Guest post by Tom Harris
Besides the obvious bias we have come to expect from most main stream media coverage of climate change, “Climate of Doubt“, aired Tuesday night on PBS’s Frontline, committed one serious mistake that can not be left unaddressed.
Frontline repeatedly implied that there is an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that our CO2 emissions are driving us to a global climate catastrophe. They cited 97% as the fraction of the climate science community who agreed with climate alarmism.
That number is easily dismissed. It comes from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Strangely, the researchers chose to eliminate almost all the scientists from the survey and so ended up with only 77 people, 75 of whom, or 97%, thought humans contributed to climate change.
Besides the fact that, with tens of thousands of climate scientists in the world, 77 is a trivial sample size, the survey coordinators did not ask respondents how much humans had contributed to climate change. The poll is therefore meaningless.
In reality, no one knows, or even currently can know, what the “consensus” is in the world climate science community. This is because there has never been a meaningful, comprehensive worldwide poll about the topic among the thousands of scientists who specialize in the many relevant disciplines.
Scientific theories are never proven by a show of hands, of course. Otherwise, the Earth would still be considered flat and space travel impossible. It is indeed those who go against the flow—independent, original thinkers –who are usually responsible for our most meaningful advances in science.
But, most reporters, politicians and the public understand little of the scientific method and even less about the exceptionally complex field of climate change science. Consequently, they often look for an indication of ‘consensus’ when trying to decide which science should form the basis of important public policies decisions. Distasteful though this is to pure scientists, it is a reality we need to recognize and it is therefore important to try to decide whether a reliable determination of ‘consensus’ has been made about the causes of climate change.
First, it is important to realize that, of the prominent national and international science bodies that have issued official statements that are in support of the CO2/climate crisis hypothesis, none released results that show a majority of their members agreeing with the assertion.
For example, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) and a leading Canadian energy expert, “Archie” Robinson of Deep River, Ontario, explains what happened with a Royal Society (the world’s oldest scientific organisation) climate initiative supporting the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report:
“the president of the Royal Society of London … drafted a resolution in favour and circulated it to other academies of science inviting co-signing. … The president of the RSC, not a member of the [RSC’s] Academy of Science, received the invitation. He considered it consistent with the position of the great majority of scientists, as repeatedly but erroneously claimed by Kyoto proponents, and so signed it. The resolution was not referred to the Academy of Science for comment, not even to its council or president.”
A similar episode happened in the United States and Russia concerning the Royal Society effort and a survey of pronouncements from other science bodies reveals that they are usually just the opinions of the groups’ executives or committees specifically appointed by the executive. The rank and file scientist members are rarely consulted at all.
But what about the supposedly authoritarian United Nations IPCC report that constitutes the foundation of most official climate concerns today? Media and politicians tell us that 2,500 official “expert reviewers” who worked with the UN body on its most recent (2007, the fourth) “Assessment Report” (called “AR4”) agreed with its conclusions. Perhaps most importantly, in Chapter 9 of the IPCC Working Group I report (“The Physical Science Basis”, reporting on the extent and possible causes of past climate change as well as future ‘projections’) appears the following assertion: “Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.”
Determining how many of the “2500 scientists” are known to actually agree with this statement is difficult, but we do know how many commented on anything in Chapter 9. Sixty-two is the number (see this analysis). The vast majority of the expert reviewers are not known to have examined this or related statements. Instead they would have focused on a page or two in the AR4 report that most related to their specialties, usually having little or nothing to do with greenhouse gases (CO2 or otherwise). And, of those sixty-two experts who did comment this chapter, the vast majority were not independent or impartial since most were employees of governments that had already decided before the report was written (indeed, as MIT Professor Richard Lindzen, a past IPCC lead author, explains, before much of the research had even begun) that human CO2 emissions are driving us to climate catastrophe.
When one eliminates reviewers with clear vested interest, we end up with a grand total of “just seven who may have been independent and impartial”, according to Australian climate data analyst, John McLean (see his report). And, two of those are known to vehemently disagree with the statement. Prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider Dr. Mike Hulme even admits that “only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies”, not thousands as is commonly asserted by the IPCC and others, “reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate” (p. 10, 11 of Hulme’s April 12, 2010 paper in “Progress in Physical Geography” at http://tinyurl.com/2b3cq3r). It is travesty that the UN permits this misunderstanding to continue uncorrected.
To meaningfully assert that there is a consensus in any field, we need to actually have convincing evidence. And the best way to gather this evidence is to conduct unbiased, comprehensive worldwide polls. Since this has never been done in the vast community of scientists who research the causes of global climate change, we simply do not know what, if any, consensus exists among these experts. Lindzen concludes: “there is no [known] consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them.” Frontline did a disservice to the public telling them otherwise.
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Tom Harris is Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition – http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/ and an advisor to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
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The answer here depends entirely on who you define to be climate scientists. If you define that group to include only those that do research every day on the subject and regularly contribute to the peer-reviewed literature, then the 97% number seems reasonable to me (I was also active in this field and knew a lot of atmospheric scientists).
And it also seems reasonable to focus on the net opinions of this group. For example, if you suspected that you needed to undergo heart surgery, would you seek the advice of all minimally qualifed health professionals or would you seek the advice the specialists who do heart surgeries every day?
77 is an appropriate sample size given the population size of about 11,000 if it is a highly polarized issue where the yes and no answers are skewed in one or the other direction. Your margin of error in those instances is very small.
10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Strangely, the researchers chose to eliminate almost all the scientists from the survey and so ended up with only 77 people, 75 of whom,
==================
75 out of 10257 is less than 1%.
Eliminating “almost all the scientists from the survey” is a form of selection bias. Similar to calibration of tree rings, it is a faulty statistical method similar to “cherry picking” that lies behind much of the epidemic of false positives that is widely reported in scientific papers.
Statistics requires that you not inspect the data before deciding how to analyze it. Otherwise, by the process of inspection you are likely to bias the results. However, few scientists can resist the temptation to “peek”. After all, who will be the wiser? In doing so they have invalidated the statistical significance of everything they report from that point onwards.
There is a rash of false positives in science today because there is no way to determine if the researchers “peeked” at their data before doing the statistical analysis. There is no way to determine if the researchers have a file folder marked “censored” in which they placed the data that didn’t support what they were trying to prove. Or maybe there is:
FOIA\documents\mbh98-osborn.zip\mbh98.tar\TREE\ITRDB\NOAMER\
BACKTO_1400-CENSORED
BACKTO_1400-FIXED
BACKTO_1300-CENSORED
BACKTO_1300-FIXED
And who is mbh98? The hockey stick.
I noted the entire lack of specific scientific criticisms levied by the skeptics. Particularly, I would have liked to see Lord Monckton reprise his criticism of the hockey stick. But that would have been off topic.
There _is_ a consensus – as seen by surveying the scientists (Doran 2009, Anderegg 2010, Vision Prize survey http://visionprize.com/faq#whatis).
And this is confirmed by looking at what is published (Oreskes 2004) – if there were a 50-50, 80-20, or even 90-10% split in views on the consensus, and supportable science on the skeptic side, skeptic papers (of whatever viewpoint – I’ve yet to see ten skeptics with less than eight contradictory views on the science) would be able to find reviewers and publishers who thought their work was worthwhile. Because if any significant percentage of the sciences thought differently, the widely discussed mythical ‘Team’ couldn’t control all outlets (cf conspiracy theories here). If 10-20% of people in the sciences disagreed, they would be publishing accordingly – they are not.
Casting doubt on the consensus as a rhetorical approach (as opposed to a scientific one) is a tactic right out of Frank Luntz’s playbook – “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate…”. Science, facts, interconnections – those are determined through investigation and the open field of discussion where those ideas are evaluated. The naysaying in the opening is (IMO) simply unsupportable doubt put up to slow public recognition of the scientific consensus that actually exists.
ericgrimsrud says:
October 24, 2012 at 7:02 am
For example, if you suspected that you needed to undergo heart surgery, would you seek the advice of all minimally qualifed health professionals or would you seek the advice the specialists who do heart surgeries every day?
============
What if the pain you are feeling could be better treated by medication? How many heart surgeons would be perfectly happy to bill your insurance plan for $50,000 in surgery, as compared to billing $50 for a prescription?
That is why we have GP’s on the front line, so folks don’t seek the advice of narrow focused specialists. Specialists by their nature see problems in terms of their specialty. As a result they tend to overlook causes and solutions that would be obvious to a generalist.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the treatment of Cancer, where progress was held back for decades by surgeons who believed that the solution was to cut out more of the affected tissue. Because surgeons held the reigns of power in medicine, largely as a result of experience gained in war, surgery came to be seen as the treatment for everything. As a result, non-surgical alternatives were ignored and minimized for decades.
Surgeons motto: when it doubt, cut it out.
If the actual science supported AGW, they wouldn’t keep harping on the meaningless consensus.
This tells us two things:
1) The facts and the data don’t support the AGW position.
2) The American education system is a failure, as only a scientific illiterate would fall for this. You don’t have to be a scientist to understand the scientific method, or to know the difference between facts and opinion or to understand that climate models aren’t accurately predicting the climate.
For those outside the US who can’t view the PBS video directly, there is at least one well seeded copy out on the p2p torrents, via the usual places…
By that standard, the data-hiding, data-twisting, prolific, award-winning, highly publicized Lonnie Thompson (of Kilimanjaro fame) would qualify, but not the critics from outside the climate club who have shot holes in his methods, reasoning, and conclusions.
By extension, my argument above applies to the whole field of clime sci.
That analogy has been debunked here before. Heart surgeons have a track record: what amounts to experiments have been conducted on their theories and skill. But climatology is an observational science, not an experimental one, so such experiments can’t be conducted. Further, climatologists’ level of skill is not high, as judged by their poor track record in making predictions
ericgrimsrud:
At October 24, 2012 at 7:02 am you say
If there were anybody who needed conclusive proof that the 97% number is wrong then they now have it.
Richard
So let me get this straight: surveys of scientists whose funding comes from publishing research on anthropogenic climate change indicate that ~97% of them believe in in anthropogenic climate change?
That seems similar to the probable results of a survey of creationsists who publish on creationism that believe in creationism.
As I expected, Frontline implied that the efforts of skeptics have been the primary cause of US society’s cooling enthusiasm for warmism. But, as I explained in my post on the Oct. 3 thread on this program, other reasons are far more important, to wit:
Climategate had an effect on public opinion.
Ditto glaciergate and Patchy’s behavior regarding it and other controversies.
The Inter-Academy’s (IAC’s) critique of the IPCC has taken the shine off its halo.
China’s refusal to go along at Copenhagen put a damper on the bandwagon, because partial mitigation efforts are useless.
Post-Copenhagen conferences have been unable to achieve a consensus and get China & India to buy in.
Various scientific papers have cast doubt on some of the case for alarm and the IPCC’s reasoning.
Wind and solar projects haven’t lived up to expectations after being subjected to scrutiny–and accordingly European governments are cutting back on subsidies for them.
China’s subsidized solar panel manufacturing has driven Western producers out of business and weakened the case for green jobs.
Biofuel has come in for criticism that has tarnished the concept of “green” solutions.
Electric cars have been a flop.
Australia’s greenies have made fools of themselves with their drought predictions and mothballed desalinization plants.
The global financial crisis has made governments less willing to subsidize uneconomic wind and solar power.
Consumers of electric power are starting to grouse about higher prices and suffer from fuel poverty in the winter (mostly in Europe).
Fracking has provided low-cost, low-CO2 natural gas in the US, making wind and solar uncompetitive even with subsidies.
The newfound availability of a century’s worth of cheap natural gas from fracking has also undercut the argument that, because fossil fuels will become scarce and expensive in a decade or two, we must start now to transition away from them and to renewable sources of supply.
Global temperatures have stayed flat. US temperatures have declined.
Hurricanes & tornados haven’t increased.
Sea level rise hasn’t accelerated.
Labour looks set to lose the Australian election in Feb. Skeptic Harper won the Canadian election. Labour lost the UK election. This has cooled the bandwagon effect among politicians.
Hopefully there’ll be a transcript available soon, even if behind a modest paywall.
Do they know that they have badly failed to understand the issue? Are these reporters so shallow as to be bereft of any knowledge in the area at all?
As one poster has already pointed out, there are actually two independent peer-reviewed studies showing a scientific consensus of 97%. The University of Chicago survey (http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf) which Watts criticises and the PNAS survey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change#cite_note-Expert_credibility_in_climate_change20-110) which is the study the programme explicitly mentions.
Watts has his facts on the programme fundamentally and incontrovertibly wrong. He must also be aware of the PNAS survey, and the fact that he fails to mention it is so significant, that it can only be called a lie of omission.
Regardless, the consensus argument is a loser for climate contrarions. The surveyed consensus is supported by several other pillars of evidence. Nancy Oreskes showed that dissenting papers in the peer-reviewed record are negligible (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/306/5702/1686.pdf).
Every National Academy of Science in the world that holds an opinion on AGW (30+) side with the science presented by the IPCC.
There is not a single scientific institution in the world that holds a dissenting opinion on AGW. Not one. The last was, I believe, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, who removed their dissenting position on AGW.
At the very least, Watts should acknowledge the factual inaccuracy in his article, and explain how such a mistake was made when the PNAS study was actually zoomed-in on the screen and explained to be the work of PNAS.
Let’s be serious, what this “survey” basically says is:
97% of people who are paid to find global warming believe in global warming.
Wow what a shock. In unrelated news, 97% of palm readers believe in palm reading.
Steven Hales: 77 is an appropriate sample size given the population size of about 11,000
The sample of 77 was not taken randomly from the total population.
@ScepticalTom says:
October 24, 2012 at 9:44 am
So?
Consensus is not science. If a scientific consensus on something actually exists, that doesn’t make it factual.
Consensus is not science. Consensus is not fact. Consensus is a political term. Consensus is not data. Consensus is opinion. You cannot test a consensus. Consensus is not science.
Keep repeating the above and stop repeating meaningless, distracting non-facts.
“Dr. Mike Hulme even admits that “only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies”, not thousands as is commonly asserted by the IPCC and others, “reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate”
I s not this referring to the Team that Phil Jones and company work with? Appears to be roughly 44 or so.
ScepticalTom says:
October 24, 2012 at 9:44 am
…
Watts has his facts on the programme fundamentally and incontrovertibly wrong. He must also be aware of the PNAS survey, and the fact that he fails to mention it is so significant, that it can only be called a lie of omission.
Regardless, the consensus argument is a loser for climate contrarions. The surveyed consensus is supported by several other pillars of evidence. Nancy Oreskes ….
Now there’s a name to be trusted – not. You really want to read Anderegg et al critically. The methodology is effectively the same as the Doran (2009) study, which prunes the study sample until you have an “authoritarian” consensus.
Only a political aide or a jury-selection consultant would consider those methods to be useful, and then certainly not as a means of arriving at an understanding of a natural process. The overall effect is that, like the methods used by the GISS to adjust historical temperature data, it is guaranteed to introduce a trend, whether or not a trend exists empirically.
You also ignore the unequivocal evidence, in their own words, of some of these “trend setters” in the Climategate emails. They explicitly document their efforts pressure editors of various publications to block papers reaching conclusions contrary to the “team’s” own. That fact means that the end sample arrived at by any study that biases its methods to select “active publishers” may end with a biased sample if the publication pressure is successful to any degree. The sample could be unbiased IF and ONLY IF success at publishing were unbiased, and it is plainly not.
Also, another elephant in the room is also lurking in the conclusions of the two studies. The fact that both studies reach precisely the same figure is not just surprising, it is downright suspicious. It leaves anyone familiar with real-world survey methods and results wondering if the data are even more cooked in some way. Perhaps there is a deliberate filter that allows “token dissent” to appear at an “acceptable” level? Statistics may not lie, but people are another matter.
Every National Academy of Science in the world that holds an opinion on AGW (30+) side with the science presented by the IPCC.
There is not a single scientific institution in the world that holds a dissenting opinion on AGW. Not one. The last was, I believe, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, who removed their dissenting position on AGW.
Ah, but again, is this due to convincing empirical evidence leading to changing scientific views, or to social factors? Scientists are in general as subject to herd mentality and fashionable fads as anyone. It is fashionable at present to be “green.” It is also fashionable to appear environmentally concerned – as well as profitable. Scientists are also quite prone to let someone else do the talking outside their own narrow bailiwick. That is they “let” authorities guide their views more than they might admit.
At the very least, Watts should acknowledge the factual inaccuracy in his article, and explain how such a mistake was made when the PNAS study was actually zoomed-in on the screen and explained to be the work of PNAS.
The grand finale here is that the post is a guest post. Did you actually read it? So why should Anthony Watts, rather than the author, do all this acknowledging you think is necessary?
@more soylent green
I never said consensus was science. I never said the consensus proved AGW.
Do you make a habit of rebutting arguments nobody made?
The point of my entire post was the Watts is factually incorrect about the paper PBS used to show consensus.
I pointed out that climate scientists agree, the scientific peer-reviewed record agree, the National Academies of Science agree, and no scientific institute in the world disagrees.
I will say that the fact that there is an overwhelming consensus is significant, as it shows that the vast, vast majority of the world’s experts and the elite National institutions we have created to inform our scientific thinking agree with AGW.
But like you, I’m more interested in the actual science. But as this is an article about consensus, I’m going to stick to the topic and talk about consensus.
If you don’t like talking about consensus and think it irrelevant, you should bring that up with Mr. Watts – it is after all, his blog, and I am, after all, responding to his topic.
Smoking Frog: The mistake of “authoritarian” instead of the expected “authoritative” is just wonderful. The climatists in general are authoritarian, no kidding!
Steven Hales: 77 is an appropriate sample size given the population size of about 11,000
There are vastly more scientists qualified to give an opinion on the subject than 11,000 and so 77 is definitely not an appropriate sample size.
30,000 scientists signed a statement stating that co2 was not going to cause runaway global warming.
Sceptical Tom. There is a saying that your post brings to mind.
‘A fool and his money are easily parted’.