Re:Some Dissenting Scientists from IPCC's Own Repo (Score 1)

I had to pick one post to reply to, so it might as well be yours...

The movie was produced by the BBC4 and is titled "The Great Global Warming Swindle.".

The movie was broadcast and commissioned by Channel 4 (not the BBC), and produced by WAGTV, an independent production company. Channel 4 and WAGTV each have somewhat chequered histories concerning the quality of their science documentaries.

Not that the BBC is the arbiter of fair and balanced documentary-making these days, either, but that's a whole other thread...

It shows an honest, reasoned response to the Global Warming Scare on a point-by-point basis from scientists and at least one journalist. The scientists all have credentials out the whazoo and are recognized leaders and contributors in their respective fields.

...which are generally not climatology. In any case, at least one of the scientists used claims to have been misrepresented. The producer of the programme has previously been chastised by the UK broadcast regulators for his biased editing of interviews with scientists in other, broadly anti-science, documentaries.

Further, as an undergraduate engineer, I spent plenty of time in college science labs doing experiments to acquaint myself with the scientific method. Working in simple straight-forward conditions:

• Indoor lab,
• Properly calibrated equipment,
• One simple, universally-accepted equation,
• One single variable,

we (me and all the other undergraduates) never got an exact match between the equations and the real world. There was always a fudge-factor.

This is also telling. It's no surprise that undergraduate experiments go that way, as at that point you're still developing your experimental skills. I'm hoping, though, that you don't believe that there was really only one single variable in your experiments, that there was no measurement (or calibration) error, and that you did incorporate the measurement errors in your calculations. These uncertainties often mount up (probably explaining your 'fudge-factor', in combination with undergraduate inaccuracy), and that is one reason why experimental results (and model predictions) should be cited with some estimate of confidence intervals - just as the measurements and predictions in the IPCC report from February are.