By Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
This week was marked by a blowout that may have greater ramifications than the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a survey of literature entitled “Expert credibility in climate” by Anderegg, Prall, Harold and Schneider that claims:
(i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC [Anthropogenic Climate Change] outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers. (Boldface added)
After ClimateGate, warming advocates declared they must communicate better with the public.
Apparently, some believe they can communicate better with the public not by demonizing carbon but by demonizing those who challenge their views, by attempting to demonstrate the challengers are somehow unqualified. The keyword “climate deniers” is a tip-off – those who think that based on physical evidence, climate change is largely natural, not human caused. Already, blacklists have been drawn up with names of those who challenge the orthodoxy. Sometime in the future, it may be useful to compare the allocation of funding with names on the lists to assess the objectivity of those who control climate change funding.
By publishing this survey and its conclusions, the National Academy of Sciences is approaching a low perhaps not seen since eugenics was in vogue.
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Holos says:
June 27, 2010 at 1:58 pm
David provides a link to his flickr pages on his name
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmathew1
Looks like a biologist, or maybe just a photographer that takes pix of bugs and such. Like I see on other blogs the bio/life/photo types tend to understand climate science the least and howl the loudest.
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Biologists generally do not have the math background of other hard sciences unless they were forced to take statistics. Even then they may have only been taught to push numbers through a computer program without really understanding what is going on. Unfortunately now a days math (and reading) skills are not taught. Instead how to guess and how to use a computer is. And a computer is just not substitute for good math skills.
“Mathematics education policies and programs for U.S. public schools have never been more contentious than they were during the decade of the 1990s. The immediate cause of the math wars of the 90s was the introduction and widespread distribution of new math textbooks with radically diminished content, and a dearth of basic skills. This led to organized parental rebellions and criticisms of the new math curricula by mathematicians and other professionals. ” http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/AHistory.html
I was going to try and leave a reasonably well thought out reply.
Then I remembered a well known saying, to wit, “Never wrestle with a chimney sweep.”
I will not demean myself by trying to comment on this ludicrous, evil-intentioned PNAS publication. It is beneath contempt.
I thank the academies for publishing this paper because it fully reveals how non scientific and corrupt the organization has become. This organization has become an arm of the progressive left including the government with their agenda on many things including CAGW. It has been taken over by the radical environmentalist and elitest from academia.
I read their article on energy and they refuse to acknowledge the importantance of fossil fuels in our economy and the reality that alternative fuels are a least several decades (or more) away. They don’t care if their agenda will ruin our economy.
Betapug says:
June 27, 2010 at 11:40 am
“Maybe the future money is in thought control research…”
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Philemon says:
June 27, 2010 at 2:47 pm
What do you mean “future” money? Or “maybe”?
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Our education system is all about thought control. Why do you think most of the skeptics are older people? It is not just because of the fear about jobs. but because critical thinking skills are no longer taught.
Take a good long look at what John Dewey has done to the American education system. This is just one example.
Dumbing Down America
“…Dewey’s philosophy had evolved from Hegelian idealism to socialist materialism, and the purpose of the school was to show how education could be changed to produce little socialists and collectivists instead of little capitalists and individualists. It was expected that these little socialists, when they became voting adults, would dutifully change the American economic system into a socialist one.
In order to do so he analyzed the traditional curriculum that sustained the capitalist, individualistic system and found what he believed was the sustaining linchpin — that is, the key element that held the entire system together: high literacy. To Dewey, the greatest obstacle to socialism was the private mind that seeks knowledge in order to exercise its own private judgment and intellectual authority. High literacy gave the individual the means to seek knowledge independently. It gave individuals the means to stand on their own two feet and think for themselves. This was detrimental to the “social spirit” needed to bring about a collectivist society….”
I expect home schooling to become illegal here in the USA fairly soon since the “transformation” of the USA is almost complete.
Keep David on the hook.
It is amusing to see these warm-earthers in action; their use of every logical fallacy to avoid substantive discussion speaks to their ignorance of both science and the scientific method, and their chauvinistic reliance on the cult beliefs of the Cilimastrologers is pathetic. They cling to their faith, no matter what mass of evidence exists to the contrary.
We have always has the ignorant among us who have tried to manipulate science, but science has persevered through the many cults of the Chicken Littles. Here today, gone tomorrow.
Looks like the science is settled now, and that climate change is seen by clear-thinkers to be naturally occurring. The latest crying and whining and name-calling about the unfairness of the real scientists using facts, nothing but the facts, to refute the Climate Inquisitors, is tacit proof that the AGW hypothesis is totally bankrupt.
Re. Philemon
I had not until recently seen seminars dealing with “denialism” as a recognized psychological defect qualifying for NHS education credits in the UK or the sessions offered by the CSIRO in information absorption deficit in Australia. The quasi-religious “believer/unbeliever” paradigm, with the attending emotionalism, seems to be giving way to a more of a disease model for AGW denial epidemiologists.
While the internal dialogs at WWF and a lot of the huge green enterprise chain talks in advertising language about image branding, market dominance and driving opinion, I guess sound less idealistic than health care.
We are not infidels so much as we are nuts and there are way more social scientists around to aid us to healthy thinking than there are climate scientists.
That the PNAS has seen fit to publish a paper in which a central premise of a paper is the fact that 97% of scientists support the theory of AGW is a sad day for science. I don’t care if 99% of scientists support a particular viewpoint; it just takes one scientist who demonstrates that the theory is false to produce a paradigm shift. There are numerous historical examples of where this was the case — 150 years ago 99% of physicians would have likely disbelieved the germ theory and it took the work of Semmelweis and Pasteur to finally convince the medical profession that they were on the wrong track. To make matters more embarrasing, Pasteur was not a physician.
Of course that is in the field of medicine which some can argue isn’t a true science as consensus positions in many subspecialties are the norm (especially psychiatry). In the field of physical sciences one would expect true science to reign. AGW is a very sloppy theory and seems to be setup so it is non-falsifiable; IMHO Steve McIntyre has falsified AGW by his debunking of the hockey stick graph. AGW is such an amorphous theory that it seems anything that happens fits the theory; we have a colder than average winter and that is part of “global warming”. It is hotter than usual in the summer – again “global warming”. It rains more – “global warming” but then droughts are also forecast by “global warming”.
What has become clear is that much of “science” has become very unscientific. True science is open to anyone who is intelligent enough to take the basic premises of a branch of science, play with them and come up with novel testable theories. The sign of a non-scientist is the denigration of an individuals credentials when they come up with unexpected testable conclusions from data that “true scientists” have not. Steve McIntyre seems to frequently be attacked on this basis as his methodology for destroying one of the essential foundations of AGW can’t be disproved by the “experts” in this area. Many of the novel discoveries in science have been made by non-experts or people with expertise in other fields as they are thinking out of the box whereas “experts” have great knowledge in a tiny area of science and no longer think much beyond their area of expertise.
I don’t care if the person who comes up with the right answer is a cab driver, plumber or solar physicist; the main thing is if they’re right or not. We’ve seen failure after failure of AGW predictions and an ever increasing nebulous theory that now seems indistinguishable from a pseudo-scientific justification for unbridled statism.
From what I’ve seen, the well funded AGW establishment is unlikely to produce anything of significance but is capable of producing immense harm. One has the situation where there are a small group of like-thinking “experts” who are the recipients of the funding and also serve as peer-reviewers on what are considered to be the most influential journals in the field. These “experts” have graduate students who, through the process of confirmation bias and often not so subtle pressure from their thesis supervisor, reject the “outliers” they find in their thesis projects and come up with yet more support for the pet theory of their supervisor. This technique is fine if one is dealing with phenomena from “mediocristan” (the realm where normal distributions apply and conventional statistics works) but totally fails in “extremistan” which is the home of black swans, or unknown unknowns and also the regime corresponding to earth’s climate. We have been total failures in modelling the far more constrained financial systems with numeric models even with incredibly fine-grained data. The idea that one can use the same models (but faster computers) to model the highly chaotic climate system of the earth which is chaotic and for which we know only imperfectly a few of the controlling parameters is the height of hubris (or insanity).
Throwing money at a large collection of climate “experts” would be analagous to creating a multiprocessor system to solve a problem in which every processor solves the identical problem with just minor differences. WUWT is the equivalent of a multiprocessor system in which the highly varied components solve differing problems in the realm of climate science and such a collection of individuals is far more likely to solve some of the difficult problems in this realm (or more importantly poke holes in poor theories) than the well funded multiprocessor system that is only working on a very tiny portion of the problem. This type of democratic science is very messy but far more likely to come up with solutions to climate science than the monolithic rigid science which is now indistinguishable from government. Democracy and capitalism are very messy multiprocessor parallel processing networks for solving social and economic problems but they are orders of magnitude better than central control solutions.
What I’ve found is that every time I change fields I come up with my most significant insights in the new field right at the beginning while I’m learning it; I’m glad I kept all my writings when I first got into medical school as they make me realized how myopic I’ve become about medicine now that I do this full time. To try to stay out of the “expert” trap I try to do some form of major career change every 10 years or so.
Charles Higley says:
June 27, 2010 at 1:29 pm
This is getting depressing. My list of journals that I consider worthwhile reading is getting shorter.
How can PNAS begin to consider this paper for publication?
Time to turn over the editors of these journals and get some that have a conscience, morals, and knowledge of the meaning of science.
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As was noted in another article about this ‘paper’ – here as i recall – because Schneider is a member of the NAS it did not need to be peer reviewed at all for publication.
Could somebody verify that? If so, it says a lot about what could show up in the PNAS… as long as one is a member of the NAS club.
DN says:
June 27, 2010 at 1:04 pm
Until then, it’s all pointless hyperventilating – and hyperventilating ain’t science either.
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But doesn’t hyperventilation cause CO2 build-up?
To address the (few) actual comments that he brought up between his rants and ravings:
Bush did not, at any level or by any method, ever encourage pollution or increase pollution by his policies. To claim such is a simple, direct lie based on exaggeration and fears.
Bush did not, at any point or by any policy ever – in any way – fund “sceptic” global warming research. HHis NASA and DOE and GISS and NOAA and NWS and NSF budgets from 2001 through 2009 budget years – the ones he signed but which were written and funded by Congresses both democrat and republican-led, and which were voted by predominaently democrat-laden Senate committees, funded pro-AGW topics to some 60 billion dollars. Some of us would wish that funding were more balanced. But the democrats and international politicians don’t like the truth. It gets in the way of their taxes. By the way, Greenpeace and WWF and earthwatch and the UN and the IPCC and the democrat party (etc) are proud to take Exxon’s and BP’s hundreds of millions of oil money every year. Can I get some of that tainted money if it is evil?
Obama was proud to have Duke Power and Exelon and BP write HIS carbon-trading scheme – as long as THEY didn’t get stuck with the bills – for increasing every body else’s taxes. Obama was proud to give PetroBras (the nationalized petroleum company of Brasil) tens of billions of US dollars for THEIR off-shore drilling and exploration – as soon as Soros invested his money in PetroBras stock. BEFORE the US taxpayer funding was revealed that is. So Obama supporters (and Soros funded 800 million of his money in US congressional democratic races all by himself.) are “allowed” to make money drilling offshore deeper than in the Gulf of Mexico using US dollars to cushion their expenses? But US workers and companies are prohibited from the same activity – as long as they are non-union?
That you can “claim” science is tainted by funding sources, or that you can even ASSUME in your current mental state that science results are tainted and prejudiced by funding sources, means that you must have personally seen some proof or evidence that science HAS BEEN changed and predjudiced by who funds it. Since we know that that no scientific project has ever been changed to a “realist” position by funding (since there has been no such funding and thousands of articles showing that pro-AGW “science” HAVE been funded to the net amount of 80 billion dollars), then you are proving that the pro-AGW studies are tainted and have been changed to prove unusual or out-of-the-ordinary global warming exists, that it has been caused by man’s CO2 releases, and that future global warming will be catastrophic.
None of the above are true.
To the contrary. There are no – not any – hazards and many blessings to come from a 2-4 degree global warming from today’s temperatures.
By the way, yes, CO2 is a fertilizer and today’s increases in plant growth – of every green plant on earth by 7% to 25% increased mass, strength, drought-resistance and productivity of food, fodder, fuel, and feed – are real and are documented. By real peer-reviewed documents in real peer-reviewed catalogs and programs. And in your grocery shelves.
You are invited to bring up facts in your discussion.
Some of the more grounded Fellows of the Royal Society are attempting to moderate the alarmism previously demonstrated by that Society.
Where are the distinguished members of the NAS who were actually elected for their scientific accomplishments rather that through the environmentalist loophole? Will no one come forward to denounce this rubbish and replace those responsible?
David: dial it back, make your case about the science, offer some evidence in place of accusation — and we’ll all be happy to debate here at WUWT. You’ll be challenged, of course, but we love a good discussion.
RE: Betapug says:
June 27, 2010 at 11:40 am
In your link, this Dr Ho mentioned (in a positive manner) Cass Sunstein and his book Nudge. That says it all for me.
Eventually, the truth will out. Then? Tar and feathers. And the historical record damning and exposing them for all time.
Gary says:
June 27, 2010 at 5:44 pm
If he could hold up his end that is! He can’t contribute anything to any scientific argument, David has made that clear. He may even be a high school kid! The anonymity of the internet is a great and wonderful thing!
“By publishing this survey and its conclusions, the National Academy of Sciences is approaching a low perhaps not seen since eugenics was in vogue.”
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What’s false about the survey and its conclusions?
David says:
June 27, 2010 at 1:07 pm
David, if you read this blog regularly you will find a number of believers in AGW comment regularly believe it or not. However, you should read the policy of this website first before posting your comments. Hysteria, abuse and provocation (“deniers”) will get you snipped. Have you not noticed your comments began to get through when you calmed down a little. Why not try and make you scientific case for AGW and post it here?
I for one hope you come to this website regularly and argue each post as you see fit. After a while you just might turn sceptical. :o)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/policy/
“After ClimateGate, warming advocates declared they must communicate better with the public.”
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What the heck is a “warming advocate” ?
A. An advocate under an electric blanket.
B. Someone who advocates a warmer world because he thinks it would be a better world?
After a while you just might turn sceptical. :o)
After checking out his site, I’d have to say I seriously doubt it . . .
It’s even interesting, after a fashion. But I think he’s definitely incorrect regarding the nature of violence. Many animals besides man engage in implacable, organized, entirely merciless warfare. Many others indulge in extreme, gratuitous violence (including against their own kind) on an individual level.
Nature is fang and claw. Even the plants get in on it.
In a similar vein, it appears there is another study showing that skeptics lack expertise:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100625185428.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29
I don’t think these people get it yet.
Jeff M says:
June 27, 2010 at 7:46 pm
In a similar vein, it appears there is another study showing that skeptics lack expertise:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100625185428.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29
I don’t think these people get it yet.
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Isn’t that the same study, or did I miss something?
I think there is something of a panic going on. One more winter like the last two and the money is going to start drying up and climate scientists are going to have to start looking for real jobs. No more sitting around at NSIDC and posting arguments on here all day on the taxpayer’s dime (or, rather, the Chinese dime).
I don’t get why several posters took such issue with the way this post started out. To me, the BP spill must not be that much of a big deal, the administration hasn’t seemed too interested in doing anything about it other than posturing.
Wren says:
June 27, 2010 at 6:55 pm
“By publishing this survey and its conclusions, the National Academy of Sciences is approaching a low perhaps not seen since eugenics was in vogue.”
======
What’s false about the survey and its conclusions?
Well, read the blog. To start with, you being on the non-blacklisted side, just for starters.
Charles Higley says:
June 27, 2010 at 1:29 pm
This is getting depressing. My list of journals that I consider worthwhile reading is getting shorter.
How can PNAS begin to consider this paper for publication?
Time to turn over the editors of these journals and get some that have a conscience, morals, and knowledge of the meaning of science.
PNAS’ “Expert credibility in climate change” article is one more reason for U.S. citizens to question their members of congress about support of funding levels for the NAS. Why is the organization doing anything other than activity directly related to physical science research? Another example of misdirection is http://nationalacademies.org/morenews/20100526b.html. What bearing does advocacy of funding for maternal and child care have on scientific research?
Mike G says:
June 27, 2010 at 8:40 pm
Wren says:
June 27, 2010 at 6:55 pm
“By publishing this survey and its conclusions, the National Academy of Sciences is approaching a low perhaps not seen since eugenics was in vogue.”
======
What’s false about the survey and its conclusions?
Well, read the blog. To start with, you being on the non-blacklisted side, just for starters.
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I did’t ask what’s false about the blog. I asked what’s false about the survey and it’s conclusions.
How about pointing out one lie for starters?