"This article was not particularly insightful - it contained lots of classic proof by assertion. It doesn't treat seriously any of the valid criticisms of the current thought and research processes on global warming. That said, I'm not going to flag it because I think it deserves some thought and rebutting."

It's not really an article about climate change. Ben Goldacre's field is more to do with the public perception of science. In that light, making the assumption that the "scientists in charge" are correct isn't invalid, although he would have done well to point it out as an explicit assumption. However, I would note that your concerns have largely been addressed, both in his article and in the general field.

"First, if it's really happening to an extent as to require severe urgency, you ought to be able to say things like this: The current average temperatures and standard deviations of temperatures in these 50 regions are X and Y. We expect the temperatures to rise by A over this period of time in at least 35 of these regions, and the standard deviation to increase by B. If this does not happen over the next five years, that creates serious doubt in our claims and methodologies."

This has been done, in several ways. A prediction has been made that, if we limit our total CO2 emissions to (from memory) 650GT between now and 2050, the anthropogenic portion of global warming will be limited to 2 degrees. This is falsifiable. Predictions of sea-level rise over the shorter term have also been made. These are falsifiable.

"Going further - very many, if not most cultures have believed that the world was in danger of ending during their lifetime. This is a recurring theme throughout history. Obviously, they've pretty much all been wrong so far. When people mention the very prominent global cooling that everyone was scared about, that I was taught to be scared about in school, they say, "Oh, scientists never believed that. It was just a media thing.""

I suspected global cooling would come up. It always does. Taking a look at one of the lists of refutations mentioned in the article comes up with http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-gl...; however my standard response is that changing one's opinion on the basis of new data and new thinking is called "progress," not "evidence that scientists can't be trusted."

"Then you've got things like the fact that there's pretty conclusive records of farming in Greenland as recently as 700 years ago, that died out due to the Earth getting colder."

There's farming on Greenland now.

"They're pointing to experts as having a consensus, but there's not a consensus, and many of the experts have very recently been shown to do some serious scientific misconduct."

Except they haven't. At all. They may have said some stupid things, but that's a different thing entirely. There was no event of "destroying data in response to an FOI request," - or if there was, there's no direct evidence of it in the leaked emails. And yes, I have read them.

"The burden of proof is much more heavy on the people that wish to add expensive political controls to citizens' lives than it is on the people that don't want those controls."

No, the burden of proof is on those who want to show that the null hypothesis, that human-produced CO2 has the potential to cause direct harm through accelerated warming, is incorrect. The reason this is the null hypothesis isn't because the scientists say so, it's because it's the best physical model we have.

EDIT: spelling