Climate Change

[Glacier]

Skeptical Science Study Finds 97% Consensus on Human-Caused Global Warming in the Peer-Reviewed Literature

http://www.skepticalscience.com/97-perc ... -2013.html

It's thoroughly studied, peer reviewed and settled. Humans are causing climate change. Now what are we going to do about it?

If it is settled then why do we have 360 peer reviewed papers that don't agree? Do we have 360 papers that don't agree that the earth revolves around the sun? Didn't think so.

That aside, I think the evidence shows there is some impact, but to what degree is the debate. Secondarily, is the net effect positive or negative, and how much either way? On these issues there is much room for debate.

It is reasonable to draw the conclusion that there is impact from us and that the vast majority of scientists agree with this, but this does not give licence to play the "consensus" card as means of shutting down debate as some like to do.

[steven lloyd]

That aside, I think the evidence shows there is some impact, but to what degree is the debate. Secondarily, is the net effect positive or negative, and how much either way? On these issues there is much room for debate.

The other question I have is how much impact does humankind really believe we have in altering the course of climate change. Obviously we don’t want to consciously pollute our environment, but if we all started driving electric cars tomorrow, stopped trading goods with other countries, grew our own food, etc. how much affect would that have on climate change. I would expect, from the research I’ve reviewed, that climate change will continue to happen anyway – just as it has many times before. My next question then, is would it not be far more prudent to invest our scarce and limited resources to continue with responsible development, continue technological advancement and prepare ourselves for the inevitable (building levies and dikes as just one example) instead of trying to prevent what is ultimately going to be impossible to prevent.

[hobbyguy]

I think the answer to the question of whether or not humankind has the potential to impact the climate lies in the huge population of humans coupled with the multiplying effects of our technology. Other creatures, right back to stromatalite bacteria have had huge impacts on the nature of the earth when their numbers grew large. In terms of biomass those creatures were far more significant than us, but when you factor in the multiplying effects of technology, our impact is indeed significant.

As an example of the multiplying effects of technolgy, consider cutting down trees. If the best you have is a stone axe, how many trees can you cut down in a day? Give you a Stihl 090 chainsaw and then how many?

Then consider what happened to the Easter Islanders when they cut down all the trees. A clearly finite environment overwhelmed by a large population who cut down all the trees, and couldn't leave because they could no longer build boats, and so died out (and they didn't have chainsaws).

The earth is clearly a finite environment. Our population has reached unprecedented levels. Our effective biomass is growing larger every day as Asia and Africa et al gain technology and compound population growth with technology.

Like it or not, this is a formula for big trouble. And WE are going to have to change.

http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2012-10/daily-infographic-if-everyone-lived-american-how-many-earths-would-we-need

[ForestfortheTrees]

You guys really crack me up. When the BC Liberals get 44% of the popular vote from less that half the population they have "a mandate from the public to govern." But if less that 3% of scientific papers do not endorse anthropogenic climate change, it is not a consensus. It seems you will hang on to any thread of hope to maintain the status quo and refuse to take responsibility for what is happening to the planet.

Yep, making changes will likely hurt the economy and the longer we leave it the more its going to hurt. But if our ecosystems start collapsing because of our continued exploitation of resources and ignorant attitude, it is going to hurt even more.

Here is a little riddle for you: A mega-business is hemorrhaging resources at an inconsistent rate, but the long-term trend is that it will be bankrupt in 5 years. 97% of the board member believe it is caused by a key business practice, while 3% think it is a natural anomaly and is nothing to worry about. What do you think would happen? Would this board just let things go and see what happens over the next few years, or would they start developing a plan to re-invent their business?

[SurplusElect]

You guys really crack me up. When the BC Liberals get 44% of the popular vote from less that half the population they have "a mandate from the public to govern." But if less that 3% of scientific papers do not endorse anthropogenic climate change, it is not a consensus. It seems you will hang on to any thread of hope to maintain the status quo and refuse to take responsibility for what is happening to the planet.

Alternatively the corporate owned media is much to blame for this. Every major scientific academy, research paper, think tank - ect - all conclude that climate change via humans is real. A very small fraction of people say the information is incomplete or inaccurate.

Oddly, when the media mentions the Holocaust, they do not present it as a "ongoing debate" whether it happened or not.

The Holocaust happened and the media presents The Holocaust as "real", even if a small percentage of WWII experts say it was fabricated or over-stated.

Mention "climate change" ...and its "a debate".

[xjeepguy]

The other question I have is how much impact does humankind really believe we have in altering the course of climate change. Obviously we don’t want to consciously pollute our environment, but if we all started driving electric cars tomorrow, stopped trading goods with other countries, grew our own food, etc. how much affect would that have on climate change. I would expect, from the research I’ve reviewed, that climate change will continue to happen anyway – just as it has many times before. My next question then, is would it not be far more prudent to invest our scarce and limited resources to continue with responsible development, continue technological advancement and prepare ourselves for the inevitable (building levies and dikes as just one example) instead of trying to prevent what is ultimately going to be impossible to prevent.

Posts like yours make the Eco Radicals angry because its logical and makes sense . I would add to it but it would blow their minds.

Good Post SL

[NAB]

Full article: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/bc ... story.html

Excerpts:

Sightline is a regional sustainability think-tank based in Seattle, and it focuses on regional environmental concerns for what we refer to as Cascadia.
What de Place tried to do was give a numeric value to the amount of global-warming carbon dioxide that would be emitted by all the energy-exporting projects now in the planning stages in B.C., Washington and Oregon.

They include:

• Five new coal terminals.

• Two expansions of existing coal terminals.

• Three new oil pipelines.

• Six new natural gas pipelines.

Eleven of those 16 proposals are in B.C.

It’s breathtaking, that kind of industrial concentration: Cascadia has suddenly become the nexus of mining and energy companies anxious to get their products off to power-hungry Asian markets. It’s this century’s gold rush. The troubled American coal industry wants a West Coast outlet. Alberta wants pipelines to the Pacific. Our premier sees our future in liquefied natural gas.

******************************************************************************

The final figure that de Place came up with?

Collectively, these new projects, he estimated, would produce a total of 761 million tonnes of CO2.

Annually.

That, de Place noted, is 12 times the total amount now emitted by B.C.

********************************************************************

De Place recognized that all these projects might not be built. Some are in direct competition with each other. There was the danger, he admitted, of overstating his case.

But he also said, to give the study balance, he purposely understated many factors that contribute to CO2 production — factors like the mining, processing and transportation of those carbon products. He also left out the vast amounts of energy that would be needed to power projects like B.C.’s proposed LNG plants. He counted only the CO2 emitted by the final user of the fuel.

********************************************************************************

But as admirable as B.C.’s domestic record of GHG production was, he said, we and Washington and Oregon would become huge net exporters of GHG production. Since CO2 and the effects of global warming don’t recognize borders, we’d be living an indulgent duality, mortgaging our children’s futures for our short-term gain. Patting ourselves on the back because we blue-box while we ship bitumen off to China.
*****************************************************************************

“Quite frankly,” de Place said, “I think it’s something we should be alarmed about. There are lots of local impacts to this like coal dust and oil spills — and I don’t want to minimize those — but purely from a perspective of taking a responsible view of climate policy in jurisdictions that pride themselves as being leaders, this allocation of capital and public resources seems to me to be violently irresponsible.

“I really do liken it to the old saying of ‘whistling past the graveyard.’ That’s exactly what this feels like. Our leaders have already said clearly that they believe climate change is a threat. And if they sincerely believe that, why advance this level of export infrastructure for carbon?”

Need he ask?

Our election just turned on the issue of jobs, jobs, jobs. And in the last eight years, corporate donors — most notably, a group of mining, gas and oil companies — have inundated the provincial Liberals with $46 million in donations. That buys a lot of attention. And when the Liberals won their landslide Tuesday night, you could hear the high-fives being exchanged in boardrooms in Vancouver, Calgary and Ottawa.

Oh, well. That’s business, or business as we now know it.

**********************************************************************************

[logicalview]

You guys really crack me up. When the BC Liberals get 44% of the popular vote from less that half the population they have "a mandate from the public to govern." But if less that 3% of scientific papers do not endorse anthropogenic climate change, it is not a consensus. It seems you will hang on to any thread of hope to maintain the status quo and refuse to take responsibility for what is happening to the planet.

The big difference Forrest is that the 44% of the popular vote number is real, while the 3%/97% number you and the other AGW fraudsters continue to throw out, despite constantly being shown evidence to the contrary, is a complete and utter fabrication. It's time to stop lying Forrest. Just come clean already. Mankind is not causing any change to the climate anywhere, and no one has shown one tiny bit of proof that we are. Anywhere. You are quoting a bogus number to defend a bogus concept.

John Cook, proprietor of the website Skeptical Science, recently published a paper with the help of members of his site. They describe their study as examining the abstracts of “over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers” and finding “a 97% consensus in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are causing global warming.” This study has received media fanfare, and even Barack Obama, the President of the United States, tweeted about it.

We’ve been having fun on this site about this study, but what I say next I cannot say with any humor. It is simply too serious. Skeptical Science recently invited people to rate the 12,000+ abstracts via Skeptical Science’s interactive rating system so people could “measure the climate consensus” themselves. An additional feature of the system allows users to view the abstracts, as well as the ratings given by the people behind the paper.

The guidelines for rating these abstracts show only the highest rating value blames the majority of global warming on humans. No other rating says how much humans contribute to global warming. The only time an abstract is rated as saying how much humans contribute to global warming is if it mentions:

that human activity is a dominant influence or has caused most of recent climate change (>50%).

If we use the system’s search feature for abstracts that meet this requirement, we get 65 results. That is 65, out of the 12,000+ examined abstracts. Not only is that value incredibly small, it is smaller than another value listed in the paper:

Reject AGW 0.7% (78)

Remembering AGW stands for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by humans, take a minute to let that sink in. This study done by John Cook and others, praised by the President of the United States, found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it.

The “consensus” they’re promoting says it is more likely humans have a negligible impact on the planet’s warming than a large one.

http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/on-the-consensus/

[logicalview]

Alternatively the corporate owned media is much to blame for this.

I agree. The media has done the public a huge disservice by lending credence to crackpots like Dr. James Hansen, David Suzuki and all the other perpetrators of the human-caused climate change scam. Instead of calling all of their insane predictions based on the AGW fraud into question, they've actively promoted this nonsense, and in the balance, billions upon billions of dollars have been wasted. The media bears a lot of the blame, for being so easily sucked in to the AGW fraud, and for not doing their jobs.

Every major scientific academy, research paper, think tank - ect - all conclude that climate change via humans is real.

Completely not true. An utter lie.

A very small fraction of people say the information is incomplete or inaccurate.

Thoroughly, utterly and completely false.

Oddly, when the media mentions the Holocaust, they do not present it as a "ongoing debate" whether it happened or not.

The Holocaust happened and the media presents The Holocaust as "real", even if a small percentage of WWII experts say it was fabricated or over-stated.

This is really an invalid comparative, given the Holocaust happened and was real, yet man-made climate change is not real.

Mention "climate change" ...and its "a debate".

As it should be. There really is no debate as to whether man is causing any change to climate, as man is not, however, it is something that is worth looking at, and perhaps spending a few million bucks studying, while the billions currently being wasted could be funneled into curing malaria in Africa or AIDS or cancer or diabetes, or just about anything else. In terms of "climate change" itself (I note you conveniently left out the "man-made") that is not really up for debate, the climate is always changing. It always has and it always will.

[logicalview]

Skeptical Science Study Finds 97% Consensus on Human-Caused Global Warming in the Peer-Reviewed Literature

It's thouroughly studied, peer reviewed and settled.

and now that you know that this "study" was actually manufactured by shysters and a complete lie, do you feel angry? Angry at yourself for being duped so easily, and angry at those that perpetrated this lie? I am just curious. When is the light going to go on, that just because some blogger claims that his bogus report has been "peer reviewed", "studied", and (shudder) "settled", does not mean that it is accurate or true, in any way, shape or form, yet here you are, accepting it as fact. This con game regarding AGW and bogus "studies" has been going on for years, and billions upon billions of dollars have been stolen and/or wasted in the process, money that could have gone to help cure AIDS, cancer, you name it. So I throw the question right back at you Jenny. What are we going to do about it? It's time shysters like this Cook guy realized there are consequences for lying to the public that is funding most of the nonsensical "war" on a bogus problem that doesn't exist.

Cook’s fallacy “97% consensus” study is a marketing ploy some journalists will fall for

What does a study of 20 years of abstracts tell us about the global climate? Nothing. But it says quite a lot about the way government funding influences the scientific process.

John Cook, a blogger who runs the site with the ambush title “SkepticalScience” (which unskeptically defends the mainstream position), has tried to revive the put-down and smear strategy against the thousands of scientists who disagree. The new paper confounds climate research with financial forces, is based on the wrong assumptions, uses fallacious reasoning, wasn’t independent, and confuses a consensus of climate scientists for a scientific consensus, not that a consensus proves anything anyway, if it existed.

Given the monopolistic funding of climate science in the last 20 years, the results he finds are entirely predictable.

The twelve clues that good science journalists ought to notice:

1. Thousands of papers support man-made climate change, but not one found the evidence that matters

Cook may have found 3,896 papers endorsing the theory that man-made emissions control the climate, but he cannot name one paper with observations that shows that the assumptions of the IPCC climate models about water vapor and cloud feedbacks are correct. These assumptions produce half to two-thirds of the future projected warming in models. If the assumptions are wrong (and dozens of papers suggest they are) then the predicted warming is greatly exaggerated. Many of the papers in his list are from these flawed models.

2. Cook’s study shows 66% of papers didn’t endorse man-made global warming

Cook calls this “an overwhelming consensus”.

They examined “11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming.

Perhaps the large number that are uncertain merely reflects the situation: climate science is complicated and most scientists are not sure what drives it. The relative lack of skeptical papers here is a function of points 4, 5, and 7 below. Though its irrelevant in any case. It only takes one paper to show a theory is wrong. Who’s counting?

3. Cook’s method is a logical fallacy: Argument from Authority. This is not science, it’s PR.

The thing that makes science different to religion is that only empirical evidence matters, not opinions. There are no Gods of Science. Data, not men, is the authority that gets the last say (there is no Pope-of-The-Papers). Cook turns that on its head. It’s anti-science. When scientists explain why they’re sure gravity keeps the Earth in its orbit, they don’t argue that “97% of geophysicists voted for it”.

Cook knows this (I do keep reminding him), but he pretends to get around it. Spot the delusion: “Scientists must back up their opinions with evidence-based analysis that survives the scrutiny of experts in the field. This means the peer-reviewed literature is a robust indicator of the state of the scientific consensus.” Cook assumes that scientists opinions are based instantly and accurately, and only on the evidence, as if humans were Intel chips. He assumes that “peer review” is uncorruptible (unlike every other human institution), that two unpaid anonymous reviewers is “scrutiny”, that climate-activist-scientists don’t work to keep skeptics out of the peer review literature, and that ClimateGate never spilled out what really happened in climate science.

Don’t people who do psychological research need to understand the basics of human nature? Scientists can cling to the wrong notion for years — just look at those who thought humans would never fly (even two years after the Wright brothers’ first flight) or that x-rays in shoe stores were safe, or that ulcers weren’t infectious, or that proteins could not be contagious (then came BSE).

4. The number of papers is a proxy for funding

As government funding grew, scientists redirected their work to study areas that attracted grants. It’s no conspiracy, just Adam Smith at work. There was no funding for skeptical scientists to question the IPCC or the theory that man-made climate science exaggerates the warming. More than $79 billion was poured into climate science research and technology from 1989 to 2009. No wonder scientists issued repetitive, irrelevant, and weak results. How hard could it be? Taxpayers even paid for research on climate resistant oysters. Let no barnacle be unturned.





The problem with monopsonistic funding models is that there is little competition. Few researchers are paid to research angles that are likely to disagree with the theory. Volunteers who want to do their own research don’t have free access to journals, may have trouble getting the data (sometimes it takes years or FOIs to get it, and sometimes it never comes). Volunteers don’t necessarily have the equipment to do the analysis, and don’t have PhD or Honours students to help. They also don’t get paid trips to conferences and suffer the impediment of having to devote time to earn an income outside of their research. When they do find something there are no PR teams to promote their papers or send out the press releases.

In the financial world we have audits, in courts we have a defense, in Parliament we have an opposition, but in science we have… whatever the government feels like funding.

In the end, there is no government funding, be it through a grant or institute that actively encourages people to search for reasons the IPCC favoured theory might be wrong.

5. Most of these consensus papers assume the theory is correct but never checked. They are irrelevant.

The papers listed as endorsing man-made global warming includes “implicit endorsement”, which makes this study more an analysis of funding rather than evidence. Cook gives the following as an example of a paper with implicit endorsement: “‘. . . carbon sequestration in soil is important for mitigating global climate change’. Any researcher studying carbon sequestion has almost certainly not analyzed outgoing radiation from the upper troposphere or considered the assumptions about relative humidity in climate simulations. Similarly, researchers looking at the effects of climate change on lemurs, butterflies, or polar bears probably know little about ocean heat content calculations. These researchers are “me too” researchers.

If a conservative government had spent billions analyzing the costs of the failed climate models and the impact of disastrous green schemes, skeptics would be able to quote just as many me-too papers as Cook quotes here. (But we wouldn’t, because analyzing the climate by doing keyword studies — it ain’t science).

6. Money paid to believers is 3500 times larger than that paid to skeptics (from all sources).

Cook seems to believe there are organized efforts running to confuse the public. Is that a projection of Nefarious Intent (NI) coupled with conspiratorial suggestions of mysterious campaigns?

Contributing to this ‘consensus gap’ are campaigns designed to confuse the public about the level of agreement among climate scientists.

Given that he is confused about what science is, he probably would think people are trying to confuse him when they give it to him straight.

His own personal bias means he is the wrong person to do this study (if it were worth doing in the first place, which it isn’t).

It has all the hallmarks of activist propaganda, not research. Cook tries to paint skeptics as doing it for the money, but blindly ignores the real money on the table. Governments have not only paid more than $79 billion in research, they also spend $70 billion every year subsidizing renewables (an industry which depends on researchers finding a link between carbon dioxide and catastrophic climate change). Carbon markets turn over something in the order of $170bn a year, and renewables investment amounts to a quarter of a trillion dollars. These vested interests depend entirely on a catastrophic connection — what’s the point of cutting “carbon” if carbon doesn’t cause a crisis? Against these billions, Cook thinks it’s worth mentioning a 20 year old payment of $510,000 from Western Fuels? And exactly what was Western Fuels big crime? Their primary goal was allegedly the sin of trying to ‘reposition global warming as theory (not fact)’ which as it happens, is quite true, except that technically, “global warming” is not even a theory, it’s a hypothesis, something with much less scientific weight.

Does Climate Money matter? Is a monopoly good for a market?

Do you think if you had $79 billion you could get 3896 papers published?

7. Keywords searches may miss the most important skeptical papers.

Keyword searches are more likely to turn up “consensus” papers. Many skeptical papers don’t use the terms “global warming” or “global climate change”: eg Svensmark (1998), Douglass (2007), Christy (2010), Loehle (2009), and Spencer (2011). Were they included? Perhaps they were, but they don’t appear to match the search terms in the methods. These are just a few seminal skeptical papers that might have been missed.

UPDATE: Lucia and JunkPschology in comments confirm that these six papers listed would not have made Cooks list. So in only half an hour of random analysis I can easily turn up major papers by skeptics that fall outside Cooks primitive keyword hunt. How many others miss too?

8. Some of these abstracts are 20 years old — does two decades of new evidence change anything?

Twenty years ago the IPCC was predicting we’d get warming of 0.3 degrees C per decade. The warming trend came in significantly below their lowest possible estimate, no matter which major dataset you consult. Back then scientists didn’t know there was an 800 year lag in the ice cores (where temperatures rise centuries before carbon dioxide does). In 1992 scientists didn’t realize that warming would soon flatten out for 15 years. They didn’t know that 28 million radiosondes would show their models were based on flawed assumptions about water vapor. They didn’t know that 3000 ARGO bouys would finally measure the oceans adequately for the first time (starting in 2003) — and find the oceans were not storing the missing energy their models predicted they would be, or heating nearly as quickly as the models predicted. In other words, even if there was a consensus in 1992, it’s irrelevant.

9. Naiomi Oreskes found 928 papers with abstracts that didn’t explicitly reject man-made global warming. So? Skeptics found 1,100 papers that support skeptical views.

Skeptics don’t issue press releases decreeing that this means anything scientific. It does mean that the media and IPCC are blindly ignoring masses of evidence, and that the term “denier” is well… marketing, not science. The people who deny these 1,100 papers exist are the ones calling other scientists names. When will journalists notice?

Given how much money has been paid to find evidence, the question real investigators ought to ask is “Is that all they found?”

10. You want authority? Skeptics can name 31,500 scientists who agree, including 9,000 PhDs, 45 NASA experts (including two astronauts who walked on the moon) and two Nobel Prize winners in physics.

Skeptics don’t issue press releases saying we outnumber and outrank the believers. Perhaps we should, but skeptics prefer to argue the evidence. Cook ignores the authorities that don’t suit him. Skeptics get Nobel Physics prizes, but believers only seem to get prizes for Peace. Phil Jones is one of the most expert of expert climate scientists, but he couldn’t create a linear trendline in Excel. Some skeptics, on the other hand, got man to the moon.

No wonder the public don’t think there is a consensus. There is no consensus among scientists.

Cook makes out that the public have been fooled by a deliberate campaign, but unless devious skeptics can cover continents in floods and snow, it could be that the public can see the failure of the models with their own eyes.

11. What about Science Associations? But they are not masses of scientists — just committees of six

Most science associations never ask members to vote, (or when they do, they have bizarre rules like the Royal Society, which recently asked members to vote Yes or Yes to inviting Prince Andrew to be a fellow). When science associations do ask all their members, mostly the votes are resounding “No’s”. With billions of dollars in grants in the offing, is it any wonder than relentless activism by government departments, renewables agencies, and other academics desperate to keep the gravy train rolling managed to win over or stack the committees?

12. Cook pretty much says this is not about a scientific argument — it’s a tactic to change public opinion through repetition of the fallacy

The first sentence in both the introduction and the conclusion tell us that the point of this paper is about public perception and government policy. It is not about the science. It is to help change public opinion. There was no attempt to find out whether there was a scientific consensus — as in a consensus among all scientists. Cook pragmatically explains that if people think there is a consensus they are more likely to support a policy to mitigate global warming. We know from Cook’s previous statements that he personally favors policies to change the weather. Is the Australian taxpayer funding research to learn something new, or to change public opinion and voter intentions? (How was this paper funded? It’s not listed in the Acknowledgements?)

Cook continues namecalling and unscientific abuse of the English language

Even John Cook admits the term “climate deniers” can’t be justified, yet he keeps on using it. It’s a misuse of English that helps trick bystanders into thinking Cook has a solid case. If the evidence they have is so overwhelming, why won’t Cook and others enter a polite debate? Just show us the missing evidence. Show us relevant model predictions from 20 years ago that turned out correct. The ol’ name-call and denigrate trick isn’t working anymore.

Cook also claims each abstract was categorized by “two independent, anonymized raters”. Yet the raters came from his partisan blog, discussed their ratings with each other, and acknowledged they were not independent among themselves. So what does “independent” mean? Can we use English instead?

Science has no gods

Welcome to the last dregs of the Great Scare Campaign, where the end game strategy is merely to repeat what worked for them before, which is the abjectly false and profoundly unscientific decree that we must believe the Gods Of Science.

The sad thing is that some environment and “science” reporters are so poorly trained they fall for what is essentially marketing that poses as science.

If only The Convinced had evidence for their favorite pet theory? Then activists like Cook would be able to debate in public, speak politely, and explain their case instead of resorting to cheap smears, dodgy research, and misleading statements.

In other words, he’s found 3,896 inconclusive, subsequently-overturned, or correct but irrelevant papers. What is most important about his study is that after thousands of scientists have pored over the best data they could find for twenty years, they still haven’t got any conclusive support.

http://joannenova.com.au/2013/05/cooks- ... -fall-for/

[maryjane48]

your the one being duped logical, lol

[logicalview]

your the one being duped logical, lol

lol yeah that sure is easier to just accept than reading what a giant fraud this study was and exposing yourself to opinions on AGW that differ from the lies and fraudulent "AGW is real and can ONLY be cured with billions of dollars of taxation of western economies and giving up all personal freedoms" movement, isn't it?

The 97% consensus – a lie of epic proportions

Posted on May 17, 2013
by Anthony Watts

To John Cook – it isn’t ‘hate’, it’s pity, – pity for having such a weak argument you are forced to fabricate conclusions of epic proportions

Proving that crap can flow uphill, yesterday, John Cook got what one could consider the ultimate endorsement. A tweet from the Twitter account of the Twitterer in Chief, Barack Obama, about Cook’s 97% consensus lie.

I had to laugh about the breathless headlines over that tweet, such as this one from the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss at The Answer Sheet:



Umm, no, as of this writing. WaPo reporter FAIL.



Source: http://twitter.com/skepticscience

But hey, they’re saving the planet with lies, that shouldn’t matter, right? 6535 is the new 31541507 in the world Cook lives in.

Yesterday, in an interview about the Tweet in the Sydney Morning Herald, Cook said:

“Generally the level of hate you get is in proportion to the impact you have,” he said.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/clima ... z2TYt7DOGr

No, it isn’t hate, it’s about facts John. This whole story is predicated on lies, and they just seem to get bigger and bigger, there doesn’t seem to be any limit to the gullibility of those involved and those pushing it.

Here’s the genesis of the lie. When you take a result of 32.6% of all papers that accept AGW, ignoring the 66% that don’t, and twist that into 97%, excluding any mention of that original value in your media reports, there’s nothing else to call it – a lie of presidential proportions.

From the original press release about the paper:

Exhibit 1:

From the 11 994 papers, 32.6 per cent endorsed AGW, 66.4 per cent stated no position on AGW, 0.7 per cent rejected AGW and in 0.3 per cent of papers, the authors said the cause of global warming was uncertain.

Exhibit 2:

“Our findings prove that there is a strong scientific agreement about the cause of climate change, despite public perceptions to the contrary.”

I pity people whose argument is so weak they have to lie like this to get attention, I pity even more the lazy journalists that latch onto lies like this without even bothering to ask a single critical question.

Of course try to find a single mention of that 32.6 percent figure in any of the news reports, or on Cook’s announcement on his own website.

Though, some people are asking questions, while at the same time laughing about this farce, such as Dan Kahan at Yale:

http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2 ... -in-m.html

Now, Cook has upped the ante, allowing the average person to help participate in the lie and make it their own, as Brandon Schollenberger observes, Cook has launched a new “Consensus project” to make even more certain the public gets his message:

The guidelines for rating [the] abstracts show only the highest rating value blames the majority of global warming on humans. No other rating says how much humans contribute to global warming. The only time an abstract is rated as saying how much humans contribute to global warming is if it mentions:

that human activity is a dominant influence or has caused most of recent climate change (>50%).

If we use the system’s search feature for abstracts that meet this requirement, we get 65 results. That is 65, out of the 12,000+ examined abstracts. Not only is that value incredibly small, it is smaller than another value listed in the paper:

Reject AGW 0.7% (78)

Remembering AGW stands for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by humans, take a minute to let that sink in. This study done by John Cook and others, praised by the President of the United States, found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it.

(Update: some folks aren’t getting the significance of Schollenberger’s findings, using Cook’s own data and code, which have been shown to be replicable at Lucia’s comment thread, Schollenberger finds 65 that say AGW/human caused, but there’s 78 that reject AGW. Cook never reported that finding in the paper, thus becoming a lie of omission, because it blows the conclusion. Combine that with the lack of reporting of the 32.6%/66.1% ratio in Cook’s own blog post and media reports, and we have further lies of omission.)

It’s gobsmacking. But, I see this as a good thing, because like the lies of presidential politics, eventually this will all come tumbling down.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/17/t ... oportions/

[Glacier]

^ Here is a summary:

[Woodenhead]

This whole "debate" (lol) is a prime example of cherry-picking, filing in gaps with bias, misunderstandings, and statistical leveraging. Entertaining for me to read, to say the least.

[masen]

Glacier said a while back that glaciers don't add water to a water shed.??? Many many scientific reports some using radioactive isotopes to follow the water, have proven this false so which reports are you using to back this up?