Lawrence Solomon in the Financial Post writes:
The ‘scientific consensus’ about global warming turns out to have a lot more to do with manipulating the numbers
How do we know there’s a scientific consensus on climate change? Pundits and the press tell us so. And how do the pundits and the press know? Until recently, they typically pointed to the number 2,500 — that’s the number of scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those 2,500, the pundits and the press believed, had endorsed the IPCC position.
To their embarrassment, most of the pundits and press discovered they were mistaken — those 2,500 scientists hadn’t endorsed the IPCC’s conclusions, they had merely reviewed some part or other of the IPCC’s mammoth studies. To add to their embarrassment, many of those reviewers from within the IPCC establishment actually disagreed with the IPCC’s conclusions, sometimes vehemently.
The upshot? The punditry looked for and found an alternative number to tout: “97% of the world’s climate scientists” accept the consensus, articles in the Washington Post, the U.K.’s Guardian, CNN and other news outlets now claim, along with some two million postings in the blogosphere.
This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2008 master’s thesis by student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman at the University of Illinois, under the guidance of Peter Doran, an associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences. The two researchers obtained their results by conducting a survey of 10,257 Earth scientists. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers — in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout.
Read more: http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/01/03/lawrence-solomon-97-cooked-stats/#ixzz1A5px63Ax
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No relation. (Thankfully!)
So all this was based on a simple survey? One key rule about understanding surveys is to know what the questions are:
1 When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
2 Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
As usual, the prolific pro-AGW commenter begins his gatekeeping activities (at the FP link). Thankfully there are reality-defenders blocking his blocking.
This has become a mass insanity. Will it ever end? I don’t think so. Many people I talk to are inherently unable to accept that they have been fooled, and will make incredible leaps of logic to justify an unjustifiable belief.
It may be generations before people can finally look back at this mass insanity objectively enough to see it for what it is.
Cherry-picking! What do you mean “cherry-picking”? All they did was throw out 10,180 “outliers” to improve the consistency of the sample. 🙂
Pundits, elites…..Monarchy or aristocracy? That’s the question.
Since the basic “science” is fake, why not fake the number of people who support it as well? In for a dime, in for a dollar.
it does show that out and out Fraud has taken place at *Every* level of the Warming Cult. It is no longer possible – in fact it has not been possible for some time – for any honest and honorable person to support this nonsense.
Our opponents are not honest, and they are not honorable. Never forget that when dealing with them.
The paraphrase Shakespeare : “The devil can site statistics for his own purpose.” I believe it came from one of my engineering classes back i the ’60s.
The big light bulb just went off in my head.
I now understand the methodology that shows global warming is real. It simply boils down to a perpetual elimination of data that contradicts the desired outcome. That is what climate science is, just weed out any useful data until you are proven right. It actually fits everything they do. GISS, GHCN, everything. A perfect correlation.
John Kehr
The Inconvenient Skeptic
I have always said the mathematics were dubious. If you’re a reporter, and you don’t understand statistics or calculus, just make it up, it’s easy.
Wow….an overwhelming majority of the cherry-picked 77 scientists agree with the IPCCs conclusions. I wonder if Ms Zimmerman was coerced into fabricating this “majority” in order to receive her MS degree.
Dr. Doran is no scientist.
Over the Holidays someone was using this figure during a discussion and they mentioned that some 10,000+ scientists were recently surveyed and the results were 97% believed in AGW…I suspected he was pulling it out of his rear-end. Well, it was coming from a rear-end, however it wasn’t his rear-end he was pulling it from. Figures.
So why can’t we do our own survey? We can keep it relatively short but still have more complex/informative questions like asking what % of the increase in heat is due to human activity and ask what they think (on a 5 point scale) of other “causes” (e.g. UHI, LIA recovery, solar/oceanic, etc).
I wonder, if surveyed, what fraction of homeopaths would turn out to accept homeopathy?
You have to admire the persistence of statistics lovers. So many ways to lie, so little time to do it in.
Having done survey research for 20 years I can tell you for certain that the wording of the questions, the sample technique, sample size, the interview method (personal, telephone, mail), question type (true/false, multiple choice, rating scale, open ended, etc.) and even the positioning of the questions relative to each other will effect outcome. Of course, cherry picking is best for obtaining the result one wants.
In other news, 97% of Baptist Ministers believe in God.
@CodeTech – it wouldn’t surprise me to see people still believing in AGW during the deepest cold of the next Ice Age. People’s ability to justify their belief in the face of such blatant hypocrisy is quite amazing.
If you’re a reporter, and you don’t understand statistics or calculus
===============================================
LOL!
Ralph Hall, U.S. Congress, Texas
Chairman of the Science Committee
Any one who cares to help Congressmand Ralph Hall the new chairman of the science committee in the U.S. House please contact his office and ask for his lead assistant on that committee.
Janet Poppoeton
202-225-6673 in D.C.
Ralph Hall is not afraid of the msm or Al Gore.
He needs real help with real facts.
APACHEWHOKNOWS
77.1 per cent of all statistics cited as supporting the AGW hypothesis are spontaneously extracted from the overheated ‘ether’. 72 of 38 AGW scientists surveyed (189.5%) agree. That settles it……
That’s good to know. I had someone throw the 97% figure at me only the other day :p. My only rebuttal was that science wasn’t done by consensus. Well, it seems I was right: there is no consensus!
“…just 3,146, or 30.7%, answered the two key questions on the survey… 82% of the Earth scientists replied that that human activity had significantly contributed to the warming. … In any case, the two researchers must have feared that an 82% figure would fall short of a convincing consensus — almost one in five wasn’t blaming humans for global warming — so they looked for a subset that would yield a higher percentage. They found it… The researchers thus decided to tout responses by those Earth scientists who not only published mainly on climate but also identified themselves as climate scientists. … Once all these cuts were made, 75 out of 77 scientists of unknown qualifications were left endorsing the global warming orthodoxy.”
That says it all. It would be like taking a survey asking if union workers do a better job than non-union workers, and then excluding all respondents except union members who have published articles on the benefits of unions. If that’s not cherry picking, nothing is.
It all simply confirms my assertion that 84.6% of statistics are made up.
(and to add weight to your manufactured numbers, add a decimal point or two; it is so much more convincing than “about 80% of statistics are made up.”)
On the reasonable assumption this is correct, then the IPCC should do the decent thing and either announce its immediate disbandment or make a public announcement it will no longer write expensive fantasy.
Going from 10,257 to 77 makes even Mannian Maths look accurate.
“The number stems from a 2008 master’s thesis by student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman at the University of Illinois, under the guidance of Peter Doran, an associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences.”
A Master’s thesis? WTF?!???
I now have a new-found appreciation for the Earth and Environmental Sciences program at the Univ. of Illinois. It has nothing to do with Earth and Environmental Sciences.
I really don’t believe that there is anything wrong here. If they really had been playing with data wouldn’t it have come out to 100%?