re: #578 elle Plater

Especially when massive amounts of public monies and human lives are at stake, academic work should have a more intense level of scrutiny and review. It is especially the case that authors of policy-related documents like the IPCC report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, should not be the same people as those that constructed the academic papers.

First off, AGW science and the need to address the consequences of AGW do not rest of Michael Mann’s papers. As the Realclimate entry to which Charles linked makes clear, there are many different “hockey stick” graphs covering a variety of types of measurements. Furthermore, the theoretical underpinnings behind CO2’s effects are well founded.

Finally the claim that the “Scientific Basis” report ought to exclude as authors those who wrote and published the original papers is absurd. While I agree that writing a consensus document such as “Scientific Basis” ought to include scientists from the entire scope of climatology related sciences, excluding the very people doing the work is a way to intentionally blind the people trying to write the consensus.