97% Climate consensus 'denial': the debunkers debunked

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Not the least of many signs that the rationalists who have dared to doubt the official story are winning the debate on the climate is the childish bluster to which the dwindling band of true-believers resort when they meet an argument they cannot defeat.

The IPCC’s version of the vaunted “climate consensus”, in which it is about to proclaim 95% confidence on 0% evidence, is that at least half of the 0.7 Cº global warming since 1950 was manmade.

Cook et al., paid schoolboy interns in propaganda studies at Queensland Kindergarten, are not pleased with Legates et al. (2013), written by grown-ups, which demonstrated that the kids, surveying the abstracts of 11,944 papers on global climate change published from 1991-2012, had marked only 64 abstracts out of 11,944 as explicitly endorsing the IPCC’s version of consensus.

The kids themselves had gone to great lengths to contrive not to reveal that devastating fact in their headcount paper, which on that and many other grounds would not have passed peer review in a real scientific journal instead of a comic.

Scientifically speaking (if one can regard brats counting heads among scientists as science), the zit-faces’ omission to reveal just how few papers they themselves had categorized as supporting the notion that Man was the cause of at least half of the small global warming since 1950 was lamentable.

Indeed, one could argue that their lapse amounted to deception. Here is why.

The tiddlers’ seven “levels of endorsement” of climate consensus were –

1 “Explicitly states that humans are the primary cause of global warming”

2 “Explicit endorsement without quantification”

3 “Implicit endorsement”

4 “No opinion or uncertain”

5 “Implicit rejection”

6 “Explicit rejection without quantification”

7 “Explicit rejection with quantification”

The first level of endorsement, which only 43 abstracts explicitly agreed to, was equivalent to the IPCC’s version of consensus. The small fry, hoping to get away with concealing the fact that even their own skewed allocation had only marked 64 abstracts as falling in level 1, simply aggregated levels 1-3 as a single quantity.

It was this oddity that first attracted my attention to the deception. In effect, by aggregating the three pro-consensus levels of endorsement, the smelts were using a different, and not a little weird, table of endorsement levels:

3 “Endorsement”

4 “No opinion or uncertain”

5 “Implicit rejection”

6 “Explicit rejection without quantification”

7 “Explicit rejection with quantification”

The little ones’ paper was published in a comic that has thus far proven unwilling to publish much, if anything, in the way of adverse comment on what they had written. Fortunately, some of the grown-up journals (though not yet Nature or Science) are beginning to allow rationalists to give the other side of the story once again. And that has tweaked the teenies to chuck a tanty, as they say Down Under.

In their lavishly-subsidized internet sandpit, misleadingly called “Skeptical” “Science”, the goo-goos throw a long, whining, self-justifying tantrum entertainingly entitled Debunking 97% Climate Consensus Denial.

Reading this fascinatingly repellent whinge is like watching a Bela Lugosi B-movie while still sober. The fascination lies in the fact that anyone bothered to distribute it at all.

Well, let us debunk the debunkers’ debunkment of Legates et al’s debunkment of the debunkers’ dismal paper.

You’re going to like this: for the tiny tots’ desperation is hilariously self-evident. Their please-sir-me-too paper says it found exactly the same “97%” “consensus” as two earlier laughable and long-discredited head-count surveys, Doorstop & Zimmerframe (2009) and Scrambledegg et al. (2010).

The bimbi’s results remind one of nothing so much as elections in the Soviet-era “democratic” “republics” of Eastern Europe: Comrade Zarkov (Communist Party) 97%, spoiled ballots 3%. Checksum: voters not shot 97%, voters shot 3%. Confidence interval 95%.

Well, here is how the kiddiwinks attempted to attack Dave Legates and his colleagues, of whom I am proud to be one.

First they quote the introduction to their own paper, which had said: “We examined a large sample of the scientific literature on global [climate change], published over a 21 year period, in order to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW).”

Yet their paper had not given the answer, because it was far too low. It revealed just how few abstracts had explicitly stated support for the IPCC’s version of consensus. That was the last think the diddumses wanted.

Now that they have been caught out, they say this:

“The IPCC position (humans causing most global warming) was represented in our categories 1 and 7, which include papers that explicitly endorse or reject/minimize human-caused global warming, and also quantify the human contribution. [Yup, you’ve seen it too, but try to keep a straight face for just a little longer].

“Among the relatively few abstracts (75 in total) falling in these two categories, 65 (87%) endorsed the consensus view.”

Just like that, the rugrats eliminated 99.4% of the papers in their sample, claiming 87% support for the IPCC’s version of consensus among just 75 papers. And that’s an even smaller sample than the 79 analyzed by Doorstop & Zimmerframe (2010), and not much more than a third of the 200 analyzed by Scrambledegg et al. (2009).

Opinion pollsters would not regard a sample size of less than 1000 as being statistically reliable, and even then only if steps had been taken to eliminate bias.

The result is even more nonsensical even than that. For it should be obvious even to the wee lambkins that those abstracts they had assigned to categories 5 and 6, as well as those in category 7, did not and would not endorse the IPCC’s version of consensus, for they had all implicitly or explicitly rejected the notion that Man has any influence on the climate at all.

So, suspending disbelief in the tiny sample size that the children’s method engenders, let us do the math for them, for they are not old enough to do it themselves and Miss Prism, their amiably dotty and self-evidently over-indulgent nanny and tutor, is on annual leave in Bunbury, Western Australia.

There were 43 abstracts explicitly endorsing the IPCC’s version of consensus. But there were 54 in level 5; 15 in level 6; and 9 in level 7. Total sample size was thus a not exactly significant 121 out of 11,944 papers, or just 1% of what was already a smallish sample of the entire literature. So the consensus, on their own dopey basis, is not the 97% they originally published, nor even the 87% they now claim, but a mere 35.5%.

And how do the babes-in-arms answer Legates et al.? They say that we have taken “quantification … to the extreme”, because our paper “focuses exclusively on the papers that quantified human-caused global warming and takes these as a percentage of all [11,944] abstracts captured in the literature search, thus claiming the consensus is not 97%, but rather 0.3%.”

Well, at least they have understood the math now.

And, whether these intellectual minnows like it or not, focusing on quantities, rather than elaborately suppressing inconvenient truths by carefully not focusing on quantities, is what grown-up mathematicians and scientists do.

Next, these critters draw a spectacularly bad analogy between our manifestly correct arguments against their now-discredited paper and the notion that just because CO2 represents only 0.04% of the atmosphere it cannot cause much warming. Seems they have not yet heard of the logarithmically-diminishing returns from adding CO2 to an atmosphere that already has 0.04% CO2 in it.

The central dodginesses in the tweety-pies’ argument are the carefully implicit assumptions that if 97.1% of those few that expressed an opinion one way or the other on global warming say or imply we can cause some warming, 97% of those not expressing an opinion would say the same if asked; that 97% of the entire sample would also say or imply we caused at least half of the global warming since 1950; and that, as Mr Obama’s twitteratus tweeted, the same 97% would go still further and say the warming we had caused or might cause was “dangerous”.

Non-sequitur piled upon non-sequitur, and all depending upon the authors’ failure to adhere to a single, clear definition of consensus throughout.

What does the silly Cook survey really reveal? It reveals the utter stupidity of all such headcounts among scientists; despite the authors’ attempt at artful suppression, it reveals the truly interesting and no doubt unintended result that explicit support among climate scientists for the IPCC’s version of consensus is vanishingly different from zero; and, above all, it reveals that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists do not express political opinions about the climate in their published papers. They just get on with the science.

In that last thought, perhaps, lies the hope for this once-honorable discipline that the likes of Cook et al., and those who fund them, have done so much to drag into the dirt.