One thing to remember is that science is often messy and contentious. Even well-established science has dissidents. The theory that the retrovirus HIV is the cause of AIDS is still contested by Peter Duesburg, the UC Berkeley retrovirologist. So there are a relatively small number of scientists who challenge global warming, or that global warming is human-caused. This I am afraid to say doesn't necessarily make me quick to reject the scientific consensus on global warming.
Another thing to remember is that there is a concerted, well-financed effort by vested interests (the energy companies) to challenge global warming. They have their talking points, and they are all over FR. It strikes me as curious that we are supposed to doubt and distrust the scientists because they have some weird agenda (to get grant money, or make us socialist hippies, or something) -- but we can trust the energy companies and their PR firms because free enterprise is swell and all-American. These companies make a lot of money, and it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that they would resort to a FUD campaign to deflect concern about global warming.
I've run across some egregious nonsense on the web. A few months ago, some loser posted (on a different board) some article about how solar irradiance was increasing, as measured by the increasing temperature on the lens of a certain solar observatory satellite. Some hunting on Google eventually came up with an explanation for this: the temperature was increasing because (as its designers anticipated) the opacity of the lens was gradually increasing (in the UV radiation of space). It blew my mind that some creep would find this and apparently deliberately spread this nonsense on the web. (The perpetrator might have been merely stupid, but I doubt it. The original data, and the explanation for it, were hard work for me to find. The originator of the story must have spent a lot of time hunting for that. Possibly someone working for a PR firm? No scientist would have made that mistake.)
The activities of the Union of Concerned Scientists deserve special mention. That widely supported organization was originally devoted to nuclear disarmament. As the cold war began to end, the group began to actively oppose nuclear power generation.
Their position was unpopular with many physicists. Over the past few years, the organization has turned to the battle against global warming in a particularly hysterical manner.
In 1989 the group began to circulate a petition urging recognition of global warming as potentially the great danger to mankind. Most recipients who did not sign were solicited at least twice more.
The petition was eventually signed by 700 scientists including a great many members of the National Academy of Sciences and Nobel laureates.--> Only about three or four of the signers, however, had any involvement in climatology.,<---
Interestingly, the petition had -> two pages <- , and on the second page there was a call for --> renewed consideration of nuclear power.
When the petition was published in the New York Times, however,--> the second page was omitted.<-- In any event, that document helped solidify the public perception that "all scientists'' agreed with the disaster scenario. Such a disturbing abuse of scientific authority was not unnoticed.
Ummmm, no. The report in question is actually the composition of around 13 people, most of whom represent governments, political parties, and NGOs. The full report might contain more scientific bona fides, but this report is a political document "summarizing" the larger one, which hasn't even been fully developed yet (don't summaries usually come after the document to be summarized? I guess not if you already know what it's going to say...). And remember, the last one of these "summaries" actually made claims not established by the full document, and some even contradicted by it (Steve Milloy at www.junkscience.com did yeoman's work exposing this). So forgive those of us who aren't immediately falling to our knees and worshiping this particular iteration.
And as for the ad hominem of the "funding" question, for every dollar available to a scientist from an oil company, there are a hundred from a government or NGO who want the opposite conclusion. The dirty little secret here is that environmentalist organizations are spending lots of money on this "science," but no one seems to be interested in tracking that money. I wonder why not?