The piece is done from the perspective of a lawyer cross-examining testimony from expert witnesses. It is not meant nor presented as a scientific debate piece.

>Did that really come from Wharton? (And what does the Wharton School of Business have to do with the Institute for Law and Economics, whatever that is?) It seems pretty darned opinionated coming from MBAs. Those folks tend to be ruled by cold eyed analysis, not political passion. Frankly this reads like a tract from any number of activist global warming skeptics. The fit just seems wrong.
>
>Please understand my post is not about the scientific truth, whatever that proves to be, but the abstract qua abstract. It just doesn't ring right. Something is not being fully disclosed, such as the exact relationship between the institute and Wharton. I have known some Whartons and they don't talk like that or stick their necks out like that. The BS detector is blinking red.
>
>>This paper is starting to show up everywhere, so why not the thread?
>>
>>It's 82 pages, but for those interested it's quite a read.
>>http://www.probeinternational.org/UPennCross.pdf
>>
>>Here's the Abstract:
>>
>>INSTITUTE FOR LAW AND ECONOMICS
>>A Joint Research Center of the Law School, the Wharton School, and the Department of Economics in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania
>>
>>Abstract
>>Legal scholarship has come to accept as true the various pronouncements of the
>>Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientists who have been
>>active in the movement for greenhouse gas (ghg) emission reductions to combat global
>>warming. The only criticism that legal scholars have had of the story told by this group
>>of activist scientists – what may be called the climate establishment – is that it is too
>>conservative in not paying enough attention to possible catastrophic harm from
>>potentially very high temperature increases.
>>
>>This paper departs from such faith in the climate establishment by comparing the
>>picture of climate science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
>>(IPCC) and other global warming scientist advocates with the peer-edited scientific
>>literature on climate change. A review of the peer-edited literature reveals a systematic
>>tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical
>>techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while
>>concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key
>>processes involved in climate change. Fundamental open questions include not only the
>>size but the direction of feedback effects that are responsible for the bulk of the
>>temperature increase predicted to result from atmospheric greenhouse gas increases:
>>while climate models all presume that such feedback effects are on balance strongly
>>positive, more and more peer-edited scientific papers seem to suggest that feedback
>>effects may be small or even negative. The cross-examination conducted in this paper
>>reveals many additional areas where the peer-edited literature seems to conflict with the
>>picture painted by establishment climate science, ranging from the magnitude of 20th
>>century surface temperature increases and their relation to past temperatures; the
>>possibility that inherent variability in the earth’s non-linear climate system, and not
>>increases in CO2, may explain observed late 20th century warming; the ability of climate
>>models to actually explain past temperatures; and, finally, substantial doubt about the
>>methodological validity of models used to make highly publicized predictions of global
>>warming impacts such as species loss.
>>
>>Insofar as establishment climate science has glossed over and minimized such
>>fundamental questions and uncertainties in climate science, it has created widespread
>>misimpressions that have serious consequences for optimal policy design. Such
>>misimpressions uniformly tend to support the case for rapid and costly decarbonization of
>>the American economy, yet they characterize the work of even the most rigorous legal
>>scholars. A more balanced and nuanced view of the existing state of climate science
>>supports much more gradual and easily reversible policies regarding greenhouse gas
>>emission reduction, and also urges a redirection in public funding of climate science
>>away from the continued subsidization of refinements of computer models and toward
>>increased spending on the development of standardized observational datasets against
>>which existing climate models can be tested.
>>