make such claims?

Anyway, let's leave that to one side for the moment. It's rather sad that it's so hard to find papers that answer his questions about the assumptions and error bars used by climate scientists. His main preoccupation seems to be modelling, so let's go check out what the IPCC said in Assement 4, WG1, Chapter 8 Climate Models and their Evaluation .

Why lookee there. There's a section of references. That's a surprise.

There are hundreds of papers referenced there. But "a skeptic" couldn't find one?

Re:

[Eunuchswear]

If you read my post you'll see I make no claims for the quality of the papers. All I'm saying is that the "skeptic" claimed he couldn't find any papers. Ok, maybe my google-fu is better than his. Or maybe he wasn't even looking, despite his absolutist claims that climate scientists don't "clearly state their assumptions and make at least some attempt to find error bounds".

Re:

[Eunuchswear]

I can post a list of five hundred peer-reviewed papers that question either the cause, the effects, or both, of Global Warming.

Interesting. Looking around on the web I find that quite a few of them turn out to be wrong. (I must admit I haven't checked all 500 of 'em). This is the real point of publishing peer reviewed papers - it's not the peer review that decides whether the paper is good or not, but other people will examine the paper, and may come up with confirmation or refutation. Seems like this li

Re:

[Eunuchswear]

I can post a list of five hundred peer-reviewed papers that question either the cause, the effects, or both, of Global Warming.

Fun, if you examine this in more detail you find gems like:

Elevated water temperature and carbon dioxide concentration increase the growth of a keystone echinoderm
(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 106, Issue 23, pp. 9316-9321, June 2009)
- Rebecca A. Gooding, Christopher D. G. Harley, Emily Tang

Who's abstract starts:

Anthropogenic climate change poses a serious