Have you ever heard of the AAAS? American Association for the Advancement of Science? If you haven't, then you're not doing science. They are the publishers of one of the premier peer-reviewed scientific journals in the world:
Science. They have made the following article publicly available to address precisely this point:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
A few relevant quotes:
"Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain. Some have used this as an argument against adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, while discussing a major U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report on the risks of climate change, then-EPA administrator Christine Whitman argued, "As [the report] went through review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change" (1). Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change.
This is not the case." Emphasis mine.
"The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).
The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change.
Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position." Emphasis again mine.
This is a stunning level of agreement. Whenever there is an "accepted wisdom," there are almost always iconoclasts publishing papers looking for flaws in the theories that underlie it. People get famous for discovering such flaws. It is therefore a tautology that there are always people looking. You can find articles questioning relativity being published to this day in reputable and even prestigious journals of physics. The fact that there aren't any doesn't indicate a conspiracy; it indicates that no one has been able to find any credible, supportable evidence to question this consensus.
Of the major scientific organizations in the United States,
only one disagrees with AGW, predictably enough the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. Amusingly, as I write, their site is down.
I'd say this thread needs to be moved to Conspiracy Theories. It certainly doesn't have anything to do with the actual demonstrable consensus represented by the major scientific associations, the National Academies or their equivalents among the G8, or any other major scientific organization.
I'll be happy to demolish your links in detail, if you'd like- but I'd say that anyone is capable of noting that your link to the "talking points memo" will note after following all the links that it has only two sources,
both of which either cite documents on the same page or documents that return to the source. In other words, these folks just say whatever they want, and then someone else uses it as a "source" for something, and then the original site uses
that as a source for some further piece of BS they want to claim is from an "unbiased source." Looks great until you actually dig into the details. There is a term for this: obfuscation. The more common term is "lying." If you really want me to detail all this incestuous crap, I'll be more than happy, but I doubt you will be when I'm done.
only that the really bad ones have already been tossed.