Quote Originally Posted by DuncanONeil View Post
The data that the "experts" in Manchester used to plug into their model with the hidden fudge factor. That data!
Science is built on reproducible results. In politics or religion, when someone says that X is so, people decide whether to believe it according to how well it sits with their prejudices and whether the speaker has a charismatic delivery. Scientists, being human, are sometimes influenced by these things, but what they try to concentrate on is: can we try it ourselves (run the experiment, do the observations, crunch the numbers) and get the same answer? If the answer is yes, they believe it. If the answer is no – either because the original paper didn't give enough information, or because the results don't work out – then it doesn't matter how ideologically correct the source is or how persuasive the write-up, it will not stand.

For example, this is why nobody (much) believes in cold fusion any more. People wanted to believe the original paper – as my then wife wrote, “if this is true, the gods have forgiven us” - and a great many labs jumped to put together the device and see if it did what they said. And it didn't. No prejudice, no Big Oil conspiracy: it just didn't work.

The basic theory of greenhouse gas driven global warming does not depend on “secret” data or complicated formulae. The data are all in the public domain, and anyone with the patience can crunch the numbers and see what comes out. And over the decades a great many people have, and got the same answers, which is why they believe it. No politics, no conspiracy: it just works.

The fancy number-crunching comes when people try to go beyond predicting the general trends and try to find out what exactly it means for, say, Europe or North America; and for that, they must use fancy models with lots of special parameters to try to draw out the particular effects they are looking for. And if they are foolish enough not to publish the details of their models so that others can try it, they will not get much credibility. But the overall facts remain available to everyone, and no-one can destroy or suppress those, any more than you can suppress this morning's weather report.