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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James, The paper is here:
http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
If it’s valid to use single tree as proxy for global temperatures, what’s wrong with using 77 scientists as proxy for global consensus? You really only need one, as long as he/she selected properly…
Dr. Doran bio:
http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/home.htm
Many skeptics believe that “human activity” has a significant upward effect on temperature, but they’re thinking of land-use changes. The survey question looks like it was “loaded” to catch them in its sieve.
Four out of Five Dentists.
recommend sugarless gum
Reveal That Texting During Dental Treatment A Common Problem
recommend playing hockey
want to sue a famous toothpaste manufacturer for false advertising
Like oral sex.
(OK, I made up the last one)
🙂
Climatology has become so identified with the CACA Cult that few would enter the field without also being believers, or without having undergone indoctrination in its tenets. Alarmism isn’t the conclusion of most of these scientwists, it’s their launch pad.
If they were skeptical and did enter the field, they would be unlikely to get grants, and so would be hard up for material to publish. If they nevertheless did write skeptical critiques of warmism, they’d have a hard time getting them published. (See the recent trouble Spencer had getting his paper published, or McIntyre et al.)
OTOH, an alarmed alarmist is going to churn out all sorts of unlikely doomsday scenarios and get them published. (E.g., warming is causing bats to die off–a now-debunked thesis published twice in Nature, while papers skeptical of that idea were rejected.)
Incidentally, were those polled guaranteed anonymity? If not, that might well have inhibited a few skeptics from participating.
So it’s not surprising the percentage of much-published climatologists is high. It’s so high it’s suspiciously high (for the reasons I mentioned above).
The survey didn’t ask these very relevant questions, I presume because in a previous poll only half the responders agreed that the results will be catastrophic is nothing is done:
Do you think the warming will continue?
How likely is the warming to be catastrophic?
(Or maybe those questions were asked, but the publicity about the survey didn’t mention them, because the answers weren’t to their liking.)
hey guys/mods – I posted this a while ago – did it get lost in the ether??
Is this ‘thesis’ available online anywhere? I’d like to know the real figures!
Also, as an earth scientist, I certainly don’t recall being asked about AGW, or seeing anything about it – so presumably, they only asked US earth scientists folks?
And finally, if the MSc was awarded on the basis of a fraudulent or flawed thesis, (what did it actually conclude?) surely that cannot be correct (its some years ago since I did mine, but a thesis would normally be reviewed by at least one external reviewer/examiner?)
Doran considers ill-informed on the subject. “Most members of the public think meteorologists know climate, but most of them actually study very short-term phenomenon,”
Contrast this with what climatologist Marcel Leroux wrote:
“basic knowledge about the real mechanisms of meteorological phenomena and about the processes whereby climatic modifications are transmitted, is necessary for the analysis and understanding of climatic evolution, across all scales of intensity, space and time.”
Doran is an ignoramus. Period.
Kind of like polling all “scientists” who identify themselves as cold fusion scientists and asking them if cold fusion is real.
The paper at http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf is more to my mind a political document rather than the true reporting of a survey. A number of commentators here have referred to how the questions were loaded and I agree.
Disregarding that point there’s this statement ‘In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total).’ Now I don’t know whether a meteorologist, geologist, paleontologist, earth scientist or physicist just to name a few would list ‘climate science’ as an area of expertise. If not then a huge slice of what affects climate is immediately disregarded. If so they’ve probably got an exaggerated sense of their own knowledge.
I’m not a scientist so howl me down if I’m wrong but if I’m right then the study is skewed even as to the 79.
Then there’s the issue of ‘publishing on climate change.’ Hmmm….I wonder how many skeptics would fit into this group. From my reading most skeptic scientists stick to their area of expertise and publish papers on that without specifically mentioning those magic mushroom words ‘climate change.’
Then there’s the last paras “It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes. The
challenge, rather, appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact to
policy makers and to a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate
among scientists.” (Neglecting the point that the word ‘scientists’ depended on the authors’ perception of who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.)
Now that’s a political marketing statement and may have been worth the graduate funding but it has no place in the study of a survey called ‘Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change’ produced at a University Science School.
The debate is over…97% of people who derive their income from anthropogenic global warming believe in anthropogenic global warming. What a shocking discovery! A Nobel Prize contender for 2011.
One thing I find rather well interesting.
Of the claimed 2500 scientists and the IPCC. You’ll find some of those 2500 individuals aren’t actually scientists anyway. Just because an individual took part in the IPCC process. They were suddenly tagged as a scientist even though they had no science qualifications.
It’s the same as if I got elected to a hospital board and I was suddenly tagged as a doctor because my name appeared on a hospital review report. Even though I didn’t have any medical qualifications.
Climate alarmists keep talking about the consensus – we can use that to our advantage.
Consensus – “agreement in the judgment or opinion reached by a group as a whole”
That is what a consensus is. So far it extends only to those with an interest in maintaining their position as ‘experts’ and those who want to tell everyone else how to live. What are they prepared to give up for me to agree with some common position? Little that I can see. They don’t *want* to meet in the middle.
Supporting nuclear power would be good. Highlighting expensive energy follies like solar and wind feed in tariffs would be good but amazingly the only high profile warmist I can think of who has done that is George Monbiot. Supporting free trade would be great – people in developing nations can then increase their wealth and people in developed nations can reduce their living costs. Money is redistributed by consent through trade and rather than have some grand global welfare scheme people decide for themselves what is required.(which in most cases won’t be adapting to climate change in any real sense but simply building better infrastructure)
Why must taxes go up to combat climate change? Let Governments show some faith in their people by redirecting existing revenues rather than taking even more money off us.
75 out of 77 Climate Scientists blame Humans for Global Climate Change, in other news, 2 Climate Scientist are excommunicated for denialism and other heretical and slanderous beliefs.
@David Ball:
“It [Ice Age] IS coming, but no one can say with absolute certainty when.”
The consensus on that is in – it’s going to start December 21, 2012. I did a survey.
@TimM:
“Total denial even when faced with verifiable facts” – isn’t that what’s usually said about the skeptics?
Problem is, facts are meaningless in religious debate.
Simply unbelievable.
Hopefully you mean “affect” and not “effect”.
David Ball says:
January 4, 2011 at 1:05 pm
Forgot to mention, cudos to Lawrence Solomon for his efforts!! All journalists should do as much homework as Solomon does.
—————
Kudos indeed! Hear hear!
The Zimmerman thesis is indicative of how political correctness lowers academic standards. Just so long as you reach the right conclusions, the methods and evidence don’t have to add up. Students don’t get trained in the importance of using proper evidence to back up arguments – at least in the ‘important’ large universities. Why? It’s because the TAs (grad students) who are grading their work often don’t have the discernment or training themselves to separate the ‘appropriate’ argument from the evidence presented. The professors in these institutions are too busy researching and publishing — to add to the lustre of their CVs and universities — to care about how measly undergrads are really learning. Then there are also too many profs who care more about acceptance and saying the right things – and getting grants – than about upholding standards.
There’s an excellent article “Progressives are Running the Universities” from the Jan 3 National Post by a sociology prof (!!!) at my old alma mater:
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/01/03/ricardo-duchesne-progressives-are-running-the-universities/#more-23449
Its very depressing for those of us who agonize over finding evidence to support arguments that most people will ignore anyway.
I hope more alumnums (gender neutral modern inflection) figure out what is going on and refuse to knuckle under when their alma mater* comes begging for money. The problem is one can’t rant at the poor students who are making the begging calls.
* The University of New Brunswick is a small and quite excellent university, and I do give it money. The places I have in mind in this complaint are considerably larger.
I don’t know about all this correspondence of corespondents, but I do remember as a boy seeing my breath in the cold and the snow was much deeper then. Does that mean me and my grand kids are going to freeze or fry or both?
97% of Chicken Littles say the sky is falling.
Takes data snooping to a whole new level …
“…This master’s thesis presents the results of the survey in an effort to advance the understanding of the global climate debate among scientists…”
The thesis was no such thing. There was zero effort expended on advancing the “understanding of the global climate debate.” They took a simple-ass survey, then tortured the results until they gave the desired results, and hand-waved away the existence of a debate. No science was involved in this farrago of arithmetical distortions.
Reminds me an old Soviet joke.
Chairman of the Soviet Writers’ Union chapter in Tula region gives a speech:
“Comrades! We made a considerable progress demonstrating the undeniable superiority of our socialist society and culture. There are now 267 registered members of the Writers’ Union in Tula Chapter, while before the October 1917 Revolution there was only a single writer living in our region, Lev Tolstoy…”
I found the thesis is available (via a paywall) from Peter Doran home page at UIC. (but I refuse to download it even if it is only a minor sum!)
anyway – on continuing a slow googling I came across this
http://cdm15036.contentdm.oclc.org/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/p15036coll3&CISOPTR=741&filename=742.pdf
which is another thesis proposal – quoting the zimmerman/doran data! this illustrates perfectly how one set of false or erroneous data gets spread through the system with nobody checking it out properly.
sorry – I should have added that it only quotes the 97% figure – doesnt seem to show any actual data to back it up!