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
I can believe lots of scientists believe in AGW simply because they have faith in a scientific method, assume climatologists are real scientists, and all they know about the subject came through nbc,cbs,and abc etc. The ones who spend 10 seconds looking at it find there are mountains of supposedly peer reviewed publications that support it, end of story.
The real scientists will tend to remain somewhat skeptical about it, knowing that peer review is not the scientific method and that most publications turn out to flawed in a serious fashion.
It seems that 97% is a magical number for the AGW crowd. Here is another study producing the same result: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.full.pdf+html
The study claims that 97% of credible climatologists believe in AGW. Therein lies the rub: dissenting climatologists are not credible and therefore cannot be counted towards credible climatologists who do not believe in AGW.
What are the qualifications of the authors? William R. L. Anderegg, Department of Biology, Stanford University is a biologist. James W. Prall, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto is a network monkey. Jacob Harold, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is an activist. And, finally, Stephen H. Schneider, Woods Institute for the Environment is an activist. Not a climatologist or statistician in the bunch. If climate study results are only valid from “credible” climatologists then doesn’t it make sense that survey results are only valid from credible statisticians? Is it lost on the authors that they are not qualified to perform the study when their own logic is applied to them?
It is Prall’s deeply flawed list ( http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/climate_authors_table_by_clim.html ) is the driver for the “database of 1,372 climate researchers”. The AGW authors’ citation counts are inflated and many well cited non AGW authors are missing from the list.
Scientific Studies prove that 97.3% of the people will believe any hogwash you make up, as long as you tell them Scientific Studies prove it and give them numbers…. 😉
The IPCC flyer that Solomon links to above http://www.probeinternational.org/ipcc-flyer-low%5B1%5D.pdf says quite clearly:
2500+ SCIENTIFIC EXPERT REVIEWERS
800+ CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS AND
450+ LEAD AUTHORS FROM
130+ COUNTRIES
6 YEARS WORK
1 REPORT which bit was too complicated for the press and pundits to understand?
I’ve been looking over Solomon’s article, and it’s riddled with misleading assumptions and other fine examples of shoddy journalism. I’m going to, piece by piece, show you deniers how he hood winked you all.
“Until recently, they typically pointed to the number 2500 “
“They” being journalists and pundits and not scientists or mathematicians. A journalist taking swipes at journalists bores me. A journalist implying that this is meaningful alerts …me to an incoming scam.
“The two researchers started by altogether excluding from their survey the thousands of scientists most likely to think that the Sun, or planetary movements, might have something to do with climate on Earth”
Wrong. The two researchers did not start by excluding people. How do I know this? I first began my exhausting attempt at debunking Solomon by reading the article he links to. It was slightly longer than one page.
The two researchers generated their database from Keane and Martinez (2007). This is a Directory of Geoscience Departments and therefore was the deciding factor in the poll for who was involved.
I furthered my study on this particular topic. I didn’t find it unreasonable or difficult to go to the authors website. So I found further information about his use of the database. In the author’s own words: “One of the most difficult parts of this study was building a data base. Professional societies (e.g. AGU) do not give out membership lists. So we were forced to build our own from the AGI book by scanning the entire directory and performing character recognition on the pages and then editing that into an email list.” No skullduggery here!
http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/survey_faq.html
Even more telling is the answer to the second and third questions. If some form of selection bias had taken place, the authors certainly would have excluded petroleum geologists who have made a formal statement rejecting man made global warming.
“The two researchers also decided that scientific accomplishment should not be a factor in who could answer”
Incorrect. The paper specifically said how the list was obtained. The names were gathered from another paper that listed “all geosciences faculty at reporting institutions, along with researchers at state geologic surveys associated with local universities, and researchers at U.S. federal research facilities”. Solomon could not have possibly missed this; it took up half the paragraph he was complaining about. As I stated above, he could have avoided this mistake with just a minimum of study.
“about 1,000 of those surveyed did not have a PhD, some didn’t even have a master’s diploma.”
This is basic math! 3146 completed the survey with more than 90% having PhD’s. This means less than 315 people involved didn’t have a PhD. Note that this information is contained within the same paragraph. Now lets just assume he didn’t lie, and instead just say that he can’t do math to save his soul.
“Nevertheless, most didn’t consider the quickie survey worthy of response –just 3146, or 30.7%, answered the two questions on the survey”
Manipulation at its finest. This is exactly the response rate one would expect to find with a volunteer survey of professionals. That is why the paper was specific and said “This is a typical response rate for web-based surveys”, but that’s not all!! Oh no, not only did he miss the qualifier that this is typical, he also missed the TWO papers that they used as evidence to support their claim.
“Worthy of a response” indeed.
“In any case, the two researchers must have feared that an 82% figure would fall short of a convincing consensus”
Or they did show that the majority of scientists with knowledge of the subject support the questions asked about Global Warming? Upon further refining of the poll so it includes only experts in the field, the results show almost no disagreement at all. I am not sure what definition of “consensus” Solomon is using but its not one I am familiar with.
“Once all these cuts were made, 75 out of 77 scientists of unknown qualifications were left endorsing the global warming orthodoxy.”
Unknown? It said who they are. 79 people who identify themselves as climate scientists and 100% of them have published more than half of their recent papers on the subject. This also likely bumps out anyone without a PhD as they often don’t even get a co-author mention on a paper let alone publish multiple papers as lead author. Feel free to ask the authors of the paper though; they have been far from secretive about respondents’ qualifications so far.
So once all the cuts are made and the most qualified, informed, and active scientists in the field of climate science cast their vote… the claim of a consensus remains unrefuted.
These are my major objections with Solomons piece. I am sure you would agree that a journalist who has written books on the subject and gets paid for his work should, at the very least, be able to read a paper accurately. Does he not have some sort of obligation to report his findings honestly and accurately? Do you think that the general public would spend the time to analyze both his review and the paper he was criticizing to see if they are being manipulated? Intentional or not Solomon is dishonest in his reporting of this paper. I have supported my claims and stand by my statements – Solomon is a crank and he conned you into thinking he had debunked the paper.
Just like I thought. You’re all silent now.