Posted on 04/09/2016 7:42:00 AM PDT by Kaslin
By now, virtually everyone has heard that “97% of scientists agree: Climate change is real, manmade and dangerous.” Even if you weren’t one of his 31 million followers who received this tweet from President Obama, you most assuredly have seen it repeated everywhere as scientific fact.
The correct representation is “yes,” “some,” and “no.” Yes, climate change is real. There has never been a period in Earth’s history when the climate has not changed somewhere, in one way or another.
People can and do have some influence on our climate. For example, downtown areas are warmer than the surrounding countryside, and large-scale human development can affect air and moisture flow. But humans are by no means the only source of climate change. The Pleistocene ice ages, Little Ice Age and monster hurricanes throughout history underscore our trivial influence compared to natural forces.
As for climate change being dangerous, this is pure hype based on little fact. Mile-high rivers of ice burying half of North America and Europe were disastrous for everything in their path, as they would be today. Likewise for the plummeting global temperatures that accompanied them. An era of more frequent and intense hurricanes would also be calamitous; but actual weather records do not show this.
It would be far more deadly to implement restrictive energy policies that condemn billions to continued life without affordable electricity – or to lower living standards in developed countries – in a vain attempt to control the world’s climate. In much of Europe, electricity prices have risen 50% or more over the past decade, leaving many unable to afford proper wintertime heat, and causing thousands to die.
Moreover, consensus and votes have no place in science. History is littered with theories that were long denied by “consensus” science and politics: plate tectonics, germ theory of disease, a geocentric universe. They all underscore how wrong consensus can be.
Science is driven by facts, evidence and observations – not by consensus, especially when it is asserted by deceitful or tyrannical advocates. As Einstein said, “A single experiment can prove me wrong.”
During this election season, Americans are buffeted by polls suggesting which candidate might become each party’s nominee or win the general election. Obviously, only the November “poll” counts.
Similarly, several “polls” have attempted to quantify the supposed climate change consensus, often by using simplistic bait-and-switch tactics. “Do you believe in climate change?” they may ask.
Answering yes, as I would, places you in the President’s 97% consensus and, by illogical extension, implies you agree it is caused by humans and will be dangerous. Of course, that serves their political goal of gaining more control over energy use.
The 97% statistic has specific origins. Naomi Oreskes is a Harvard professor and author of Merchants of Doubt, which claims those who disagree with the supposed consensus are paid by Big Oil to obscure the truth. In 2004, she claimed to have examined the abstracts of 928 scientific papers and found a 100% consensus with the claim that the “Earth’s climate is being affected by human activities.”
Of course, this is probably true, as it is unlikely that any competent scientist would say humans have no impact on climate. However, she then played the bait-and-switch game to perfection – asserting that this meant “most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”
However, one dissenter is enough to discredit the entire study, and what journalist would believe any claim of 100% agreement? In addition, anecdotal evidence suggested that 97% was a better figure. So 97% it was.
Then in 2010, William Anderegg and colleagues concluded that “97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support … [the view that] … anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for most of the unequivocal warming of the Earth’s average global temperature” over a recent but unspecified time period. (Emphasis in original.)
To make this extreme assertion, Anderegg et al. compiled a database of 908 climate researchers who published frequently on climate topics, and identified those who had “signed statements strongly dissenting from the views” of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The 97–98% figure is achieved by counting those who had not signed such statements.
Silence, in Anderegg’s view, meant those scientists agreed with the extreme view that most warming was due to humans. However, nothing in their papers suggests that all those researchers believed humans had caused most of the planetary warming, or that it was dangerous.
The most recent 97% claim was posited by John Cook and colleagues in 2013. They evaluated abstracts from nearly 12,000 articles published over a 21-year period and sorted them into seven categories, ranging from “explicit, quantified endorsement” to “explicit, quantified rejection” of their alleged consensus: that recent warming was caused by human activity, not by natural variability. They concluded that “97.1% endorsed the consensus position.”
However, two-thirds of all those abstracts took no position on anthropogenic climate change. Of the remaining abstracts (not the papers or scientists), Cook and colleagues asserted that 97.1% endorsed their hypothesis that humans are the sole cause of recent global warming.
Again, the bait-and-switch was on full display. Any assertion that humans play a role was interpreted as meaning humans are the sole cause. But many of those scientists subsequently said publicly that Cook and colleagues had misclassified their papers – and Cook never tried to assess whether any of the scientists who wrote the papers actually thought the observed climate changes were dangerous.
My own colleagues and I did investigate their analysis more closely. We found that only 41 abstracts of the 11,944 papers Cook and colleagues reviewed – a whopping 0.3% – actually endorsed their supposed consensus. It turns out they had decided that any paper which did not provide anexplicit, quantified rejection of their supposed consensus was in agreement with the consensus. Moreover, this decision was based solely on Cook and colleagues’ interpretation of just the abstracts, and not the articles themselves. In other words, the entire exercise was a clever sleight-of-hand trick.
What is the real figure? We may never know. Scientists who disagree with the supposed consensus – that climate change is manmade and dangerous – find themselves under constant attack.
Harassment by Greenpeace and other environmental pressure groups, the media, federal and state government officials, and even universities toward their employees (myself included) makes it difficult for many scientists to express honest opinions. Recent reports about Senator Whitehouse and Attorney-General Lynch using RICO laws to intimidate climate “deniers” further obscure meaningful discussion.
Numerous government employees have told me privately that they do not agree with the supposed consensus position – but cannot speak out for fear of losing their jobs. And just last week, a George Mason University survey found that nearly one-third of American Meteorological Society members were willing to admit that at least half of the climate change we have seen can be attributed to natural variability.
Climate change alarmism has become a $1.5-trillion-a-year industry – which guarantees it is far safer and more fashionable to pretend a 97% consensus exists, than to embrace honesty and have one’s global warming or renewable energy funding go dry.
The real danger is not climate change – it is energy policies imposed in the name of climate change. It’s time to consider something else Einstein said: “The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
OK!! Everybody pay attention!
Lesson for today:
1. The sun is 1,300,000 times as big as the earth.
2. The sun is a giant nuclear furnace that controls the climates of all its planets.
3. The earth is one of the sun’s planets.
4. The earth is a speck in comparison to the size of the sun.
5. Inhabitants of the earth are less than specks.
Study Question: How do less-than-specks in congress plan to control the sun?
All-talk Cruz is chairman of the Senates Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness ..... WHAT HAS HE DONE???
NASA currently supports Global warming research more than ever. They even fund propaganda groups to convince the public of their false claims... meanwhile other Space and Aeronautical programs slide!
“Climate change” (aka: weather) is used by fascists top control and tax. Their “scientists” are in it for the grant money and control. Losers all.
It is just socialism on a global scale. The totalitarian socialists are just coming at us from a different angle.
The end result is the same. Tyranny and everyone is equally miserable.
Saw a TRAVELTALKS short film from MGM on TCM about Glacier and Waterton Parks.
In it the narrator states the glaciers have been receding since the last Ice Age and will be gone in about one thousand years IF there is NO “climatic change”.
This film was made in 1942, seventy four years ago.
Our activities can no more affect the overall world climate than a pinprick can affect an elephant.
All those scientists in a consensus were force fed a database of made up numbers then provided with the climate model that when executed would spit out the results desired by the dark forces.
Don’t think so?
Show the chain of custody documents for every number from sensor to the database that was distributed. Don’t have that? Sorry your data may have been compromised. Start over and do it right this time.
+1
November 5, 1982 issue of SCIENCE magazine:
The worlds total of termites emits 10 times the CO2 than does the entire population of humans, all their factories and all their vehicles combined. Makeup of CO2 in the atmosphere: .04%. The atmosphere contains 720 billion tons of CO2 and humans contribute only 6 billion tons. Man's contribution is .83% of .04% of the atmosphere. Manmade CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas at those numbers. Water vapor accounts for up to 95% of all solar radiation attenuation.
My favorite is the Chinese government which is intent on building a military base at sea level in the south China sea. Don’t they know that the rising ocean level will make their efforts useless? They don’t believe in ocean rising? Oh dear, more deniers.
Actually, there are three sources for that 97% figure.
One is the survey you mention, which is boundless hilarity when you dig into the details (only 97%? Given the specific questions? - and that was only one of the questions, the others actually had lower agreement)
The second, is the list selected, minus those who signed a statement opposing the IPCC conclusions...which is an absurd way to conclude anything in its face.
Another is a study done where they selected a sample of scientific papers. Say paper A concludes to a specific singular point which seems to support the current AGW theory. That was tabbed as supporting. Now a couple of papers disproving the conclusion of that paper. Each of theses counted as support, because none of them directly state they rebuff AGW as a whole. Some papers by well-known skeptics are included as “supporting” - both papers which don’t address a point which supports AGW theory, and papers which debunk points..
Barbers...landscapers...high school students...the concerned...
Barbers...landscapers...high school students...the concerned...
You do not even need to know how to spell scientist to be one.
Here it is. Naomi Oreskes is a Harvard professor, and the actual source of the fraud.
A I recall the progression, 4000 or so surveys were sent out to self-define climate "scientists."
Of those only between 1000 & 1500 replied.
Then it got really interesting. The authors of the study arbitrarily decided that if the respondents did not specifically disagree that warming was anthropogenic, they surely must agree that it was.
Last, but not least, the reduced the total number to >89<
Of those 89, 87/89 = 97% agreed that Climate change was anthropogenic.
Glad to see you’re still spamming away with your infantile drivel. You’ve missed quite a few threads on the topic, though.
Here’s the Oreskes study I am familiar with, and further excerpted pieces:
https://climateaudit.org/2005/05/04/science-con-sensus-and-censorship/
Letter Details:1. N. Oreskes (2004). The scientific consensus on climate change. Science, Vol 306, Issue 5702, 1686 , 3 December 2004
On December 3rd, only days before the start of the 10th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-10), Science Magazine published the results of a study by Naomi Oreskes (1): For the first time, empirical evidence was presented that appeared to show an unanimous, scientific consensus on the anthropogenic causes of recent global warming.
Oreskes claims to have analysed 928 abstracts she found listed on the ISI database using the keywords “climate change”. However, a search on the ISI database using the keywords “climate change” for the years 1993 – 2003 reveals that almost 12,000 papers were published during the decade in question (2). What happened to the countless research papers that show that global temperatures were similar or even higher during the Holocene Climate Optimum and the Medieval Warm Period when atmospheric CO2 levels were much lower than today; that solar variability is a key driver of recent climate change, and that climate modeling is highly uncertain?
These objections were put to Oreskes by science writer David Appell. On 15 December 2004, she admitted that there was indeed a serious mistake in her Science essay. According to Oreskes, her study was not based on the keywords “climate change,” but on “global climate change” (3).
Her use of three keywords instead of two reduced the list of peer reviewed publications by one order of magnitude (on the UK’s ISI databank the keyword search “global climate change” comes up with 1247 documents). Since the results looked questionable, I decided to replicate the Oreskes study.
[Replication attempts failed, even with the new keywords.]
There’s also the more recent SKS studies
Skeptic opinions (according to true-believers posing as skeptics)
https://climateaudit.org/2013/03/28/lewandowsky-doubles-down/
Evaluations of papers, and lying about it
https://climateaudit.org/2014/07/26/cooks-fake-ethics-approval/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/11/the-climate-consensus-is-not-97-its-100/
These were the six questions.
1. Does climate change?
2. Has the atmospheric concentration of CO2 increased since the late 1950s?
3. Is Man likely to have contributed to the measured increase in CO2 concentration since the late 1950s?
4. Other things being equal, is it likely that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will cause some global warming?
5. Is it likely that there has been some global warming since the late 1950s?
6. Is it likely that Man’s emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases have contributed to the measured global warming since 1950?
At a conference of 600 “climate change deniers”, then, not one delegate denied that climate changes. Likewise, not one denied that we have contributed to global warming since 1950.
One of the many fundamental dishonesties in the climate debate is the false impression created by the Thermageddonites and their hosts of allies in the Main Stream Media (MSM) that climate skeptics would answer “No” to most – if not all – of the six questions.
That fundamental dishonesty was at the core of the Cook et al. “consensus” paper published last year. The authors listed three “levels of endorsement” supporting some sort of climate consensus.
Level 1 reflected the IPCC’s definition of consensus: that most of the global warming since 1950 was man-made. Levels 2 and 3 reflected explicit or implicit acceptance that Man causes some warming. The Heartland delegates’ unanimous opinion fell within Level 2.
Cook et al., having specified these three “levels of endorsement”, and having gone to the trouble of reading and marking 11,944 abstracts, did not publish their assessment of the number of abstracts they had marked as falling into each of the three endorsement levels. Instead, they published a single aggregate total combining all three categories.
Their failure to report the results fully was what raised my suspicions that their article fell short of the standards of integrity that the reasonable man on the Clapham omnibus would have expected of a paper purporting to be scientific.
The text file recording the results of Cook’s survey was carefully released only after several weeks following publication, during which the article claiming 97% consensus had received wall-to-wall international publicity from the MSM. Even Mr Obama’s Twitteratus had cited it with approval as indicating that “global warming is real, man-made and dangerous”.
The algorithm counted the number of abstracts Cook had allocated to each level of endorsement. When the computer displayed the results, I thought there must have been some mistake. The algorithm had found only 64 out of the 11,944 papers, or 0.5%, marked as falling within Level 1, reflecting the IPCC consensus that recent warming was mostly man-made.
I carried out a manual check using the search function in Microsoft Notepad. Sure enough, there were only 64 data entries ending in “,1”.
Next, I read all 64 abstracts and discovered – not greatly to my surprise – that only 41 had explicitly said Man had caused most of the global warming over the past half century or so.
In the peer-reviewed learned journals, therefore, only 41 of 11,944 papers, or 0.3% – and not 97.1% – had endorsed the definition of the consensus proposition to which the IPCC, in its 2013 Fifth Assessment Report, had assigned 95-99% confidence.
Now that we have the results of the Heartland Conference survey, the full extent of the usual suspects’ evasiveness about climate “consensus” can be revealed.
Cook et al. had lumped together the 96.8% who, like all 100% of us at ICCC9, had endorsed the proposition that we cause some warming with the 0.3% who had endorsed the IPCC’s proposition that we caused most of the warming since 1950.
In defiance of the evidence recorded in their own data file, they had then explicitly stated, both in their article and in a subsequent article, that 97.1% had endorsed the IPCC’s proposition.
JC comments: In case you missed it the first time, check out my recent publication No consensus on consensus. So, what the heck does the ‘climate change consensus’ even mean any more? The definition of climate change consensus is now so fuzzy that leading climate change skeptics are categorizing themselves within the 97%. IPCC and other leading climate scientists can’t agree on the cause of the lack of surface temperature increase for the past 15+ years (i.e. see the recent article in the New Republic).
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/10/an-oopsie-in-the-doranzimmerman-97-consensus-claim/
In 2008 Margaret Zimmerman asked two questions of 10,257 Earth Scientists at academic and government institutions. 3146 of them responded. That survey was the original basis for the famous “97% consensus” claim.
For the calculation of the degree of consensus among experts in the Doran/Zimmerman article, all but 79 of the respondents were excluded. They wrote:
“In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2.”
The basis for the “97% consensus” claim is this excerpt:
[of] “the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change)… 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2.”
But that is a false statement.
The two questions were:
Q1: “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” 76 of 79 (96.2%) answered “risen.”
Q2: “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” 75 of 77 (97.4%) answered “yes.”
...
This was the full set of questions that Zimmerman asked in their survey:
Q1. When compared with pre-1800’s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
1. Risen
2. Fallen
3. Remained relatively constant
4. No opinion/Don’t know
Q2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures? [This question wasn’t asked if they answered “remained relatively constant” to Q1]
1. Yes
2. No
3. I’m not sure
Q3. What do you consider to be the most compelling argument that supports your previous answer (or, for those who were unsure, why were they unsure)? [This question wasn’t asked if they answered “remained relatively constant” to Q1]
Q4. Please estimate the percentage of your fellow geoscientists who think human activity is a contributing factor to global climate change.
Q5. Which percentage of your papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the last 5 years have been on the subject of climate change?
Q6. Age
Q7. Gender
Q8. What is the highest level of education you have attained?
Q9. Which category best describes your area of expertise?
Do you see it? If a respondent answered “remained relatively constant” to the first question, then he wasn’t asked the second question!
That’s obviously why only 77 answers were reported to the second question. Two of their 79 top climate specialists had answered “remained relatively constant” to the first question, and those two were not asked the second question, and were not included in the calculation of the supposed 97.4% agreement.
That means only 75 of 79 (94.9%) of their “most specialized and knowledgeable respondents” actually gave them the answers they wanted to both of their questions.
So, despite asking “dumb questions” that even most skeptics would answer “correctly,” and despite excluding over 97% of the responses after they were received, they still did not find 97% agreement. They actually found only 94.9% agreement.
They really like that 97% number...so it’s hard to keep track of which silliness is which.
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