Are you serious ? Not only is there multiple way to interpret same data (after all there are so many competing models to explain it) and at best you can debate confidence intervals and models - it's far beyond non-experts expecting them to review the data directly is ridiculous - the only way they can work with experts is based on trust and credibility.
And no, it's not unreasonable to expect a non-technical person to review the data or the methods either. Many people don't want to put the time in to try but it's well within the reach of any high-school grad.
Not if you don't trust the field. It's like saying if you don't like your numerology readings hire a different numerologist and compare the results.
Not saying I agree with the view but science is a lot less convincing when when you can't setup repeatable experiments.
>And no, it's not unreasonable to expect a non-technical person to review the data or the methods either.
You're going to review PHD level work that ran weather simulations on supercomputers and compiled various data sources with highschool level knowledge in your spare time ?
Perhaps you could do a security audit of OpenSSL if you have some free time on your hands - I'm sure people will even pay you if you manage to find security issues and you' be doing the community a big favor. Maybe we should hire some highschool grads to do it - start a kickstarter campaign and I'll pitch in.
To be fair, this is excellent advice, much better than "your numerologist knows what he's talking about, and you'd better follow his recommendations".
No real reason to compare the results afterwards, though.
But sure, if you don't trust someone from the 'warming' camp, get a 'status-quo' camp person to check their work.
And as for numerologists - try looking for another person skilled in your actual problem, relationships, work, etc...
When a mathematician checks their work they do so by a different method, not just repeating the same steps to reach the same potentially flawed answer.
If you think that stuff like economics/climatology/etc. has the same level of rigor and validation applied to it as established and verified theories from hard science then boy do I have some bad news for you (struggling for SD 2 as ideal vs SD 5 for eg.).
Reading other people's mails won't refute the physics.
And no, other factors aren't the answer:
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wor...
It's the same with the Earth. It's as isolated as the isolated room would be -- we know exactly how much heat can dissipate and how much must contribute to the increase of the temperature for the room, and we have quite good estimates for Earth too (less heat dissipates to the space when CO2 increases, and the Sun shines the heat nevertheless - we can nicely calculate even the contributions of the changes in orbit and some clever scientist did that even before the computers were available, it took years of calculations by hand then but it was done). We can be wrong for some particular year, but the direction and the average increase match.
The room is of course simpler than the Earth. Imagine having some water pumps, some fans and some chunks of ice in the room. You know the formulas for the water and ice but you have more to calculate for short term effects. But you still know there will be less ice as the time goes by and more water. And still always a bit warmer.
CO2 is a green house gas - good job mr. high-school physicist - now show me the temperature projections along with human CO2 production graphs and estimated impacts and error margins and past model prediction performances vs measured data. You know the actual things that matter for policy implications. See that's where things go beyond high school.
http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/index.shtml
There are other countries among those who took part in making the reports who would be more than eager to point on anything that's wrong there. And nobody did find anything significant against.
Wait - but you didn't verify it your self ? After all :
>You don't have to be a rocket scientist to repeat most of the basic calculations which give similar results.
Or does it all boil down to trust and your original argument is nonsense.