The Convenient Lies of An Inconvenient Truth

Military briefings are done in accordance with fairly strict rules.  For a reason.  One of the "rules" is that in a decision brief you list both the facts and the assumptions up front, right after giving the background on the problem (note: you rarely need a decision if there isn't an underlying problem).  The reason you do this is because decision makers don't need their time wasted sitting through a bunch of PPT slides on what the solution should be if they don't agree with your assumptions!  When the decision maker doesn't agree with your assumptions, the briefing usually ends right then and there, and you are sent back to your office to get the right information before presenting the brief again. 
Let me give you an example.  When GEN Petraeus was getting briefed up on the plan for the Baghdad "surge", if someone had listed as an assumption that Iran will end their involvement in Iraq by April '07 due to UN pressure, the brief would likely have ended right then, with GEN Petraeus telling the briefer to go back and correct that assumption.  Any course of action about to be briefed to the CG based on that assumption would be ridiculous, as the UN is completely ineffectual in getting Iran to do anything at all.  That's why you list the assumptions up front.  If your assumptions are wrong, the rest of the brief is useless, and doesn't need to be briefed. 
Why do I bring this up?
Because when you hear someone say that most scientists agree that life on earth is threatened by global warming, that information is incomplete unless you know what those scientist believe are the facts and assumptions about global warming.  This is very significant because most of those scientists are not climatologists, and they are basing their predictions on the facts and assumptions that are presented to them by the climatologists.  Those scientists; economists, biologists, social scientists, population movement experts, etc, are dependent upon the climatologists to have an agreed upon set of facts and assumptions that they can use to put into their models.  So when you hear that an economist, for example, states that life is threatened because of global warming fueled economic disaster, you have to know how they got to that conclusion.  If the assumption that the economist used is the Goricle assumption of 20 foot sea level rise in the next 20 years instead of the 11 to 17 inches of rise in the next 100 years as predicted by the UN then of course the economist's prediction will be much more dire.  But if you believe the UN over the Goricle (I know, tough choice) then the "expert" opinion of the economic scientist is useless.   In fact, every single news report that states all the scientists agree on the dangers of global warmmongering is useless unless you know what the facts and assumptions were used by the scientists in coming up with that agreement. 
Keep that in mind when you hear how many scientists agree we are on the eve of destruction.  I personally would agree that we are doomed as a planet and species if I agree with the assumption that there is a fifteen mile wide asteroid heading straight for Earth and it will hit us next week.  Given that assumption, 100% of scientists would agree that we are doomed, along with about 99% of humanity.  If the foundation of the global warmmongering scientists is the convenient lies of An Inconvenient Truth, then you can expect that they will all agree we are doomed.  However if don't agree with the assumption that a huge asteroid is about to crash into us, then 100% agreement among scientists is quite useless, isn't it?
Thank God we aren't all starting from the same set of facts and assumptions.  For some of us, one big assumption is that the Earth is more complex than even brainiac Al Gore can understand.  Another assumption would be that if Gore doesn't believe his own global warmmongering bullshit, we probably shouldn't either.  For some of us the facts are that scientists predicted world starvation before the year 2000, that scientists predicted disastrous global cooling in the 70s, that since 1947 scientists predicted that nuclear annihilation was only minutes away, and that scientists predicted a population bomb overwhelming the earth's resources by the turn of the century...all proven completely and utterly ludicrous.  One needs to know the input before you can know how to assess the resultant output.