If you try really really hard to ask questions a certain way, then you’ll get the answers you want. ~ charles the moderator
Scientists misread data on global warming controversy
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Well-publicized troubles have mounted for those forecasting global warming. First, there was last year’s release of hacked e-mails from the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia, showing some climate scientists really dislike their critics (investigations are still ongoing). Then there was the recent discovery of a botched prediction that all Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 in one of the Nobel-Prize-winning 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Instead, the glaciers are only shrinking about as much as glaciers everywhere, twice as fast as they did 40 years ago, suggest results from NASA‘s GRACE gravity-measuring orbiter.
The recent controversies “have really shaken the confidence of the public in the conduct of science,” according to atmospheric scientist Ralph Cicerone, head of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Cicerone was speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting last month on a panel calling for more communication and release of data to rebuild lost trust for scientists. IPCC chiefs have made similar calls in the handling of their reports.
Scientists see reason for worry in polls like one released in December by Fox News that found 23% of respondents saw global warming as “not a problem,” up from 12% in 2005. Also at the AAAS meeting, Yale, American University and George Mason University released a survey of 978 people challenging the notion that people 18 to 35 were any more engaged than their elders on climate change. Statistically, 44% in that age range — matching the national average — found global warming as either “not too important” or “not at all important,” even though they grew up in an era when climate scientists had found it very likely that temperatures had increased over the last century due to fossil fuel emissions of greenhouse gases.
But what “if” (apologies to Kipling again) scientists are misreading those poll results and conflating them with news coverage of the recent public-relations black eyes from e-mails and the glacier mistake? What’s really happening, suggests polling expert Jon Krosnick of Stanford University, is “scientists are over-reacting. It’s another funny instance of scientists ignoring science.”
Krosnick and his colleagues argue that polling suggesting less interest in fixing climate change might indicate the public has its mind on more immediate problems in the midst of a global economic downturn, with the U.S. unemployment rate stuck at 9.7%. The AAAS-released survey of young people, for example, finds that 82% of them trust scientists for information on global warming and the national average is 74%.
“Very few professions enjoy the level of confidence from the public that scientists do, and those numbers haven’t changed much in a decade,” he says. “We don’t see a lot of evidence that the general public in the United States is picking up on the (University of East Anglia) e-mails. It’s too inside baseball.”
Read the rest of the story here.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Hi Charles, link to original article does not seem to work.
cheers
John
Reply: Oh you nit pickers (thanks, fixed) ~ ctm
Top link works, but not the bottom one.
Maybe the title should read:-
Scientists misread data on global warming – the controversy
John of Kent.
Thanks for the help and suggestions.
Charles of SOMA.
The problem now becomes how to gently let down those who have staked so much (financially, professionally or emotionally) on the imagined pending doom. It won’t be easy, as admitting to having been a dupe (or duped) will be a challenge .
Had the pleasure last night of seeing the last of Darwin College Cambridge’s lecture series on “Risk”. Given by Prof. Robert Watson of UEA (actually UK “government”) titled “Risk and (human induced) Climate Change”. I expected a world-class twaddle-fest (since a humble apology was hardly likely) and so it proved.
The man is a great speaker; admittedly not in the V I Lenin or A. Hitler class, but still damned good. Fascinating use of multiple fallacies and rhetoric, in particular the weasel-wording of the title which would enable him to say that he’d said he was talking about AGW even though most of his talk was of the “if it gets hotter you won’t like it” type and applied equally to any change whatsoever in the climate. Naturally no mention at all was made of sundry queries about the quality of the temperature curves displayed, or the rather distressing tendency of hurricanes etc. to decrease rather than increase as he kept predicting – whoops, sorry, projecting!
All good stuff, but I’m not at all sure that all the audience was convinced. To judge from my small circle of friends and acquintances, scientists are not misreading the data (for once!) at all.
…”it’s too inside baseball.”…
That’s because the MSM won’t print the story in order to keep it that way.
Trying to do most things in the eye of public forums serves primarily as a distraction most times. Facts lead to direction as misfacts lead to misdirection. If someone really wanted to reduce Greenhouse gases, one would only have to make an alternative that is both more convienent and cheaper. Unfortunately most major industry leaders have already made their methods the most convienent and anything cheaper they bought and buried. We haven’t advanced enough as a society to yet look past out own lives or our own times. One possability would be to take steps to put laws or regulations that keep technological, economical, ecological, and humanitarian progressions from never being added to our society or civilization. (examples: Electric car from the 50’s bought by GM and buried, deregulation of the private section of our economy, global warming & the truth/mistruth, New Orleans compared to Hadies – N.O. everyone complained about Phema/Haties everyone donated money or time to help/Chile everyones just watching) These ignorances we see every day and say it’s a shame. No ones doing anything, everyones waiting for someone to do something, & I don’t know what to do… But I do have some Idease!
I agree. I’m a scientist and I know a lot of scientists. None of them along with all of the nonscientists I know are aware of Climategate. It’s amazing to me how many are more worried about sports news and to a lesser extent the economy and local news. The climate just never crosses their minds.
I think they’re kidding themselves. If they were more scientific about polls, they would know that trends can take a while to register. And this, I think, is going to be one hell of a trend.
Not to be critical of Fox News, but relying on the results of a single poll is a fools mission. For example, lets conduct two identical polls about AGW, polling 1,000 readers on each of the two sites, “The Huffington Post” and “Free Republic”. Will we see similarities in results between the two? Very unlikely. Add the results of each poll, and calculate the responses of the 2,000 respondents as if they were one data set, and then we will greatly improve the confidence level of the results. However, “The Huffington Post” is not going to report the results based on the responses of the FREEpers, and vice versa!
How a poll question is asked will have major consequences to the poll results. For example, if the question is phrased as:
A) Do you believe that humans are making a contribution to Global Warming?
will produce a very different response than the question:
B) Do you believe that human’s contribution to Global Warming will have serious consequences in the near future?
or even
B) Do you believe that human’s contribution to Global Warming will have serious consequences in the distant future?
All questions have their own set up problems. While A) is not a leading question, it allows a “yes” answer even if the respondent thinks that the human contribution exists but is minuscule. Thus even AGW skeptics would likely answer “yes” to question A). The results of this question would certainly produce a skewed and misinterpreted result.
B) is a leading question that forces the respondent to accept the given that humans are contributing to Global Warming, but does allow a person to answer “No” if he or she rejects the alarmist paradigms (rising ocean levels, melting ice caps, increase in extreme weather, etc.)
The poll results between A) and B) could easily have a 50 point spread.
Complexity of the poll question is a delicate balance. A ‘too simple” question imparts ambiguity, requiring the respondent to to use his /her imagination to interpret the meaning of the question. A “too complex” question produces skewed results due an overly complex Boolean function that will confuse some respondents.
Another factor that can affect the poll results is whether the AGW question was asked exclusively, or whether it was part of a larger set of poll questions. In the latter case, even the ordering of the questions will likely affect the results. The first question asked in a set of questions implies either most importance, or in some cases least importance.
An improved form of polling (commonly used at Universities) allows for five possible responses to a given question, but this is usually not done by the professional pollsters dealing with the public.
See “20 Questions a Journalist Should Ask About Poll results”
http://www.ncpp.org/?q=node/4
Anyone with substantial experience in social statistics or econometrics knows you can shape your analysis to prove just about anything, at just about any stage of your research. We all take our own inferences “seriously” but know not to take anyone else’s that way. The layers of scope for intentional or unintentional bias are huge, running from theory selection, to specification, to underestimating various uncertainties, to functional identification, to question formation, analytic framework and above all, the process of informal inference and discussion……and quasi-experiments don’t address all the issues. Not to mention all-too-common dodgy standalone stats. Much more to say on this, but this isn’t the place.
The recourse in this article to “push-polling” on climate, then discussing very loosely perceptions, and confidence in science and scientists, is classic rhetorical diversion and classic soc-sci blather ( I say this as an economist).
The conclusion reduces to
– keep going with the agenda, the plebs are distracted, and
– the details don’t matter so long as the story sells.
There’s no point in rehashing Willis’ great article in response to Dr Curry, but similar sentiments certainly arise in reading this.
And what does “Arguments about science do obscure news and television discussions over steps to take in dealing with climate, from investing in nuclear power to regulating coal plants” mean? Stop talking science, it confuses people? Just push out the message and the facts be damned?
Underlying this is an assumption that ordinary people aren’t rational enough to deal with debate. That things have to be sorted out among the cognoscenti before being presented neat and simple for approval. That may appeal to bureaucrats, social engineers and behavioural economics meddlers like Sunstein, but it is just another argument for a revolutionary vanguard. And look where that got us.
Hmm. Just keep adjusting the input until you get the output you want. Sounds familiar.
Robert of New Kent
Like much of the climate change issue, public opinion is being misread, manufactured and blown out of all proportion.
Few countries have been as brain washed as the UK. Most people here would describe themselves as concerned about the environment and will spout some politically correct dogma if questioned about it. However the bits that stick in their minds are the bits that suit them. It might be some vague concern about pesticides or polar bears or recycling but very little really connects to CO2 reduction. If you question them about their specific CO2 reduction habits most will become vague or trot out excuse after excuse about why they haven’t actually significantly changed their lifestyles or homes.
Most are sure they want something done about reducing CO2 but what they really mean is they want the issue to magically disappear. They want government or big business to reduce CO2 emission, without it costing anything or inconveniencing them in any way. CO2 is a problem, just somebody else’s. Even the highest echelons of AGW find it impossible to match actions with their beliefs and only a few of them like Monbiot seem to be trying. Has no one asked themselves ‘if I can’t change myself, how can I change the rest of the World?’ Apparently not.
Most of those who would call themselves sceptics are equally disinterested. It’s just another excuse to avoid doing what they don’t want to. Very few actually know the real concerns about climate science and frankly don’t care. It’s only as you dig into the science that you begin to have serious doubts about how much scientists really know about the climate and become aware of how mad the current solutions are. Climate change is the ultimate money pit.
It infuriates me that the AGW fraternity and scientists see real sceptics as their enemy. It’s not us, it’s not the people that are looking at the science and seeing the flaws, it’s the people who aren’t looking at all.
Among the most seriously myopic are the climate scientists themselves. Each time they’ve assumed that the science from another department is accurate, without actually asking some fundamental questions, they’ve weakened the science. Each time they’ve accepted a colleague’s work for peer review and not actually seriously reviewed it, they have helped to screw up climate science. Each time they kept quiet when someone was wildly exaggerating, they’ve worked to create the chimera that is ‘robust’ AGW theory.
All these polls on climate opinion are only measuring the levels of self delusion not the levels of enlightenment.
Took me a while to get the pic.It’s straw,or is it?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Rice_straw.jpg
That’s not straw,This is straw
http://www.strawbale.com/wp-content/uploads/straw-bale-on-field.jpg
Sorry,couldn’t resist.
One of the fundamental issues is that the greater population at large are less educated in the ways of science – or should that be the mystical ways of science.
Over the past decade, schools have been escalating emphasis on administration, and political correctness and dragging science into a creationism verses evolution debate.
While this is no slant against those with religious beliefs, but the very fact that the scientific process is in apparent conflict with creationism indicates a deep flaw with the education system. Specifically, creationism and scientific process are two totally different mechanisms – it’s like arguing which should be taught in schools, Math or English?
Therefore, it’s not so surprising that many young adults are putting more faith in scientists because they themselves have no core understanding of science. Up to this point the scientific process has had little bearing on any given individuals life, but now we are all drawn into determining what science actually is. For a lot of us (when we were at school we had to get up before we went to bed and walk up hill both ways) we can have a bit of trouble telling the difference between belly button fluff and an atom.
The majority of people appeal to the scientific authority – it isn’t rocket science, though. A given individual with a (theoretical) high school education may not understand the mathematics and the advanced principles involved, they *should* be educated enough to understand and ask pertinent questions.
Maybe this is too harsh, but the education system is useless to the majority of students, and completely fails those who truly need help with their education.
Actually, all this poll shows is that people who are home to answer the phone for pollsters (i.e. Oprah watchers) still trust scientists because Oprah says to. If you want to move the hoi polloi, you need to put pressure on Oprah to answer for promoting fraudulent global warming books to her viewers.
Why are they bothered about polls anyway? OK rhetorical question – they need AGW to be forefront in the public mind so their political masters will keep the funds flowing. My response: Get a life.
Garh Paltridge summed it up thus:
“The problem with propaganda machines is that the average man in the street has learnt to smell them, recognize them, and be highly sceptical of them. His distrust may be hidden for a while for various reasons of inertia and politics, but given some small encouragement by way of an obvious glitch in the system, he will rather enjoy tearing the thing apart.
And such a glitch seems to have occurred in the climate game with the leaking a few months ago of thousands of e-mails and documents from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Among other things, they reveal how researchers may indeed go off the rails when they can no longer distinguish between research and political activism.
The response of prominent scientists within the global warming establishment both to Climategate and to the subsequent emergence of a very obvious and very extensive degree of scepticism about their work is quite extraordinary.
They have had control of public opinion concerning the disastrous nature of climate change for so long that they cannot even conceive of the possibility that sceptics may have a point. It seems instead that to return to their place in the sun it will merely be necessary for scientists to engage more powerfully in active promotion of a belief in climatic doom.
To build a bigger propaganda machine in other words. It doesn’t occur to them that it is exactly this sort of behaviour that got them into trouble in the first place. It is exactly this sort of behaviour that is ultimately likely to lose their battle for them.
IS GLOBAL WARMING MAN MADE?
CO2 is known to be a heat trapping greenhouse gas. The theory of man made global warming assumes that the CO2 in the atmosphere (about 0.04% of air) that has increased due to use of fossil fuels by humans has been causing global warming.
In science, the method used to verify the validity of a theory is to compare the theory with actual observations. To verify the theory of man made global warming, we may compare the change in CO2 in the atmosphere to change in mean global temperature during the same period.
In science, for a theory to be valid, it must apply at all times. As a result, to verify the validity of the theory of man made global warming, we can consider the years since 1998. The result of this comparison is shown above.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/plot/esrl-co2/from:1998/normalise/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1998/normalise/trend
In the chart above, based on the data since 1998, for more than a decade, there has been increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, but there has not been any change in the mean global temperature trend.
As a result, based on more than a decade long data, global warming is not man made.
Cheers
Looks like part of the AGW believers’ planned PR offensive.
Public opinion about AGW is important to me from an investment point of view. I never bought into the notion that AGW was real or severe or a big problem. It’s no big deal but blown out of proportion by a willingly complicit media and it has been so since its inception.
So when will public support break and when will governments shift the spending focus on something else? It’s already happening in Germany; the subsidies for renewable energy production get reduced by 15 percent for all new installations. New PV installations on the valued agrarian soil of Germany get nothing at all from now on. (It sounds irrational on a factual level as there is enough agrarian land available everywhere east of Germany but makes sense on the political level: You want to stop subsidizing so you use the excuse of scarcity of agrarian land in Germany; it just has to appeal to voters instincts.)
The AGW scientists will never regain their importance. The momentum they once had is just whithering away. They will fade into obscurity. The cool phase of the PDO is their undoing.
Meanwhile we will happily use microgeneration (coupled heat+electricity production at home, hydrocarbon fuel cells like the Bloom box, home PV+batteries) whenever it gives us cheaper energy. This path will be taken by the middle class; the poor will have to buy the ever more expensive grid electricity and pay the price for our green religion. (in Germany, grid providers have to inflate end consumer prices so they can pay the politically fixed prices for renewable energy ; they are forced to buy this energy)
Microgeneration is rapidly becoming viable under these circumstances. Public support for subsidized renewables drops with the ever increasing electricity prices. At the same time, people are just apathetic towards the science, tell’em that the globe is warming and they’ll say alright it’s warming, now where do i get some cheap wood for my fireplace for the next winter.
All three young intelligent people in our LA office at my recent visit there, barely knew of AGW, were not in the slightest concerned about it, knew nothing of the climate controversy or ClimateGate or of Cap&Trade (or health reform for that matter).
There is no point in taking polls of the public. Most wouldn’t even understand how a simple watch works so how would they even be close to having a basic understanding of how the climate works. Worse than that the climate is a very complex system, which is to this day not well understood by the cleverest scientists (at least the real ones) and so can’t make any predictions other than just guesses that are meaningless. How will the public ever be convinced they have been duped by the AGW hoax and fraud? I don’t know the answer unfortunately. We appear to be going around in circles yet the media, the governments and the public are still treating AGW by and large as a real threat. I hate to say this but I think truth will lose out this time, at least for the short to medium term. So, I sometimes wonder if we (as in AGW skeptics) are the ones grasping at straws.
Reading between the lines, it seems the point Professor Jon
A. Krosnick is making is that there are numerous “groups”
all engaged in various lines and levels of “groupthink”.
If I’m correct, he’s applying it to sceptics and AGwers; those
in between and those non-interested alike.
This is a form of interaction wasmade famous by Irvine L Janis
a number of years ago in his “Victims of Groupthink” .
It’s partly supported by selective attention, partly by selective
exposure, and partly by the groups/goals with whom you
tend you identify though time.
The term “hubris” applies when you identify closely enough
with your perceived peers that you exclude all other people
and possibilities from having rational points of view.
“They” are almost always wrong.
To mangle an old saw and a Unix/Linux term:
Birds of a feather awk together.
Sort of like the opinion groupings that show up in the
polls.
Monstrously condescending from ‘inside baseball’ to ‘hacked emails……showing some climate scientists really dislike their critics’. This is shameful and offensive, but at least it’s in a big league newspaper.
At least they’re telling the readers that there is a baseball game on. They missed the anthem and the rout it’s been so far, though.
=============================