Which is an opinion from a single writer with no scientific credentials; not exactly a detailed critique. But if lay opinions are important now, here's some much more influential people that support the Stern Report's conclusions:
* Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK * Paul Wolfowitz, former President of the World Bank * Claude Mandil, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency * Kirit Parikh, Member, Planning Commission, Government of India * Adair Turner, Former Director of UK Confederation of British Industry and Economic Advisor to Sustainable Development Commission * Sir Rod Eddington, Adviser to the UK Government on the long term links between transport and economic growth, and former chief executive of British Airways
Do please enlighten us; what "plenty of evidence" do you refer to?
The reason the deniers are in such a minority among actual climatologists is because they have failed to provide convincing evidence to back up their claims, whereas there are many, many studies that show clear and unequivocal evidence of warming, and strong correlation with the calculated result from observed anthropogenic emissions. None of the alternative hypotheses have anything like the same correlation, and have been judged to be far less likely than the obvious candidate: human CO2 emissions.
If someone can provide solid and convincing evidence of a natural cause to the observed warming, then they'll be famous, but nobody has come up with any. If all the "skeptics" can do is attempt to cast patchwork doubts while ignoring that the data that has been confirmed and re-confirmed by multiple other observations of independent indicators, then IMHO they're more deserving of the label "zealot", and it's no surprise that most climatologists tuned them out long ago. The real scientists have seen the actual data; they know better.
So... 4,000 articles explicitly or implicitly agreed that AGW was real - and only 24 articles explicitly or implicitly disagreed. Since the rest did not even address the question, they're not relevant here.
That still sounds like a 99.4% agreement to me. 166 out of 167 climatologists (from a sample of 4024 relevant papers) are convinced by the observed data; human-caused global warming is very real.
Or, much more likely, non-straw-man scenario - trade boycott.
Australian exporters get their contracts cancelled, and Indonesian buyers go elsewhere. Wave goodbye to our third-largest agriculture market and a good chunk of that $14 billion of trade. How business-friendly is that?
All because our Glorious Leader can't bring himself to make even an insincere apology, thus sending the clear message that not only did we spy on them to gain unfair economic advantage, we're proud of it and we'll happily do it again. Would you do business with someone who regularly, illegally, and unashamedly rifled through your office looking at your private files for something to catch you out with?
Don't like proprietary apps on your tablet? Then flash your own choice of completely FOSS rom. CyanogenMod makes a few, and so do many others.
Granted this is (a little) beyond the average user - but the average user *wants* most of those proprietary apps and services; it's just you that doesn't want them (and if it's beyond you as well, you could always pay someone to do it for you).
Well yeah. The Android apps you would miss out on are (only) the ones that are designed to require Google's cloud services specifically (Drive storage, Maps navigation, Google's voice search, Play games syncing etc). No big surprise there.
There are entire categories of apps which don't need any cloud services of course, and many others where the apps are written to use alternative services, or where the bulk of the app is entirely usable even when a given service is unavailable (e.g. when sold through Amazon's app store). In all cases though, it's the developer's decision, and Google's cloud service APIs are completely optional & not part of the base Android framework.
What record? You linked to a blog that picks quotes from a book written by a mining consultant and an economics professor. There's no record visible there - no context, no dates, nothing hard - only someone allegedly repeating claims from authors with obvious agendas, that we can't begin to verify. Oh, and an unreferenced op-ed with loaded language and unproved allegations that gives no actual contrary data, but only raises questions from a known skeptic (Lindzen) while ignoring the opinions of all the other scientists mentioned.
But you go ahead and believe whatever random opinions you like. We'll just stick to the data that's been repeatedly verified in a dozen different ways.
Thanks; still looking for citations though, esp. for 1) and 3).
2) From my link:
As a major measure to improve energy and economic structure, the plan aims to cut coal consumption in the total energy mix to below 65 per cent by 2017, down from 66.8 per cent in 2012.
... which is admittedly not that significant, but it's also not "increasing the coal being dug" as you claimed (at least not relatively). 4) Agree that China's promises are not exactly iron-clad, but unless you have a reliable citation that says the opposite, as you claim, then we have to go with their publicly stated position. I see no reason to accept your opinion over their "top climate negotiator". 5) Still not sure where you're going with the locally-made AE point. Everything here indicates they're moving away from coal and increasing their nuclear, natural gas, hydro etc.
I think you need some citations. And if you're going to declare a post "total BS", perhaps your rebuttals should be on point? Kinda like this:
1) China "will be"? UN says 28.6%, not quite "over 1/3" as you originally said. 2) China is indeed focusing on reducing pollution, but they're also cutting coal consumption, not just consuming it differently. They're using GreatPoint's catalytic hydromethanation process of coal gasification, and the CO2 produced is captured, not released. 3) Primarily stopping desertification as I said, but 500,000,000 hectares of fast-growing trees are a not-insignificant CO2 absorber, as the Chinese are quick to point out. 4) China's top climate negotiator said that China has pledged to cut its carbon intensity by 40-45% by 2020 from 2005 levels. Coal plants are no longer being approved in polluted provinces like Beijing, and their nuclear power program is one of the most ambitious programs in the world. 5) Huh?
China's emissions growth is slowing, as it has implemented its own carbon trading scheme and started cleaning up the worst-polluting of its power plants.
Additionally, China has planted over 500,000 square km of trees in the north, as a desertification barrier and carbon sink. This is the largest artificial forest in the world (twice the size of Britain), and they plan to continue increasing this through to 2050.
Little known fact: It is a legal requirement for all Chinese over the age of eleven to plant at least three trees a year.
95% of requests were over the Internet, rather than in person - no surprise there, it's more accessible. We have no idea how many of the documents were available to be accessed this way, though.
No wait, we do. FTFA:
In late December, as outrage over the library closings grew, her department posted answers to 19 questions online. It gave the total size of the print collection as 660,000 items. Some 30,000 departmental publications are available online and more documents are being digitized. But many books can’t be digitized due to copyright laws.
So only 4.5% of documents are available online (assuming departmental publications == print collection, which I'm not sure about). Too soon to start throwing out entire collections, it seems - if ever.
This is nothing like Google Glass, or the Oculus Rift. But it is a direct competitor for Sony's HMZ head-mounted personal displays, only a little cheaper & crappier.
I applaud your effort to bring actual data to the discussion, but I'm not certain those links support your claim of temperatures "equal to or higher than todays". Closest I could find in the first paper was:
The level of warmth during the peak of the MWP in the second half of the 10th century, equalling or slightly exceeding the mid-20th century warming, is in agreement with the results from other more recent large-scale multi-proxy temperature reconstructions
(emphasis mine)... but we know global temperatures have risen significantly in the last 60 years. Do you have evidence that this is not the case in Europe?
The second link was paywalled, but the abstract says northern Sweden experienced "similar levels of summer warmth in the medieval period (MWP, c. CE 900–1100) and the latter half of the 20th century". Hard to pin down the comparison dates, but again, not "equal or higher than today".
The third link says that some reconstructions of northern Sweden and Finland specifically have indeed been up to 0.6C warmer 2000 years ago, when compared to the 1951-1980 mean (rather than today's warmer temperatures), but also says that proxy reconstructions can vary wildly, by 1.5-3C, depending on which Scandinavian record is used, and finishes with:
We conclude that the temperature history of the last millenium is much less understood than often suggested, and that the regional and particularly the hemispheric scale pre-1400 temperature variance is largely unknown.
So basically, it was certainly fairly warm in Europe during certain past periods, but the evidence is not reliable enough to say exactly how warm, and no paper supports the claim that it's "equal or higher than todays" temperatures. In any case, Europe in general (and Sweden/Finland in particular) are only one part of the global picture; temperatures were relatively low elsewhere in the world even during the MWP.
It is literally free from China to AU as well; most Chinese/HK vendors ship here for free these days, and to most other destinations.
Those high prices are from the US to Australia; why is that? US international postage prices seem huge to us - more than shipping from AU to the US. Amazon (when it deigns to ship here) are often much cheaper, like $9-$20, but that's still more than e.g. from the UK, let alone China.
Both should respect each others property and businesses and laws
Guess who sets out those principles of international respect for property, businesses etc? The same WTO that you want shut down.
The US agreed in 1995 to abide by the WTO's principles and rules. If they no longer want to, they're free to withdraw, but they can't expect other nations to respect the rules if they won't.
What makes you think US-passed laws have anything to do with Antigua and Barbuda, a foreign nation with its own laws? US laws aren't being "overruled", they simply don't apply outside the US.
There are international organisations such as the WTO and WIPO that set trade rules that both these nations have each agreed to abide by. The US is free to lodge a dispute with them, but they might not get very far considering it was the US who violated those rules in the first place.
And of course, the US has no power to "shut down" the WTO. They can continue to ignore it and keep violating WTO rules where it suits them, but then more nations will do simply the same and follow in Antigua/Barbuda's footsteps.
If the US wants others to follow the rules and respect its copyrights, it will have to follow the rules itself.
Individual scientists have overturned long-standing consensus for the entire history of science.
This same argument is also used by the countless wrong people too.
Sure, it does happen - but only after a) the method and conclusions are shown to be rock-solid, b) confirming evidence is found by third parties, and c) the existing body of evidence is also explained in the new context. This does not happen commonly - it's far more often that attempts to challenge the status quo fail one or all of the above, and are quickly forgotten.
it has very often turned out that the minority was right
And how often has that minority been wrong?
When I can easily identify errors in a scientific paper, then yes, my judgment is better than theirs. When scientist B points out an error in scientist A's paper, which I can verify for myself is true, then yes, my judgement is better than that of scientists A.
And when Scientists A and C point out errors in Scientist B's critique, who do you believe then? You have no idea even of how much you don't know in the complex field of climatology, yet you're still certain you can "easily" identify errors that the paper's authors, their peer reviewers and the great bulk of climatologists somehow missed completely. Or perhaps you're just selecting the conclusions you want to believe.
who do you think is the one suffering from Dunning-Kruger?
My answer stands:-)
rather than evaluating the actual science in each case.
I'm not capable of evaluating the science at that level. Neither are you, unless you have a PhD and years of work in climate science that you haven't mentioned. We don't have the training or the experience, we haven't been reading all the relevant literature for the last decade, we don't even know what we would need to know to do that. The conclusions sound reasonable to me, but so do the critiques - and so do the counter-critiques. How is a layman supposed to tell who's the most accurate? It's not high-school level stuff.
That's science for you. Actual figures, peer-reviewed paper. If you have a problem with it, refute the science, not my comment about the science.
I assume you're referring to Fyfe et al (2013). And no, I have no problem with it. The models are clearly failing to robustly predict surface temperature variability, and if you read the paper itself, you'll see that it offers a number of possible reasons for this, including the ENSO and AMO oscillations, stratospheric aerosols, model base factors like climate sensitivity, or just unusual natural variability. There's a lot of factors involved, and nobody's claiming that the science is perfect yet, not even close. But we do know, for example, that ocean warming (where 90% of the heat imbalance goes) is continuing unabated, as does ocean acidification. Surface temperatures, while important to humans, are only a small part of the overall rising trend - and they can fluctuate up just as quickly as down.
What I do have a problem with, is the prodigious assumptive leap that a paper like Fyfe's somehow provides evidence that all climate science is therefore junk, that AGW must therefore be insignificant, or even that the 180-year global warming trend has suddenly ceased. This paper does not begin to suggest that, merely that our surface temperature models need more work, nothing more. Meanwhile, other peer reviewed papers like Santer et al (2013) conclude unequivocally that "Our results... underscore the dominant role human activities have played in recent climate change." (I can cite half a dozen others that say the same, if you want).
YOU are ignoring the great many scientists who do disagree with IPCC
Not ignoring (I've read some of Dr Lindzen's papers, and others); just giving more weight to the far greater numbers of practicing climate scientists who support the IPCC's conclusions. Dr Lindzen and the others you mention are very much in the minority, according to numerous studies from many different parties, and of course the IPCC's own many authors, backed by their reviews of the last 5 years of climate papers. If you want to call listening to a 97% majority "cherry-picking", I don't really know how to respond.
your reliance on consensus as an argument suggests that you actually don't know much about how science really works
It's not consensus of uninformed opinions, it's confirmation of expert results. I'm sure you're smart enough to realise that, so I can only imagine you don't want to.
When a scientist publishes a paper, especially one that contradicts current thinking, we don't immediately throw out all our textbooks; first, other scientists try to confirm their results. Particularly in complex fields, there is debate - are the conclusions actually supported by the data? Are there any questionable assumptions, are the techniques applied appropriate, are there any important factors that have been overlooked, are the interpretations of the data reasonable, that sort of thing. Peer review catches the obvious errors, but particularly for papers that challenge the status quo, the biggest question is usually, how do you reconcile this result with the existing body of evidence? Declaring everybody else to be "wrong" doesn't get you far; you have to find other data that confirms your own results, and you have to explain how all that existing counter-evidence doesn't apply to your conclusions. If you can do that convincingly, other scientists will support your work. If you can't, your results are considered suspect and are assumed to have a flaw, at least until more confirmation can be found. After all, if two observations disagree then either they're observing different things, or one is just wrong.
This is a crucial part of the scientific process, as much as peer review. It's what saves us from crackpots and wasting time on free-energy machines, it protects us from inadvertently flawed results, and it's also what keeps the majority of science and engineering focused and on track. We can't all be experts in every field, so we defer to those that are. I personally don't have the expertise or experience to properly judge Dr Lindzen's work, but his colleagues do - and if the vast majority of them still aren't convinced by his claims after 15 years, then it's fairly safe to for the lay person to assume that his claims (and those of the handful of scientists who continue to deny the results of the thousands of other climatologists) are most probably either flawed, or just don't apply.
Of course, if you still believe that Scientist A's pet theory is right when Scientists B through Z have all produced peer-reviewed results that disagree, you either have to believe your own judgement is superior to theirs (hint: it isn't), or that they're all in a huge conspiracy to supress the truth. I'll leave you to decide which is more likely.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is an opinion from a single writer with no scientific credentials; not exactly a detailed critique. But if lay opinions are important now, here's some much more influential people that support the Stern Report's conclusions:
* Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK
* Paul Wolfowitz, former President of the World Bank
* Claude Mandil, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency
* Kirit Parikh, Member, Planning Commission, Government of India
* Adair Turner, Former Director of UK Confederation of British Industry and Economic Advisor to Sustainable Development Commission
* Sir Rod Eddington, Adviser to the UK Government on the long term links between transport and economic growth, and former chief executive of British Airways
Already been done.
Do please enlighten us; what "plenty of evidence" do you refer to?
The reason the deniers are in such a minority among actual climatologists is because they have failed to provide convincing evidence to back up their claims, whereas there are many, many studies that show clear and unequivocal evidence of warming, and strong correlation with the calculated result from observed anthropogenic emissions. None of the alternative hypotheses have anything like the same correlation, and have been judged to be far less likely than the obvious candidate: human CO2 emissions.
If someone can provide solid and convincing evidence of a natural cause to the observed warming, then they'll be famous, but nobody has come up with any. If all the "skeptics" can do is attempt to cast patchwork doubts while ignoring that the data that has been confirmed and re-confirmed by multiple other observations of independent indicators, then IMHO they're more deserving of the label "zealot", and it's no surprise that most climatologists tuned them out long ago. The real scientists have seen the actual data; they know better.
So... 4,000 articles explicitly or implicitly agreed that AGW was real - and only 24 articles explicitly or implicitly disagreed. Since the rest did not even address the question, they're not relevant here.
That still sounds like a 99.4% agreement to me. 166 out of 167 climatologists (from a sample of 4024 relevant papers) are convinced by the observed data; human-caused global warming is very real.
Or, much more likely, non-straw-man scenario - trade boycott.
Australian exporters get their contracts cancelled, and Indonesian buyers go elsewhere. Wave goodbye to our third-largest agriculture market and a good chunk of that $14 billion of trade. How business-friendly is that?
All because our Glorious Leader can't bring himself to make even an insincere apology, thus sending the clear message that not only did we spy on them to gain unfair economic advantage, we're proud of it and we'll happily do it again. Would you do business with someone who regularly, illegally, and unashamedly rifled through your office looking at your private files for something to catch you out with?
Don't like proprietary apps on your tablet? Then flash your own choice of completely FOSS rom. CyanogenMod makes a few, and so do many others.
Granted this is (a little) beyond the average user - but the average user *wants* most of those proprietary apps and services; it's just you that doesn't want them (and if it's beyond you as well, you could always pay someone to do it for you).
Well yeah. The Android apps you would miss out on are (only) the ones that are designed to require Google's cloud services specifically (Drive storage, Maps navigation, Google's voice search, Play games syncing etc). No big surprise there.
There are entire categories of apps which don't need any cloud services of course, and many others where the apps are written to use alternative services, or where the bulk of the app is entirely usable even when a given service is unavailable (e.g. when sold through Amazon's app store). In all cases though, it's the developer's decision, and Google's cloud service APIs are completely optional & not part of the base Android framework.
What record? You linked to a blog that picks quotes from a book written by a mining consultant and an economics professor. There's no record visible there - no context, no dates, nothing hard - only someone allegedly repeating claims from authors with obvious agendas, that we can't begin to verify. Oh, and an unreferenced op-ed with loaded language and unproved allegations that gives no actual contrary data, but only raises questions from a known skeptic (Lindzen) while ignoring the opinions of all the other scientists mentioned.
But you go ahead and believe whatever random opinions you like. We'll just stick to the data that's been repeatedly verified in a dozen different ways.
Thanks; still looking for citations though, esp. for 1) and 3).
2) From my link:
As a major measure to improve energy and economic structure, the plan aims to cut coal consumption in the total energy mix to below 65 per cent by 2017, down from 66.8 per cent in 2012.
... which is admittedly not that significant, but it's also not "increasing the coal being dug" as you claimed (at least not relatively).
4) Agree that China's promises are not exactly iron-clad, but unless you have a reliable citation that says the opposite, as you claim, then we have to go with their publicly stated position. I see no reason to accept your opinion over their "top climate negotiator".
5) Still not sure where you're going with the locally-made AE point. Everything here indicates they're moving away from coal and increasing their nuclear, natural gas, hydro etc.
The Martian atmosphere is about 0.6kPa, compared to Earth's 101kPa. It's just not dense enough to move anything more substantial than dust.
I think you need some citations. And if you're going to declare a post "total BS", perhaps your rebuttals should be on point? Kinda like this:
1) China "will be"? UN says 28.6%, not quite "over 1/3" as you originally said.
2) China is indeed focusing on reducing pollution, but they're also cutting coal consumption, not just consuming it differently. They're using GreatPoint's catalytic hydromethanation process of coal gasification, and the CO2 produced is captured, not released.
3) Primarily stopping desertification as I said, but 500,000,000 hectares of fast-growing trees are a not-insignificant CO2 absorber, as the Chinese are quick to point out.
4) China's top climate negotiator said that China has pledged to cut its carbon intensity by 40-45% by 2020 from 2005 levels. Coal plants are no longer being approved in polluted provinces like Beijing, and their nuclear power program is one of the most ambitious programs in the world.
5) Huh?
China's emissions growth is slowing, as it has implemented its own carbon trading scheme and started cleaning up the worst-polluting of its power plants.
Additionally, China has planted over 500,000 square km of trees in the north, as a desertification barrier and carbon sink. This is the largest artificial forest in the world (twice the size of Britain), and they plan to continue increasing this through to 2050.
Little known fact: It is a legal requirement for all Chinese over the age of eleven to plant at least three trees a year.
Well, them and all the climate scientists with their pesky evidence.
For a guitar amp, certainly.
For a stereo system, if it's clipping you're doing it wrong. Precise audio reproduction is the game there, and tubes aren't terribly precise.
95% of requests were over the Internet, rather than in person - no surprise there, it's more accessible. We have no idea how many of the documents were available to be accessed this way, though.
No wait, we do. FTFA:
In late December, as outrage over the library closings grew, her department posted answers to 19 questions online. It gave the total size of the print collection as 660,000 items. Some 30,000 departmental publications are available online and more documents are being digitized. But many books can’t be digitized due to copyright laws.
So only 4.5% of documents are available online (assuming departmental publications == print collection, which I'm not sure about). Too soon to start throwing out entire collections, it seems - if ever.
This is nothing like Google Glass, or the Oculus Rift. But it is a direct competitor for Sony's HMZ head-mounted personal displays, only a little cheaper & crappier.
I applaud your effort to bring actual data to the discussion, but I'm not certain those links support your claim of temperatures "equal to or higher than todays". Closest I could find in the first paper was:
The level of warmth during the peak of the MWP in the second half of the 10th century, equalling or slightly exceeding the mid-20th century warming, is in agreement with the results from other more recent large-scale multi-proxy temperature reconstructions
(emphasis mine) ... but we know global temperatures have risen significantly in the last 60 years. Do you have evidence that this is not the case in Europe?
The second link was paywalled, but the abstract says northern Sweden experienced "similar levels of summer warmth in the medieval period (MWP, c. CE 900–1100) and the latter half of the 20th century". Hard to pin down the comparison dates, but again, not "equal or higher than today".
The third link says that some reconstructions of northern Sweden and Finland specifically have indeed been up to 0.6C warmer 2000 years ago, when compared to the 1951-1980 mean (rather than today's warmer temperatures), but also says that proxy reconstructions can vary wildly, by 1.5-3C, depending on which Scandinavian record is used, and finishes with:
We conclude that the temperature history of the last millenium is much less understood than often suggested, and that the regional and particularly the hemispheric scale pre-1400 temperature variance is largely unknown.
So basically, it was certainly fairly warm in Europe during certain past periods, but the evidence is not reliable enough to say exactly how warm, and no paper supports the claim that it's "equal or higher than todays" temperatures. In any case, Europe in general (and Sweden/Finland in particular) are only one part of the global picture; temperatures were relatively low elsewhere in the world even during the MWP.
It is literally free from China to AU as well; most Chinese/HK vendors ship here for free these days, and to most other destinations.
Those high prices are from the US to Australia; why is that? US international postage prices seem huge to us - more than shipping from AU to the US. Amazon (when it deigns to ship here) are often much cheaper, like $9-$20, but that's still more than e.g. from the UK, let alone China.
Both should respect each others property and businesses and laws
Guess who sets out those principles of international respect for property, businesses etc? The same WTO that you want shut down.
The US agreed in 1995 to abide by the WTO's principles and rules. If they no longer want to, they're free to withdraw, but they can't expect other nations to respect the rules if they won't.
Exactly what Antigua is saying. There's earnings to be made by violating US copyrights.
Don't like it? National sovereignty; too bad.
What makes you think US-passed laws have anything to do with Antigua and Barbuda, a foreign nation with its own laws? US laws aren't being "overruled", they simply don't apply outside the US.
There are international organisations such as the WTO and WIPO that set trade rules that both these nations have each agreed to abide by. The US is free to lodge a dispute with them, but they might not get very far considering it was the US who violated those rules in the first place.
And of course, the US has no power to "shut down" the WTO. They can continue to ignore it and keep violating WTO rules where it suits them, but then more nations will do simply the same and follow in Antigua/Barbuda's footsteps.
If the US wants others to follow the rules and respect its copyrights, it will have to follow the rules itself.
Buses don't provide door-to-door, non-stop service. Taxis do - but of course now you have to cover the whole cost of the driver by yourself.
Individual scientists have overturned long-standing consensus for the entire history of science.
This same argument is also used by the countless wrong people too.
Sure, it does happen - but only after a) the method and conclusions are shown to be rock-solid, b) confirming evidence is found by third parties, and c) the existing body of evidence is also explained in the new context. This does not happen commonly - it's far more often that attempts to challenge the status quo fail one or all of the above, and are quickly forgotten.
it has very often turned out that the minority was right
And how often has that minority been wrong?
When I can easily identify errors in a scientific paper, then yes, my judgment is better than theirs. When scientist B points out an error in scientist A's paper, which I can verify for myself is true, then yes, my judgement is better than that of scientists A.
And when Scientists A and C point out errors in Scientist B's critique, who do you believe then? You have no idea even of how much you don't know in the complex field of climatology, yet you're still certain you can "easily" identify errors that the paper's authors, their peer reviewers and the great bulk of climatologists somehow missed completely. Or perhaps you're just selecting the conclusions you want to believe.
who do you think is the one suffering from Dunning-Kruger?
My answer stands :-)
rather than evaluating the actual science in each case.
I'm not capable of evaluating the science at that level. Neither are you, unless you have a PhD and years of work in climate science that you haven't mentioned. We don't have the training or the experience, we haven't been reading all the relevant literature for the last decade, we don't even know what we would need to know to do that. The conclusions sound reasonable to me, but so do the critiques - and so do the counter-critiques. How is a layman supposed to tell who's the most accurate? It's not high-school level stuff.
That's science for you. Actual figures, peer-reviewed paper. If you have a problem with it, refute the science, not my comment about the science.
I assume you're referring to Fyfe et al (2013). And no, I have no problem with it. The models are clearly failing to robustly predict surface temperature variability, and if you read the paper itself, you'll see that it offers a number of possible reasons for this, including the ENSO and AMO oscillations, stratospheric aerosols, model base factors like climate sensitivity, or just unusual natural variability. There's a lot of factors involved, and nobody's claiming that the science is perfect yet, not even close. But we do know, for example, that ocean warming (where 90% of the heat imbalance goes) is continuing unabated, as does ocean acidification. Surface temperatures, while important to humans, are only a small part of the overall rising trend - and they can fluctuate up just as quickly as down.
What I do have a problem with, is the prodigious assumptive leap that a paper like Fyfe's somehow provides evidence that all climate science is therefore junk, that AGW must therefore be insignificant, or even that the 180-year global warming trend has suddenly ceased. This paper does not begin to suggest that, merely that our surface temperature models need more work, nothing more. Meanwhile, other peer reviewed papers like Santer et al (2013) conclude unequivocally that "Our results... underscore the dominant role human activities have played in recent climate change." (I can cite half a dozen others that say the same, if you want).
YOU are ignoring the great many scientists who do disagree with IPCC
Not ignoring (I've read some of Dr Lindzen's papers, and others); just giving more weight to the far greater numbers of practicing climate scientists who support the IPCC's conclusions. Dr Lindzen and the others you mention are very much in the minority, according to numerous studies from many different parties, and of course the IPCC's own many authors, backed by their reviews of the last 5 years of climate papers. If you want to call listening to a 97% majority "cherry-picking", I don't really know how to respond.
your reliance on consensus as an argument suggests that you actually don't know much about how science really works
It's not consensus of uninformed opinions, it's confirmation of expert results. I'm sure you're smart enough to realise that, so I can only imagine you don't want to.
When a scientist publishes a paper, especially one that contradicts current thinking, we don't immediately throw out all our textbooks; first, other scientists try to confirm their results. Particularly in complex fields, there is debate - are the conclusions actually supported by the data? Are there any questionable assumptions, are the techniques applied appropriate, are there any important factors that have been overlooked, are the interpretations of the data reasonable, that sort of thing. Peer review catches the obvious errors, but particularly for papers that challenge the status quo, the biggest question is usually, how do you reconcile this result with the existing body of evidence? Declaring everybody else to be "wrong" doesn't get you far; you have to find other data that confirms your own results, and you have to explain how all that existing counter-evidence doesn't apply to your conclusions. If you can do that convincingly, other scientists will support your work. If you can't, your results are considered suspect and are assumed to have a flaw, at least until more confirmation can be found. After all, if two observations disagree then either they're observing different things, or one is just wrong.
This is a crucial part of the scientific process, as much as peer review. It's what saves us from crackpots and wasting time on free-energy machines, it protects us from inadvertently flawed results, and it's also what keeps the majority of science and engineering focused and on track. We can't all be experts in every field, so we defer to those that are. I personally don't have the expertise or experience to properly judge Dr Lindzen's work, but his colleagues do - and if the vast majority of them still aren't convinced by his claims after 15 years, then it's fairly safe to for the lay person to assume that his claims (and those of the handful of scientists who continue to deny the results of the thousands of other climatologists) are most probably either flawed, or just don't apply.
Of course, if you still believe that Scientist A's pet theory is right when Scientists B through Z have all produced peer-reviewed results that disagree, you either have to believe your own judgement is superior to theirs (hint: it isn't), or that they're all in a huge conspiracy to supress the truth. I'll leave you to decide which is more likely.
Dr Lindzen is not listed as a lead or contributing author of any AR5 chapter, though a few of his recent papers are cited and discussed.