A further riposte from a flat earther

On-Line Opinon kindly put up a recent post 'A riposte from a 'Flat Earther'which attracted 66 comments. Since that post I attended a talk given by Dick Warburton who among his various roles was the Chair of the Board of Taxation 2000-2011. While the contents of talk are bound by Chatham House rules, it is worth noting that Dick began his talk by saying that when he first saw An Inconvenient Truth and because he has eight grandchildren he immediately thought that he had failed them. However as he began to investigate the issue of anthropogenic global warming further he began to have doubts. You can read a summary of his views in the March 2011 issue of Quadrant The Intelligent Voter's Guide to Global Warming (Part I)but suffice to say when he raised these doubts with Penny Wong, he was told that the Climate Science was proven and she would brook no further discussion.

The talk and articles raised further issues in my mind and I would like to lay them out.

How can you not believe in anthropogenic global warming when the all climate scientists say it exists.

In 1980 99.999% of the medical and scientific community believed ulcers of the stomach and duodenum were caused by stress. When Dr Warren, 68, and Dr Marshall, 54, announced in 1982 that Helicobacter pylori, a rare bacterium, caused ulcers of the stomach and duodenum, they faced intense scepticism from the medical community.

Many doctors doubted whether bacteria could thrive in such an acidic environment.

To prove the point, Dr Marshall became his own guinea pig, drinking a culture of H pylori to give himself an ulcer and then clearing it up with antibiotics.

"This extraordinary act demonstrated outstanding dedication and commitment to his research," said Lord May, Australian president of the Royal Society in London. "The work by Barry Marshall and Robin Warren produced one of the most radical and important changes in the last 50 years in the perception of a medical condition."

Even so, said Brian Spratt, professor of microbiology at Imperial College, London, "they had a hell of a job convincing everyone that ulcers are not physiological but were in fact an infectious disease".

Dr Warren and Dr Marshall subsequently shared the 2005 Nobel Prize for Medicine.

It was not consensus that proved or disproved the theory but an experiment or set of observations.

I know that in 2007 Al Gore and the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize but I am unaware that any climate change scientist has actually won a Nobel Science Prize.

Is there a critical experiment that proves or disproves the climate change models?