Come on, a public debate (lost by a pretty slim margin!) does not a trial make (especially not one that asks if global warming is a "crisis", rather than whether there is GW, whether humans are responsible, and what could happen if nothing is done, which is what's being dealt with here).

Even if you can find a few AEI, Cato, or Heritage foundation "studies" that genuinely try to participate in scientific debate on AGW (and I would be surprised if you could find more than one or two) I think you'll agree that the vast majority of the work of these organizations does no such thing. For some reason, AEI + co. seem more interested in convincing lay people that AGW doesn't exist than actually trying to figure out whether or not it does.

Scientists who are pro-AGW (the people I'm advocating we listen to) do not trade in citation-free commentary, even if they produce it for P.R. reasons. Their trade takes place subject to anonymous peer review and strict standards of evidence. A problem with AEI and friends is in part that they blur the line between scholarly and not scholarly work, putting out publications that have a few citations, but not engaged in a good faith attempt to figure out what's actually going on.

It looks like this debate is no longer about AGW per se, but instead on the reliability of the scientific process as a whole: It's not entirely clear what you mean by "most published articles are false". First, you're using a single article to back up a claim that the article itself undercuts to an extent. In fact, that article is making a very particular claim about the existence of alleged relationships. Genuinely good results are obviously good and aren't at all likely to be "false", and there are plenty of these, even if they're a minority. This is what is meant by working with the "best science". Like in everything else, most science is only of marginal use, but the subset that is useful is extremely useful and people can fairly easily recognize which is which.

I was very careful to separate misconduct from being wrong. Misconduct gets you fired. When you're stupendously and regularly right people want collaborate with you and fly you to their conferences. Less so with the anti-AGW crowd, in which I would guess good and prolific writing (irrespective of overall correctness or fairness) makes one popular.

> Scientists are wrong all the time; it means nothing.

This is so obviously ridiculous it hardly bears a response. If being wrong means nothing, then being right means nothing, and this can't be true. It's the job of an academic to be right about "new" out-on-a-limb things -- it's what they do. You could similarly conclude that because concert pianists play more wrong notes than the average person they must be bad at piano.

For some reason, anti-AGW people seem to believe that pro-AGW people either (1) want AGW to be taking place, or (2) want everyone to start living in communes ASAP. Neither of these is true. First, unlike the "disappointment" [http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/apr/6/20060406-1121...] expressed over not finding WMD in Iraq, I don't know any pro-AGW person who will be similarly disappointed if the mean planet temperature stays roughly the same. Second, climate change scientists are normal people leading normal lives, if perhaps bicycling a little more frequently -- they don't in the aggregate want everyone to become hippies.

With respect to the 150 orgs -- I said what I said: they work (or did work) to make sure they continue(d) to be funded by corporations that stand(/stood) to lose if there is a carbon tax or somesuch. This doesn't mean they're spending all their time writing papers denying AGW -- at the very least they are engaged in fundraising, too. Regardless, how many well-funded organizations, acting in bad faith, would it take to produce enough FUD to change US public policy?