Actually, it’s a direct reference to a two-part survey of about 12,000 peer-reviewed studies. The actual claim being made as a result of that survey is this, “Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” When they gave researchers the opportunity to look at their own studies making no claim, the consensus grew to 98.4%.
I already explained this on another thread.
It’s not just that man! They want cleaner air, and fuel sources that don’t require us to do manly things like knock over mountains and fill rivers with toxic ash.
It’s like some kind of commie tree hugger nightmare.
A fairly amazing quote from Kentucky State Senator Brandon Smith:
“As you (Energy & Environment Cabinet official) sit there in your chair with your data, we sit up here in ours with our data and our constituents and stuff behind us. I don’t want to get into the debate about climate change, but I will simply point out that I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here. Nobody will dispute that. Yet there are no coal mines on Mars. There are no factories on Mars that I’m aware of.”
This is not just wrong, it is egregiously, fabulously wrong. It is confidently delivered as fact.
I imagine a bunch of the more shameless denialist stoodges and dupes will pick this “fact” up, maybe bolstered with pictures of the “searing red deserts of Mars,” and temperature ranges provided in degrees Kelvin.
Watch for it in letters to the editor, blog comments, and Twitter!
Video at:
For Christ’s sake, Jan, it’s 109 degrees out.
See? AGW alarmism preys on low information. 1) Climategate involved email exchanged between individual scientists about how to not share data and methodology – even to the point of destroying emails – rather than hand it over to unfriendly peer reviewers. That’s not even up for debate. The defense of the scientists was that it was NATURAL that scientists would not want to reveal their raw analysis and algorithms. But this is the science of computer modeling and without that information, there can be no peer review.
The people who defend AGW alarmism the most enthusiastically are those who have spent the least time investigating the actual methods used to collect data or build the models. They conflate headlines like “97% blah blah blah” to mean things the original authors never claimed and when peer reviewers critique them unfavorably they just wave it off “Well they’re just ‘deniers’.”
Let me put it this way. Global temperatures have risen .8C in 150 years since the end of the Little Ice Age. They’ve risen 1.5C in 250 years. That’s not a ‘denier’ claim. That’s Berkeley Earth. Does that sound like a catastrophe?
Actually, it’s a direct reference to a two-part survey of about 12,000 peer-reviewed studies. […] “Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
After deconstructing Cook’s data that was publicly available, blogger Brandon Shollenberger found that only 65% of the 12,000+ scientific abstracts Cook and his team of volunteers studied can be said to endorse the position that human activity is responsible for most of the experienced global warming. In a typical demonstration of a devotion to transparency, the University of Queensland threatened to sue him for using John Cook’s data to analyze his claims.
The abstract was limited to paper’s expressing an opinion. Given the difficulty of proving a negative, it is presumed that of papers expressing an opinion, they would attempt to confirm a positive rather than disprove a negative.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Confirmation bias cannot be ruled out from a prediction from a computer model based on theoretical algorithms that cannot be tested in the short term for measurements that are incredibly small in the short term. How can a scientist know that his model has a flaw? It gets unexpected results. Confirmation bias. Even the collection of the raw temperature data is as close to an art as a science with assumptions and algorithms to adjust for urbanization, parking lots, moved stations, and lazy human record takers.
I took Wynn’s post to mean that skepticism (or ‘skepticism’) is a good position for politicians to take if the only thing they care about is getting elected.
I did mean it just that way and no more. But I have also taken the effort be informed on the intricate algorithms employed by atmospheric computer models, on hotly debated assumptions they use, and on the raw data the base it all on which is itself teased out with algorithms and assumptions to compensate for urbanization, changing measurement locations, and lazy record takers. And also, the very, very small changes in temperature that the models are intended to predict.
But I don’t see why my opinions on computer models matters in this case. The facts are the facts regardless of whether it comes from a “denier” or not:
Alarmist policy changes (that would have any effect at all) would be extremely disruptive to the national economy. Even assuming the West Coast middle class and poor completely accepted the most catastrophic predictions of the IPCC and other studies, if they were told how much Green policies currently cost them every year and the cost of any policies that would successfully ameliorate alleged global warming, I imagine they would vote for skeptical pols as well.
“A man’s gonna do what he has to do when he’s got a hungry mouth to feed.” ~ Bob Dylan
So, this is interesting. You say ‘facts are facts’ and as evidence for that statement you proceed to regale us with your opinion as if it were fact.
It’s true what they say: Irony isn’t just a river in Egypt.
Shollenberger was booted from using that material because it was retrieved without permission by sourcing copyrighted material owned by the university, and then promptly sending a letter to John Cook, letting him know that he had the intent to publicize the location of unprotected data from a private study. That letter he hasn’t published the verbiage of on his own blog. He’s only willing to publish snippets of letters from the university that is, with good reason, quite angry at him.
If you want to know how valid he is as a resource (even when he has full access to his material), you may want to take a look at this blog which discusses flaws in Schollenberger’s review of Michael Mann’s The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the front lines. Schollenberger makes several errors. No matter his behavior with UQ, he isn’t your best resource.
http://www.frankodwyer.com/blog/2012/03/06/mann-shollenberger/
BTW — in sourcing this material, I noticed that many of the people making the claim that Cook got it wrong are misquoting his survey. That’s why they think his numbers are bad. They don’t know how to or haven’t bothered to read the original survey. This is what they claim the survey says:
“it’s always “97%” – of scientific articles surveyed (by volunteers) supported the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming”
That’s not what the survey found, and it’s not what Cook claimed. The survey found this:
“Among abstracts that expressed a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the scientific consensus. Among scientists who expressed a position on AGW in their abstract, 98.4% endorsed the consensus.”
It makes no claim about the number from the total abstracts. It only makes a claim about those studies which take a position on AGW. His published numbers are sound.
The fact is that skepticism is a winning platform in the US. It could be unpleasant to hear but it is true. Look at the map.
Shollenberger was booted from using that material because it was retrieved without permission by sourcing copyrighted material owned by the university, and then promptly sending a letter to John Cook, letting him know that he had the intent to publicize the location of unprotected data from a private study.
Um…sourcing copyrighted material is not a breach. That’s called research. You can’t copyright a fact. And that is how credible UQ is.
[The survey claimed] “Among abstracts that expressed a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the scientific consensus. Among scientists who expressed a position on AGW in their abstract, 98.4% endorsed the consensus.” It makes no claim about the number from the total abstracts. It only makes a claim about those studies which take a position on AGW.
…among the articles surveyed as determined by the volunteers. What’s the mistake?
The mistake you are claiming Shollenberger et al are making is the mistake of 97% of the people who reference this article as proof of a “scientific consensus”.
Could there be a more ironic term than “scientific consensus”? Not “scientific method” or “scientific research” or even “scientific fact”. Have you ever heard anyone refer to the scientific consensus regarding the distance between the Earth and the Sun?
To quote Bob “J.R.” Dobbs,
“Act like a dumbfuck and they’ll treat you like an equal.”
And then vote for you.
Uh … yeah. All. The. Time. We even gave it a name: 1AU.
The actual distance between the Earth and the Sun is constantly varying, but that hasn’t stopped us from coming up with a commonly accepted nominal value and using that when appropriate, or using more accurate values for specific niche purposes when necessary.
What was your point - would you rather ‘teach the controversy,’ and pretend that the Earth-Sun distance is unknowable?
Uh … yeah. All. The. Time. We even gave it a name: 1AU.
No. 1AU is a unit of measure. The actual length of an official unit of measure is somewhat arbitrary as you sort of implied. Someone makes that decision. If it were a consensus, it would vary over the years. The actual distance to between the Earth and the Sun is called a “measurement”. And that is why no consensus is needed…as is the case with all science.
“Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.” ~ Michael Crichton
If anyone ever still wonders about the difference between true skeptics and deniers, this is a great example. Wynn is happy to take an e-mail where someone was sick of handing data to a disingenuous reviewer, something one review after another found improper but hardly serious, as proof everything in the field might be confirmation bias and nobody is trustworthy.
But supposing a ruinous cost of action somehow doesn’t need any skepticism at all; it can be taken as simple fact without needing any agreement, citation, or evidence. Surely that’s not the sort of thing that warrants any questioning, right?
No, measurements are the results of experiments to figure out a value, and ultimately these give an agreed on value for other scientists to use. Quantities like the earth-sun distance, or to take something fixed the elementary charge, now have generally accepted values but took many experiments to work out.
Crichton is a decent author who often doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to science. In truth, when you hear the word “consensus” used, it almost always reflects the same thing: most scientists genuinely do agree on something, and they need to point it out because someone disagrees anyway.
That disagreement may occasionally be something brilliant, but more often it’s something foolish, or even dishonest. The Galileo gambit applies here:
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. - Carl Sagan
Not only does saying something is against consensus not imply it has any value, but when people pretend that it conveys merit to their dissent, it’s usually because there isn’t any.
Whereas in truth consensus is a valuable thing: not for the progression of a field, which involves people looking critically at it, but for making its findings of use to other fields. If you’re going to learn enough atmospheric physics and climate science to understand global warming in full, you should form your own opinions, but if you’re not, your best bet is to listen to the people that did.
Or let’s make it simpler: would you actually be more inclined to trust climate scientists if they said there was not a consensus on this issue? If not, taking the agreement as evidence you’re being had is simply begging the question.
I always take my thinking advice from best-selling authors.
Good points. I think that it’s time for another refresher lesson on the climate change evidence. Al Gore tried to do it in his TED talk movie a while back. But what we need, again, is a recap of all the evidence to date and why that evidence leads us to the model that man-made interference with the environment can be traced to the changes in the climate. And how we might discern confounding. I think we need another info talk instead of all this debate-about-the-debate. I find it amusing but preposterous to always be talking about the opinions rather than the science itself.
Well, you know how tricky those climate scientists are, always conspiring to destroy the economy and all, just so they can get more grant money and lead the global economy into a grinding depression, just so they can make us try to be more energy independent, drive shitty Smart Cars, and save the glaciers. I think they may all be Socialists…or fascists…or Commies or something.
Why should we believe dweeby climate scientists when our job-creating pals at Exxon clearly have our general well being so much more in mind. They work so hard to make our lives smoother, and all they ask in return is a measly 8% of our GDP…and, oh yeah, we need to keep publicly funding the largest military on the planet to protect the oil supply as well, for our own good of course. There is no reason whatsoever to question their motives. A coastline destroying oil spill is a small price to pay if it means we don’t have to ride bicycles (shudder).
But supposing a ruinous cost of action somehow doesn’t need any skepticism at all; it can be taken as simple fact without needing any agreement, citation, or evidence. Surely that’s not the sort of thing that warrants any questioning, right?
I have the citations. I’ve done the research. I’ve examined the math of what a decrease in energy carbon output 2% over 40 years due to taxes and mandates would do to the economy—starting with the poor. I’ve examine how those policies are playing out in, say, Germany. The fact that you don’t understand that what I’ve said is self-evidently true is because you have not. It’s a little hard to catch you up to speed in a comment section. But, why would a citation from a “denier” matter to you (that is, denies that we know to anything beyond trivial speculation that increasing CO2 output beyond current levels would be catastrophic). You believe in the Devil (deniers) but you don’t know what he says or who he is. You don’t know he includes the founder of Greenpeace and the guy who coined the term “global warming”. You don’t care. AGW alarmism preys on the willingly low-information consumer.
No, measurements are the results of experiments to figure out a value, and ultimately these give an agreed on value for other scientists to use. Quantities like the earth-sun distance, or to take something fixed the elementary charge, now have generally accepted values but took many experiments to work out.
That’s right. Experiments with the real world. Not a computer model that claims to make a prediction about the weather 100 years in advance. Computer models are a useful scientific exercise, but when they are consistently shown to be wrong after 5, 10, 20 years, it is time to re-examine the underlying premises.
Or let’s make it simpler: would you actually be more inclined to trust climate scientists if they said there was not a consensus on this issue?
I would wonder why–if the science is clear–a scientist would care about taking a vote. Consensus is a trap for suckers.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period. […] I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. ~ Michael Crichton
