More Durban PR ramp-up, this time from GMU, recycling old news and old claims.
Widespread Public Misperception about Scientific Agreement on Global Warming Undermines Climate Policy Support
FAIRFAX, Va.-People who believe there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about global warming tend to be less certain that global warming is happening and less supportive of climate policy, researchers at George Mason, San Diego State, and Yale Universities report in a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
A recent survey of climate scientists conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois found near unanimous agreement among climate scientists that human-caused global warming is happening.
This new George Mason University study, however, using results from a national survey of the American public, finds that many Americans believe that most climate scientists actually disagree about the subject.
In the national survey conducted in June 2010, two-thirds of respondents said they either believed there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening (45 percent), that most scientists think it is not happening (5 percent), or that they did not know enough to say (16 percent.) These respondents were less likely to support climate change policies and to view climate change as a lower priority.
By contrast, survey respondents who correctly understood that there is widespread agreement about global warming among scientists were themselves more certain that it is happening, and were more supportive of climate policies.
“Misunderstanding the extent of scientific agreement about climate change is important because it undermines people’s certainty that climate change is happening, which in turn reduces their conviction that America should find ways to deal with the problem,” says Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.
Maibach argues that a campaign should be mounted to correct this misperception. “It is no accident that so many Americans misunderstand the widespread scientific agreement about human-caused climate change. A well-financed disinformation campaign deliberately created a myth about there being lack of agreement. The climate science community should take all reasonable measures to put this myth to rest.”
About George Mason University
George Mason University is an innovative, entrepreneurial institution with global distinction in a range of academic fields. Located in Northern Virginia near Washington, D.C., Mason provides students access to diverse cultural experiences and the most sought-after internships and employers in the country. Mason offers strong undergraduate and graduate degree programs in engineering and information technology, organizational psychology, health care and visual and performing arts. With Mason professors conducting groundbreaking research in areas such as climate change, public policy and the biosciences, George Mason University is a leading example of the modern, public university. George Mason University-Where Innovation Is Tradition.
###
Media Contact: Tara Laskowski, tlaskows@gmu.edu 703-993-8815
==============================================================
I’ll let Lawrence Solomon speak to the issue of the “…recent survey of climate scientists conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois “.
Deceitful claim: 97% of climate scientists think humans contribute to global warming
by Lawrence Solomon December 30, 2010 – 2:35 pm
Original Link:
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 2500 – that’s the number of scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those 2500, the pundits and the press believed, had endorsed the IPCC position. [1]
To their embarrassment, most of the pundits and press discovered that they were mistaken – those 2500 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 recently found an alternate number to tout — “97% of the world’s climate scientists” accept the consensus, articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere have begun to claim.
This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. 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.
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 – out were the solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists and astronomers. That left the 10,257 scientists in disciplines like geology, oceanography, paleontology, and geochemistry that were somehow deemed more worthy of being included in the consensus. The two researchers also decided that scientific accomplishment should not be a factor in who could answer – those surveyed were determined by their place of employment (an academic or a governmental institution). Neither was academic qualification a factor – about 1,000 of those surveyed did not have a PhD, some didn’t even have a master’s diploma.
To encourage a high participation among these remaining disciplines, the two researchers decided on a quickie survey that would take less than two minutes to complete, and would be done online, saving the respondents the hassle of mailing a reply. Nevertheless, most didn’t consider the quickie survey worthy of response –just 3146, or 30.7%, answered the two questions on the survey:
1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
The questions were actually non-questions. From my discussions with literally hundreds of skeptical scientists over the past few years, I know of none who claims that the planet hasn’t warmed since the 1700s, and almost none who think that humans haven’t contributed in some way to the recent warming – quite apart from carbon dioxide emissions, few would doubt that the creation of cities and the clearing of forests for agricultural lands have affected the climate. When pressed for a figure, global warming skeptics might say that human are responsible for 10% or 15% of the warming; some skeptics place the upper bound of man’s contribution at 35%. The skeptics only deny that humans played a dominant role in Earth’s warming.
Surprisingly, just 90% of those who responded to the first question believed that temperatures had risen – I would have expected a figure closer to 100%, since Earth was in the Little Ice Age in the centuries immediately preceding 1800. But perhaps some of the responders interpreted the question to include the past 1000 years, when Earth was in the Medieval Warm Period, generally thought to be warmer than today.
As for the second question, 82% of the earth scientists replied that that human activity had significantly contributed to the warming. Here the vagueness of the question comes into play. Since skeptics believe that human activity been a contributing factor, their answer would have turned on whether they consider a 10% or 15% or 35% increase to be a significant contributing factor. Some would, some wouldn’t.
In any case, the two researchers must have feared that an 82% figure would fall short of a convincing consensus – almost one in five wasn’t blaming humans for global warming — so they looked for subsets that would yield a higher percentage. They found it – almost — in those whose recent published peer-reviewed research fell primarily in the climate change field. But the percentage still fell short of the researchers’ ideal. So they made another cut, allowing only the research conducted by those earth scientists who identified themselves as climate scientists.
Once all these cuts were made, 75 out of 77 scientists of unknown qualifications were left endorsing the global warming orthodoxy. The two researchers were then satisfied with their findings [2]. Are you?
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the author of The Deniers.
—
[1] http://www.probeinternational.org/ipcc-flyer-low%5B1%5D.pdf
[2] http://probeinternational.org/library/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/012009_Doran_final1.pdf
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R. Gates says:
November 21, 2011 at 11:42 am
R., that is really a silly play at being devil’s advocate. You need to answer that question yourself.
R. Gates says:
November 21, 2011 at 11:53 am
And stay on one side of the fence.
What is the common thread in all these articles leading up to Durban.
NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE
No organisation is more dependent on maintaining the concept than this organisation.
It is a propaganda mouthpiece from beginning to end. It has no other function.
R. Gates says:
November 21, 2011 at 11:42 am
If you can’t measure it, or see any functional difference, then how would you know it is occurring?
==========================================
Which brings with it an interesting point…..
We have let the very people claiming it’s ab-normal……….define what is normal
Truth is, we have no proof that there is any thing abnormal about the climate right now…….
So I take it that R. Gates doesn’t dispute that the 97% claim is bogus and exaggerated?
I was reading a story on the GWPF site – “IPCC Fails In Education About Climate Change”.
It was translated from de spiegal online. I went to their site which is in German and noted a picture credited to Reuters/Greenpeace. This picture of a dead tree in a desert of red sand clearly designed to emgender fears of a thermageddon hell on Earth.
The problem is they forgot to trim the photo to remove the Southern Cross windmill from the corner.
A Sothern Cross Windmill in a sea of red sand means only one thing – Central Australia.
Now I don’t wish to pour cold water on alarmism but Central Australia has been a red sand desert for who knows how long as aboriiginal occupation can only be traced some 40,000 years but it seems to have been desert for that long.
Another example of deception – much like the water vapour shown belching from heat exchange stacks deceptively meant to convey pollution because the pollution control measures introduced throught the 60’s and 70’s cleaned up the particulates emitted from power station such that visible emissions all but disappeared.
Perhaps the global warming/climate change advocates might attract less hostility if they stopped their deceptive artistic attachments.
All this argument about a little warming.
It is accepted the Earth, the biosphere and animal life survived even 12 degrees C higher temperatures thaan today and somehow managed to stagger back into an ice age.
What alarmists never acknowledge is that we are actually in an ice age today – or more correctly an interglacial period of an ice age.
A return to conditions where the glaciers begin to advance will have much more serious consequences for humanity than a 1 -2 degree increase in temperature.
I would have thought people living in high latitudes where the climate is cold or cool for the majority of the year could only benefit from some moderate warming AND that is what has been observed – moderate warming.
People should actually be hoping “greenhouse gases” will prevent a return to colder ice age conditions.
My bet is they won’t and some day temperatures will start to decrease like they have done repeatedly in a fairly regular cycle over the duration of the recent ice age and the glaciers will begin to advance again.
Stop wasting your life worrying about things you cannot control.
No-one will be able to stop the ice age returning if it commences.
No-one can stop the “greenhouse gas” emissions if the Chinese and Indian governments decide they do not believe.
There is much to be thankful for in the modern world. Few remember that only a few generations ago most people lived hard lives, most work was manual and life expectancy was short. If you had a disability at birth life was even more miserable than than the average.
The people who lived through these hard times would be simply astounded that we worry about what might happen – their attention was completely focused on producing enough food during the warm seasons.
Don’t worry – be happy.
Steph says:
November 21, 2011 at 10:32 am
There are several other studies. All say pretty much the same thing.
=========================================================
No, there are not several other studies that show 97% consensus. Read your page that you offered……..
Anderegg, Prall, Harold, and Schneider, 2010 only reference “pal reviewed” writers, using an arbitrary criteria. Given the well documented difficulties skeptics have getting published, this study is invalidated by its selection criteria.
Doran and Kendall Zimmerman, 2009….. that’s where all of 75 scientists made up the 97%.
Bray and von Storch, 2008 show a markedly lower percentage. Oddly, it hasn’t been used in peer review publication. See my comment about selection criteria to understand why.
STATS, 2007, again, shows a significantly lower percentage. (And the selection criteria is, again, highly suspect as to being valid. A study conducted by……. you guessed it! GMU!)
Oreskes, 2004…… the selection criteria was so laughable, its hardly worth mentioning. The papers had to have the words, “global climate change” before being selected.
Bray and von Storch, 2003 shows a near 50/50 split in the surveying…… again….. there weren’t enough pals to get it published.
So, there you have it. Only 3 studies that actually poll scientists, not confined by organization affiliation. Only one came up with the 97% number, or greater than 90% for that matter, and that had the least amount of respondents.
Further, you should look at the way questions are framed. I’d estimate that >90% of skeptics agree that the earth has generally warmed since the 18th century. I’d also estimate that >90% skeptics agree that CO2 is a GHG. Most of the skepticism lays at the “catastrophic” part of CAGW, the lack of empirical data, and the attempts to flip the null hypothesis, that is to say, climatologists avoidance of the scientific process. So, please, tell your alarmist friends to quit mischaracterizing people’s positions and views. It serves no purpose other than to obfuscate.
Hey, whats up ????
It should be 100%,
I mean you aren’t recognised as a climate scientist UNLESS you agree !!
So in summary:
Gorebull warming is defined by 75 out of 77 participants out of 10,257 scientists, who are absolutely sure of CAGW using 30 years of temperature data out of 12,000 years (=0,4%) since beginning of the holocene?
What is the significance of 97% from 0,4%?
My oh my…
Oh, I get it, in the new green socialist religion they are the 75 virgins, right? :p
R. Gates says:
November 21, 2011 at 11:53 am
A world in which atmospheric CO2 levels were at 2000 ppm might be “harmless” and even “beneficial” if you’re a tropical plant, but really bad if you’re a human or even one of the many grain plants like wheat and corn that we need for our food supply.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
2000 ppm *IS* harmless even for humans. CO2 is harmless until it comes near 6%.
6%, that is the constant and necessary CO2 level in our lungs to allow blood gas exchange.
A very minor +/- deviation can cause death.
So it doesn’t play a role for humans if the atmosphere has 400 ppm or 2000 ppm CO2.
The poll was conducted by Peter T Doran – a Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and a Post Grad research student.
http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/index.html
Please make bookmark this paper for future reference if you need require an example of
– How climate scientists cherry-pick the data.
– How the weak evidence (In this case two banal questions) do not support the extreme conclusions (Future accelerating warming with catastrophic consequences)
– How climate scientists fail to observe basic statistical tests. In this case an unbiased sample of 77 would have little significance even if a true random sample (Note that political opinion polls need to have at least 1000 people). However, as a biased sample, any significance tests are rendered useless.
– If you are a teacher of statistics needing an example for students to “spot the errors”.
– The failure of peer review to spot obvious errors.
http://probeinternational.org/library/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/012009_Doran_final1.pdf
If I drop an ice cube into an Olympic swimming pool, will it lower the temperature of the water? 100% of scientists will say yes. If I then ask whether the temperature change is either measurable or meaningful, I get a good analogy to the climate debate.
I’d like to know more about the 3%. After all, it takes a brave quack to admit he’s a quack.
The two researchers were then satisfied with their findings [2]. Are you?
No. The selection bias was too convincing at 99.05%.
P.F. says:
November 21, 2011 at 11:12 am
“Maibach argues that a campaign should be mounted to correct this . . .”
Sounds that they have a pressing need to launch a propaganda scheme to get the ignorant masses in line with those who “correctly understood.”
_____________________________________
They are going to have a REAL problem with that campaign. The “ignorant masses” are not as dumb as they think. In a recent (8/03/11) Rasmussen poll – “69% Say It’s Likely Scientists Have Falsified Global Warming Research” http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environment_energy/69_say_it_s_likely_scientists_have_falsified_global_warming_research
And that was just as this news was breaking: “The FDA has found “widespread falsification” and “manipulation of equilibration samples” at Cetero research from 2005 to 2010.” http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-42849261/fda-finds-falsification-of-drug-trial-results-affecting-dozens-of-companies/
From the Clinical Research Society:
And to top that off at the beginning of November, a well respected Dutch psychologist, Diederik Stapel. “admitted that he falsified numerous studies in an effort to meet the academic demand to “publish” and to “perform” and was subsequently suspended from his position at the university….He has admitted making up data and faking research over many years in studies which were then published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.” from the Pyschiatric Crime Database. http://www.psychcrime.org/news/index.php?vd=1288&t=Dutch+psychologist+falsified+dozens+of+papers%3B+suspended+from+university
Even on Google a search of “scientists falsified” returns 1,280,000 results.
I really doubt that the ” ignorant masses” are going to trust scientists again any time soon. I certainly won’t . Once trust is lost it is much harder to regain.
Gates says:
“This is an incomplete hypothesis.”
It’s an abbreviated form of my complete hypothesis, which I have posted repeatedly:
CO2 is harmless and beneficial to the biosphere at current and projected global concentrations.
That is a testable and falsifiable hypothesis. Unfortunately for Gates, no one has been able to falsify it – unlike the repeatedly falsified CO2=CAGW conjecture.
[emphasis mine]
R. Gates:
While the thrust of your statement is basically true regarding conditions, the co2 ppm you state are questionable. Having read many of Smokey’s posts in the past,I’m sure it was just an oversight in not qualifying his statement.
See below:
R. Gates;
A world in which atmospheric CO2 levels were at 2000 ppm might be “harmless” and even “beneficial” if you’re a tropical plant, but really bad if you’re a human or even one of the many grain plants like wheat and corn that we need for our food supply.>>>
If the average farmer could get the air in their wheat and corn fields up to 2,000 ppm, they would be ecstatic. Greenhouse operations pump far more than that into their greenhouses because production sky rockets and the plants need less water (amongst other benefits). The only reason the same isn’t done for wheat and corn is it is really hard to scale a greenhouse that big.
Once again you are hoisted on your own petard. You pretend to knowledge that does not stand up to factual scrutiny.
RE: 2000 PPM of CO2
Satellites show no decadal reduction
in the Earth’s IR radiance at the edges
of the 15 micron CO2 band,
even though 30 years of CO2 increase
should have discernibly widenened the 15 micron band.
Theoretically, MODTRAN shows a ‘forcing’
of only 0.75 degrees C per CO2 doubling.
All the so blathered-about huge delta T
is merely postulated runaway forcing by water,
never backed up by measurement because
it is only valid for long-ago warm regines
such as the Cretaceous or the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM),
when there was a circum-global warm current and a frost-free Arctic.
When it’s already warm and wet then CO2 does have some leverage,
but in an icehouse CO2 has most of its affect going from 180 to 280 ppm.
In our ice-house regime, 2000 ppm will only need 1.75 deg C
added to the Earth’s IR temperature
for the slightly wider 15 micron CO2 band.
It would only take a modest increase in low clouds or snow
to wipe that out entirely, such as with recent weather.
More UFOologists believe in UFOs than non-UFOologists
these sort of claims are just tiresome. Most people recognise that man’s activities have a warming effect on the globe. The question is, how much? The evidence says, not much!
waterside4 says:
November 21, 2011 at 12:20 pm
just the usual out of date cant,
Mr Watts
I am submitting a short ‘paper’ for your estimable bloggers peer review.
subject to the normal critisims and corrections i intend to subit it to the IPCC.
THE PLEADING ROSE
I am a vivid flowering rose,
delighting eye and balm to nose,
i thrive on heat and morning dew
but most of all on Co2.
so please dont limit it the nigh
or elso i will just wilt and die,
i grow in rain and sun from skies
and gas to photosynthesize.
i’m not a scientist like you
with mega grants and peer review,
please explain to a plant like me
the workings of IPCC,
can it be wise to stop the clock
then turn it back to an epoch,
when i was cold and half this size
true scientists helped me hybridize.
all those airmiles and pulp from trees
to promulgate those treatise,
designed to spread alarm and fear
of a trace gas which i hold dear,
your past deliberations show
if you were honest – ‘you dont know’,
what future tempreatures will be
i hope it’s warmer – just for me!
perhaps you could add a poetery section to your cartoons/humour section above?
plenty more MMGW doggerel where this comes from
regards
Pat Healy.
———————————————
Pat, I do hope you send this to Pam Ayers, who is doing a tour of her ‘doggerel’ recitals in Australia at present, I can just hear it in her west-country accent in my head as I read it, and it would fit in well with her down to earth subjects. She was interviewed on 2GB.com this last week, maybe they can put you in touch. 🙂
All that can be said for sure is that 75 out of 10,257 earth scientists agree with AGW. Less than 1%.
“Tex says:
November 21, 2011 at 11:58 am
Next you are going to tell me that 97% of ExxonMobil employees drive cars powered by gasoline engines…”
97% of scientists and politicians that warn about the dangers of CO2 drive cars powered by gasoline. The other 3% drive diesel.