because of how the articles are presenting the information. This isn't a field I know a huge amount about, but I DID notice one glaring omission in one of the first links I clicked on, describing Dr. Christopher Landsea's withdrawal from the IPCC because of how they misrepresented his research.

The article implies that Landsea is a global warming denier (even lists his CV as "CV of a denier"). He isn't. In fact, he supports wholeheartedly the notion of human-influenced global warming, but he thinks that it won't have more than a minor effect on hurricane intensity/frequencey .

This debacle may have been good evidence that the debate (and the science) have become politicized, but it's fundamentally dishonest to call Dr. Landsea a global warming denier, which he most certainly is not. Quite the contrary, in fact. Instead, the article you linked to goes to great effort not to talk about Landsea's scientific opinion on global warming, and avoids entirely Landsea's discussion of why the science didn't justify the IPCC's conclusions. Why? Because the author would have had to acknowledge that Landsea agrees with climatologists about human-influenced global warming. "CV of a denier", indeed.

Now this is a story I luckily know, because I followed it when I happened. I hope you can understand that this strains my ability to read the ones I don't know with an open mind.

I am finally getting around to reading these articles and commenting in more detail ...

Statistics needed -- The Deniers Part I

I found this article to be an interesting read.  The primary points I took away from the article were:

1. Michael Mann was the author of the now famous Hockey Stick Graph which was ultimately discredited as being faulty in 2001 by Dr. Edward Wegman and an assembled panel of professional statisticians all of who were working pro bono.
2. The the official view of the International Panel for Climate Change in 2001 regarding the Hockey Stick Graph was unsupportable.
3. Two Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, published peer-reviewed critiques of Mann's work of their own.
4. Wegman: "Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported"
5. Wegman: "I am baffled by the claim that the incorrect method doesn't matter because the answer is correct anyway. Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science."
6. With bad science, only true believers can assert that they nevertheless obtained the right answer.

Dr. Wegman is a professor at the Center for Computational Statistics at George Mason University, chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, and board member of the American Statistical Association.

...

Mann's findings were arguably the single most influential study in swaying the public debate, and in 2001 they became the official view of the International Panel for Climate Change, the UN body that is organizing the worldwide effort to combat global warming. But Mann's work also had its critics, particularly two Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who published peer-reviewed critiques of their own.

Wegman accepted the energy and commerce committee's assignment, and agreed to assess the Mann controversy pro bono. He conducted his third-party review by assembling an expert panel of statisticians, who also agreed to work pro bono. Wegman also consulted outside statisticians, including the Board of the American Statistical Association. At its conclusion, the Wegman review entirely vindicated the Canadian critics and repudiated Mann's work.

"Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported," Wegman stated, adding that "The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable." When Wegman corrected Mann's statistical mistakes, the hockey stick disappeared.

Wegman found that Mann made a basic error that "may be easily overlooked by someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimate studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians." Instead, this small group of climate scientists were working on their own, largely in isolation, and without the academic scrutiny needed to ferret out false assumptions.

...

In other words, Wegman believes that much of the climate science that has been done should be taken with a grain of salt -- although the studies may have been peer reviewed, the reviewers were often unqualified in statistics. Past studies, he believes, should be reassessed by competent statisticians and in future, the climate science world should do better at incorporating statistical know-how.

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While Wegman's advice -- to use trained statisticians in studies reliant on statistics -- may seem too obvious to need stating, the "science is settled" camp resists it. Mann's hockey-stick graph may be wrong, many experts now acknowledge, but they assert that he nevertheless came to the right conclusion.

To which Wegman, and doubtless others who want more rigorous science, shake their heads in disbelief. As Wegman summed it up to the energy and commerce committee in later testimony: "I am baffled by the claim that the incorrect method doesn't matter because the answer is correct anyway. Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science." With bad science, only true believers can assert that they nevertheless obtained the right answer.

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Edward Wegman received his Ph.D. degree in mathematical statistics from the University of Iowa. In 1978, he went to the Office of Naval Research, where he headed the Mathematical Sciences Division with responsibility Navy-wide for basic research programs. He coined the phrase computational statistics, and developed a high-profile research area around this concept, which focused on techniques and methodologies that could not be achieved without the capabilities of modern computing resources and led to a revolution in contemporary statistical graphics. Dr. Wegman was the original program director of the basic research program in Ultra High Speed Computing at the Strategic Defense Initiative's Innovative Science and Technology Office. He has served as editor or associate editor of numerous prestigious journals and has published more than 160 papers and eight books.