Skeptical Science kidz channel Inigo Montoya in new 'consensus' paper

The cartoonist would have become a great social scientist.

This is disputing the wrong question. There is no doubt about that the scientific literature is dominated papers that accept global warming. The question that scientists should have been asked if there was consensus on the magnitude of the needed action. Is it indeed sufficient to eat tofu, drive Toyota Prius and vacation in space (http://business.iafrica.com/worldnews/858696.html) once a year or it will need more? Perhaps cutting back our living standard to the level of the Pennsylvania Amish. If it is the later, would the danger of global warming warrant that level of sacrifices.

Sorry but when I saw the words “independent” and “John Cook” “Skeptical Science ” I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.He’s a tryer you’ve got to give him that at least LOL.. trying ever ones patience with this clap trap.

C’mon Sarah Green, you’ve made the first step. Now, if your willing to go a little further,….

Perhaps the quality of Cook’s studies could be improved by the use of simple objectivity enhancing tools we all learned about in grade school. For example:

Beyond the blatantly contrived nature of this “study”, lurks another issue. Even if the data was 100% fairly assessed, it would still be wrong.
Science doesn’t stand still. Papers are published to either confirm those that came before them, or to bring forward new information that might change the interpretation or even debunk entirely previous papers. More recent papers carry more weight (or should) than do older papers because they are predicated on additional information that the older papers didn’t have available at time of writing.
My understanding is that this study was done on papers ranging in time from 1991 to 2011. Let’s put that in a more meaningful context. In 1991 most people had never heard of e-mail, much less used it. How valid would a paper written in 1991 about the influence of postal unions be today? There were many books and papers written in 1991 about the information age. I challenge anyone to find a single one that predicted the existence of Google or blogs and is remotely relevant in today’s technical environment. Leading edge thought on the information age in 1991 is not only irrelevant in the context of modern technology, most of it would seem rather laughable today.
By the same token, papers from 1991 are simply not relevant. Temps were, in fact, increasing at that time. They didn’t peak until 1998. The fact that they had peaked and were starting to fall wasn’t really obvious in the data for a good ten years after that. In brief, the bulk of the papers in this study have insufficient data to be relevant in the current context, and many of them are just as laughable today as articles in the early 1990’s about the continued power of postal unions, and how corporations may one day have the ability to store as much as a gigabyte of data for less than $50,000.

Nothing like picking your own jury.

OK slightly off topic, except for the laughs….
The Force was with Star Wars fans at the University of East Anglia…
The Police Force that is.
It seems rival Doctor Who and Star Wars fans had a rumble at the UEA.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-22542222
Finally proof that its all science ‘fiction’ at the UEA.
I wonder how many participants were from the ‘climate’ department?

You know you must be on the right side of the question when you discover you are hanging out with a bunch of other Princess Bride fans.

Can anyone say confirmation bias?

To borrow from the scene in which Wesley is revived…
Miracle Max: He probably owes you raw data huh? I’ll ask him.
Inigo Montoya: He’s independent. He can’t spin.
Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY independent. There’s a big difference between mostly independent and all independent. Mostly independent is slightly skewed. With all independent, well, with all independent there’s usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo Montoya: What’s that?
Miracle Max: Go through his e-mails and look for the sheep..

Did members of the Crusher Crew help?
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/09/skeptical-science-drown-them-out.html

A survey of 10,000 letters to Santa Claus found that 97% of authors accepted that reindeer pulling a sleigh is the most common means of Christmas present transport around the globe.

You’re correct Anthony – all you can do is laugh.
And I am rolling around laughing at just how ludicrous you and all you worshippers sound, as you slide further and further into irrelevance.
If you want to make yourself relevant again, you can join in the debate on the best approach to deal with climate change. But while you keep denying that it is happening, you just make yourself look foolish.

The fact that they feel the desperate need to ‘prove’ a consensus, and the lengths to which they will go to do so are very revealing regarding the stage of this whole debate.

mandas says:
May 15, 2013 at 7:36 pm
[…]
If you want to make yourself relevant again, you can join in the debate on the best approach to deal with climate change. But while you keep denying that it is happening, you just make yourself look foolish.

Name one person here who denies that the climate changes. One. One name. Just name one.
Behind some of the vanilla monikers here are real scientists (atmospherics, physics, geophysics, geology, climate, etcetera) doing real research work at real science institutions. Some have been doing it for decades. They teach, and present papers.
Isn’t Skeptical Science’s Mr. Painter a former police cop with a “hobby” in climate change he picked up 6.5 years ago in 2006? Or John Cook who got a Bachelors in physics in the 90s then spent 10 years running cricket and cartoon blogs and worked as a web programmer until he got climate change religion three years ago in 2010?
So don’t you waltz over here waving your sparkler like some effeminate cruise director who doesn’t realize he got on the wrong cruise. There’s more science discussed on this blog than Skeptical Science knows exists. You seem incapable of realizing it yourself.

Poptech says:
May 15, 2013 at 6:45 pm
Get the list of papers.

I agree. Get the list of papers, so we can verify their work. (Like watching paint dry, mind you….)

Ya gotta feel a bit sorry for Cook … he threw away a career in cartooning, to urgently and nobly save the world.
Now it is starting to appear that the world does not need saving, at least not right now, and even if it later does, we have time to do it properly.
I think you will find Mr Cook will only get noisier from now on.

mandas says:
May 15, 2013 at 7:36 pm
“…If you want to make yourself relevant again, you can join in the debate on the best approach to deal with climate change. But while you keep denying that it is happening, you just make yourself look foolish…”
You silly man das ( pun deliberate! 🙂 …. you need to read a little more and ramble a little less.
The debate is about how much the climate is warming, and whether this is likely to be catastrophic, and how much man contributes to that warming, and how it (climate) is regulated.
You would do yourself a favour by joining in the debate, rather than taking the simplistic approach that all is known and running around telling us we are doomed.
But, I predict you will come back with the standard non informative content free riposte: “… you think it is a conspiracy!…” and “…well funded oil lobby…” and “…catastrophe… its already too late…..!”.

Polycritic says:
“……Name one person here who denies that the climate changes. One. One name. Just name one…..”
Wow! That’s just…….. wow!
If any of you truly think that there are people who comment and post here who do not believe that the climate is changing, and that humans are responsible for it, then you are living more in denial than I thought. How about you read some of the comments before putting your fingers to the keyboard next time.
If the debate here was truly about how much the climate is changing, and what to do about it, then I would be 100% behind everything that goes on. But its not.
There are a staggering number of posts that make all sorts of nonsensical claims about things like a coming ice age, or cosmic rays, or sunspots, or its all natural (ENSO, AO, etc), or its all based on flawed models, or its a conspiracy to install a socialist world government, etc, etc. Then there is the cheer squad, which is happy to criticise actual scientific papers without ever having read them. And if you truly think that is not the case, then you have not been paying the slightest bit of attention to what goes on.

Mandas,
You’ve moved the goal posts with “and that humans are responsible for it”. There are many articles and comments on this site which show that natural processes account for various changes in the earth’s climate. Many others that take the IPCC position but redo the calcuations (frequently coming up with a much lower CO2 sensitivity – one that is more in line with actual temperature data). By taking the un-proven hypothesis that climate change is caused by human action as fact unfortunately leads to actions detrimental to human life and frequently causes more harm than good. If you don’t get the science right first you end up looking foolish and creating a solution to a problem that does not exist – often creating more problems via the rule of unintended consequences.
As to critcism of “scientific papers” – this is how science works. And as to the concensus; to paraphrase Einstein: No number of papers will prove me right, it only takes one to prove I’m wrong.

After reading lucia’s thread, …
It is truly shocking that we are letting people like this dictate important public policy and our energy usage.
I mean we can laugh at the antics that went on behind the scenes here, but these PR exercises produced by dedicated cult-like AGW believers are actually changing how human society is managed.

There is a fundamental lack of basic understanding at play.

No amount of scorn poured on the methodology of this meta-analysis of climate research is going to change the fact that less than five percent of the published research calls AGW into question.
That relegates the many here who would dispute the AGW theory as fellow-travellers with the tiny minority of scientists involved in the field who express doubts.
No credible scientific research outright rejects AGW, the argument, as with the actress and the bishop, is over how much it will cost.

@- fadingfool
“argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad auctoritatem in the one comment. Any more logical fallacies you wish to add?”
The argument from authority is only a logical fallacy if there is no expert consensus and the authorities cited are not legitimate experts.
In this case both those criteria are met.
As for the argumentum ad populum, i am NOT claiming that because less than five percent quibble about the reality of AGW it is therefore ‘True’. There are many good scientific reasons why AGW is an accurate explanation of recent climate change. I am simply pointing out that the posters here that reject or doubt AGW are part of a small, and shrinking, minority amongst the scientifically informed.

@- fadingfool
“…Instead I’ll leave you with a simple thought: The AGW meme – Cui bono?”
Well in the over century and a half that the AGW meme has become the scientific mainstream I would say that human understanding of the way the climate works has benefited.
But to turn the question around, who benefits from pretending there is much more doubt or uncertainty than is evident from the published research?

Human carbon dioxide emissions are not warming up the planet, anymore than other natural factors warm the planet, Anthropogenic factors are dwarfed by natural factors and there is not going to be any kind of catastrophe at all what’ so ever that will ever be be caused by carbon dioxide.
There is no such thing as a carbon dioxide induced tipping points, runaway greenhouse effect or anthropogenic global warming.
Cooling and colder winters are not caused by human carbon dioxide emissions, anthropogenic global warming or any other kind of tipping point fantasy.
There is absolutely NO such thing as “Anthropogenic Climate Change”, “Global weirding”, “Global disruption” or any of the ridiculous variants.

Human carbon dioxide emissions are not warming up the planet, anymore than other natural factors warm the planet, Anthropogenic factors are dwarfed by natural factors and there is not going to be any kind of catastrophe at all what’ so ever that will ever be caused by carbon dioxide.
There is no such thing as a carbon dioxide induced tipping point, runaway greenhouse effect or anthropogenic global warming.
Cooling and colder winters are not caused by human carbon dioxide emissions, anthropogenic global warming or any other kind of tipping point fantasy.
There is absolutely NO such thing as “Anthropogenic Climate Change”, “Global weirding”, “Global disruption” or any of the ridiculous variants.

The “survey” and many posters are asking the wrong question in my view. Let’s assume that the last 250 years are somehow significant and then ask ourselves how much of that warming is natural and how much is man-made.
Can the warming be split into the same ratio as the proportion of man-made greenhouse gasses to natural ones? Is half the warming man-made or 75% or 1%? Unless we can assign some numbers we are all just arm waving.

Sparks says:
Human carbon dioxide emissions are not warming up the planet, anymore than other natural factors warm the planet, Anthropogenic factors are dwarfed by natural factors and there is not going to be any kind of catastrophe at all what’ so ever that will ever be caused by carbon dioxide.
OK, that declares what you believe. But most of the scientists who have studied this topic believe differently, based on their research.
graphicconception says:
The “survey” and many posters are asking the wrong question in my view. Let’s assume that the last 250 years are somehow significant and then ask ourselves how much of that warming is natural and how much is man-made.
The Cook article actually does address that question. Most of the papers they survey are not attribution studies, but many exist and some are included.

mojo says:
May 16, 2013 at 9:49 am
NEVER go up against a Sicilian when DEATH is on the line!
—————–
I’ve spent the last few years developing an immunity to iocane powder.

BA says:
May 16, 2013 at 8:52 am
“OK, that declares what you believe. But most of the scientists who have studied this topic believe differently, based on their research.”
Any so-called scientist who believes that a catastrophe will happen or can even occur from a miniscule amount of carbon dioxide locked in an a biological cycle with life on earth, in an atmosphere with a composition of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 0.9% argon, is not studying hard enough or is a total nitwit.
The facts I mentioned in my comment up thread also show; that I believe that these so-called scientists, that “believe differently” make up fantasies and apply terminology such as “Global weirding” to spin their belief with an emotional plea and distort the meaning of what the term “climate change” actually means (Inigo Montoya).
“It is difficult to say what truth is, but sometimes it is so easy to recognize a falsehood.”
~Albert Einstein.

BA says:
May 16, 2013 at 1:03 pm
Again, you declare your beliefs (though I saw you shift that goalpost, from “not warming up the planet” to “a catastrophe”).
To be fair, it was anthropogenic global warming proponents (who are alarmist of an impending catastrophe) that have declared their beliefs, I as an accomplished Engineer and programmer, qualified horticulturist, amateur astronomer and a highly educated person do NOT agree with these beliefs, get over it and respect my opinion, as for moving goal posts drivel? your original statement “…you declare your beliefs” did that.

@- fadingfool
” AGW does a very poor job of explaining how the climate works, if anything it hinders our understanding of the earth (if you removed the CO2 hypothesis you wouldn’t need to re-invent it to explain our climate) . ”
If you really have a credible explanation for the surface climate that did not require the role of CO2 in converting outgoing longwave photons to thermal energy within the atmosphere you would overturn more than just climate science. The first two Laws of thermodynamics would fall as well.
CO2 is required for simple energy balance since Plass et al worked out the radiative transfer equations in the 1960s. You certainly need the CO2 hypothesis to understand the climate on Venus and Mars. Without CO2 increasing the temperature gradient from the surface to the tropopause it is likely that most of the water vapour would condense out from the atmosphere resulting in a snowball Earth.
Claiming that the AGW theory, developed over the last century and closely integrated into most of the rest of modern science is some kind of Lysenkoist conspiracy is not even slightly credible.
@- “But as to who benefits from doubt – directly no one (try selling doubt on the stock exchange) – indirectly the human race as mitigation techniques are killing the elderly with cold and increasing food prices for the poorest.”
If the stock exchange was convinced that fossil fuels could no longer be used at present rates because of political regulation I think a lot of people would be trying to sell oil and coal companies.
While cold and increasing food prices may be killing the elderly the cold and the increasing food prices are only marginally effected by mitigation techniques. Climate change is the main factor impacting food prices and extreme winters.

BA says: If you don’t agree about the 97%, can you find many recent peer-reviewed papers that say humans are not causing global warming? Sure there are some; 3% of that sample is about 360 papers. But can you pick up recent copies of Science, Nature, GRL, EOS, BAMS, etc. and find stacks of them? I can’t.

You fail to understand the nature of scientific publishing. You very seldom see papers published which state that other people’s theories are wrong even when the general consensus behind the scenes is that the theory is a load of crap. Asking to see such papers is completely unrealistic. I could name a whole bunch of completely worthless papers in my area which have never been explicitly refuted in print but which everyone working in the area knows are rubbish. Bad science usually dies by being ignored into oblivion rather than being explicitly refuted in print.
There is a strong bias in science towards papers which put forward explanations. The criteria for publication require that a paper add to our understanding. Subtracting is a type of addition but this is not an easy argument to make to a publisher. It is a struggle to get a paper published which simply says that some other guy’s paper is wrong unless you put forward an alternative. Sceptics tend to put forward few alternative climate models of their own as most believe that our current state of knowledge of this chaotic system is insufficient to allow it to be modelled.
For an example of what a dying scientific theory looks like, take a look at supersymmetry. The theory has made no verifiable predictions and there is no experimental evidence to support it. It is now in the process of withering on the branch. Yet you won’t find very many papers in the literature that state supersymmetry is wrong. Meanwhile there are a bunch of supersymmetry experts out there still publishing and reviewing each other’s papers because academics have to publish to eat. The field will persist as an active area of research until these people retire. I have sympathy for them. It isn’t their fault that the idea they chose to build their careers on didn’t pan out. It looked promising and was worth investigating. So even though the whole field really deserves to be buried under a crossroads with a stake driven through its heart, I am not going to argue with them. I just ignore them.

This study cannot claim to be scientific if it is not reproducible. So how do you reproduce a study using a database that is dynamically updated?

izen, if the study is not reproducible because the database contents change how can we know it is valid? What is or is not included in the Web of Science database at any given time is at the discretion of Thompson Reuters and scientifically meaningless when quantified.
So if someone builds a database that only has 100 papers in it that meet this criteria and you get the same results that would be scientific confirmation?
Using this logic doing the same study on the Poptech database would be scientifically valid.

Izen said “If you really have a credible explanation for the surface climate that did not require the role of CO2 in converting outgoing longwave photons to thermal energy within the atmosphere you would overturn more than just climate science. The first two Laws of thermodynamics would fall as well.”
H2O. Water cycle and state changes of H2O. If anything it’s the “back radiation” theory that stretches the second law of thermodynamics. The oceans and H2O in the atmosphere are the control of the earth’s climate. Whilst CO2 might be the control of Venus (given the amount) even that is debateable as i suspect its more to do with the sulphur dioxide cycles.
Step back a moment – do you know anything about alternative geometries (such as spherical or taxi) in mathematics (as opposed to euclidian)? If you change a premise you can create logically consistent universes with its own proofs and laws. If that premise does not reflect reality though these proofs are little more than mental exercises. Now take a look at Hansens projections of temperature and CO2. The closest match to reality is the non-increasing CO2 projection. In any other field would not the premise be questioned?

Izen, please provide an objective criteria for determining if a database has a representative sample of “the published research”.
You are not making much sense, if over a thousand papers are published in this field every month how come the cartoonist only found 11,000 for 20 years?
How many papers in the cartoonist’s “study” explicitly endorse AGW?
Why is the cartoonist lying that they surveyed of over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/97-percent-consensus-cook-et-al-2013.html
When their paper explicitly states that when you eliminate non-peer-reviewed papers and ones that are not climate related you only have 11,991 papers.
“The ISI search generated 12 465 papers. Eliminating papers that were not peer-reviewed (186), not climate-related (288) or without an abstract (47) reduced the analysis to 11 944 papers”
Surely the cartoonist can do basic math?
You also have not answered this question – Does the Web of Science include every peer-reviewed papers and journal? If not how can you determine consensus?
I will wait while you seek council from the crusher crew.

Eugene WR Gallun says:
Izen and BA
Simple question — were either of you two involved in the Cook study as “raters” or in any other way?
Simple answer: no

Patrick says:
First link seems to be behind a pay-wall, contains only an abstract and apparently disproves ALL other studies. Second link seems to be behind a pay, contains only an abstract and refers to computer simulations.
There are other studies, I just cited a couple of recent ones from the two leading journals, Science and Nature. The temperature/CO2 relationship, in Antarctic ice cores and elsewhere, is important and has been widely studied — these new pieces do not “disprove ALL other studies.” Where did you get that idea? Like most science, they build on what is already known, such this 2012 paper:
“Antarctic ice cores provide clear evidence of a close coupling between variations in Antarctic temperature and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 during the glacial/interglacial cycles of at least the past 800-thousand years. Precise information on the relative timing of the temperature and CO2 changes can assist in refining our understanding of the physical processes involved in this coupling. Here, we focus on the last deglaciation, 19 000 to 11 000 yr before present, during which CO2 concentrations increased by ~80 parts per million by volume and Antarctic temperature increased by ~10 °C. Utilising a recently developed proxy for regional Antarctic temperature, derived from five near-coastal ice cores and two ice core CO2 records with high dating precision, we show that the increase in CO2 likely lagged the increase in regional Antarctic temperature by less than 400 yr and that even a short lead of CO2 over temperature cannot be excluded. This result, consistent for both CO2 records, implies a faster coupling between temperature and CO2 than previous estimates, which had permitted up to millennial-scale lags.”
http://www.clim-past.net/8/1213/2012/cp-8-1213-2012.html
In the meantime, have a look here;
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/02/4-carbon-dioxide-is-already-absorbing-almost-all-it-can
I see why we disagree. I read new research articles by scientists who are studying these topics. You dismiss scientists without knowing what they’ve written, and cite bloggers instead.

Sparks says:
My view is clear, Human carbon dioxide emissions, a fraction of the total composition of carbon dioxide in the earths atmosphere, which is a gas, Warms and cools with the rest of the earths atmosphere including the oceans and the land surface, It does not “cause” the warming or cooling. Any trace contribution made by human’s is beneficial and necessary for the earth to maintain a healthy “carbon cycle” which biological process need and have evolved to take advantage of over millions of years.
Your views expressed here are chaotic rather than clear, although it’s clear that you believe them quite strongly. On the other hand, most scientists who study these topics believe anthropogenic CO2 can and does warm the planet, not by creating heat but by slowing the loss of solar heat back to space. Many studies suggest the consequences will be more harm than good. And absolutely nothing has evolved over millions of years to take advantage of a CO2 rise this rapid.

BA says:
May 17, 2013 at 7:15 am
…most scientists who study these topics believe anthropogenic CO2 can and does warm the planet
The sun warms the planet, which includes carbon dioxide and all the other liquids and gases.
“Many studies suggest the consequences will be more harm than good”
Yes they do, I agree, they are alarmist and based on nothing more than fantasy and an over hyped representation of the facts.
“…absolutely nothing has evolved over millions of years to take advantage of a CO2 rise this rapid.”
Again, more dishonest twisting (what a surprise), Any trace contribution made by humans is beneficial and necessary for the earth to maintain a healthy “carbon cycle” which biological [processes] need and have evolved to take advantage of over millions of years.
by which I mean; carbon dioxide in general is beneficial and necessary for all the biological processes which have evolved to take advantage of it, over millions of years (anthropogenic or not). Mole fractional fluctuations in carbon dioxide or a “rapid rise” as you put it, is irrelevant to biological processes which sequester it as a mechanism to produce sustenance and where more carbon dioxide is beneficial.
Why are you refusing to understand or acknowledge this point.

BA says:
May 17, 2013 at 9:05 am
“What I understand about your points is that they are declarations of your own very strongly held beliefs, which happen not to be supported by logic or science.”
When did you stop beating your wife?, despite the Logical Fallacy of your argument, I will reply in kind, Carbon dioxide is beneficial, this is a logical declaration and it is demonstrated by science to be true.
Sure, CO2 is necessary to life. So is water. That does not mean that more is always better.
In the context of our planet more is better, carbon dioxide is a necessity and is beneficial at much higher levels, regardless of what relationship it has with earths variable temperature, is this not logical and backed up by science?

BA says:
May 17, 2013 at 11:26 am
How can something be beneficial “regardless of what relationship it has with earths variable temperature”?
Carbon dioxide in general is beneficial for life which sequester it as a mechanism to produce sustenance even tho temperature is variable.
If temperature warms or cools, that will change length of seasons. How the wind blows, where the rain falls, and much else.
Temperature does not change the length of a season, the length of a season is determined by the earths axis as it rotates around the sun, also, there are cycles of activity on the sun that can determine how warm or cold a season can be and there are tidal forces caused by the moon that effect the weather.
Forests can’t move very fast to get out of the way. Are they drought, insect and fire-proof, where you live?
Forests where I live have evolved to take advantage of insects and fires caused by dryer times. Trees are not fire-proof, but they have evolved a resistance to fire.
In fact, the forests where I live are so evolved, that every-time a “carbon neutral” power company orders some “carbon neutral” wood. The trees must see the logging company coming because they always disappear. /jk

Contrary to Brandon’s nonsense looks like I was right again, skeptic authored papers are being classified as either “Endorse AGW” or “No AGW position”.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/nir-shaviv-one-of-the-97/
Also,
Why is this paper not listed in the SS database – “What do we really know about the Sun-climate connection?”?
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273117797004997
It was published between 1991 and 2011 (1997), includes the search phrase “global warming” and the journal is indexed in the Web of Science (Science Citation Index);
http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/cgi-bin/jrnlst/jlresults.cgi?PC=MASTER&ISSN=0273-1177

Izen and BA
i asked if either of you were involved in the Cook paper. My reason for asking was i was hoping you were so you could provide some inside information about the processes of the study. But i guess not. Thank you for answering.
Eugene WR Gallun

I often find that the little things a person says and does are always very telling about that person’s personality.and predictive of his other behaviors.
11,991 papers were used in the study.
Cook-The-Books says over 12,000 papers were used in the study.
The correct statement would have been ALMOST 12,000 papers were used in the study.
A small thing? Yes, but very telling. At the very least Cook-The-Books likes to garnish his facts. i strongly suspect that all his claims about the “virtues” of his study are exaggerations.
Eugene WR Gallun