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Yes, science is not done by opinion poll. But the IPCC report is the result of a lot of highly qualified scientists doing a lot of hard work going over thousands of published scientific papers, and the report was heavily reviewed by other scientists.

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.)

Science is not done by stupidity, either. All of these screaming meamies ignore the fact that the earth is dynamic. A static state is forever unchanged, think of a perfectly maintained fish tank. A dynamic state is constantly changing and in a model as complex as a planet, it is almost impossible to understand the etiology of significant changes. We only know that things will not stay the same.

Of course the earth's climate is changing. If it didn't, there would be no breathable air. If the earth remained in its original state, life as we know it would have caught fire before it took hold.

But the Cullens and Pelleys of the world have no need of a sound,scientific foundation for thier ideas. That might interfere with their standing in politically correct circles.