To John Cook – it isn’t ‘hate’, it’s pity, – pity for having such a weak argument you are forced to fabricate conclusions of epic proportions
Proving that crap can flow uphill, yesterday, John Cook got what one could consider the ultimate endorsement. A tweet from the Twitter account of the Twitterer in Chief, Barack Obama, about Cook’s 97% consensus lie.
I had to laugh about the breathless headlines over that tweet, such as this one from the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss at The Answer Sheet:
Umm, no, as of this writing. WaPo reporter FAIL.
Source: http://twitter.com/skepticscience
But hey, they’re saving the planet with lies, that shouldn’t matter, right? 6535 is the new 31541507 in the world Cook lives in.
Yesterday, in an interview about the Tweet in the Sydney Morning Herald, Cook said:
“Generally the level of hate you get is in proportion to the impact you have,” he said.
No, it isn’t hate, it’s about facts John. This whole story is predicated on lies, and they just seem to get bigger and bigger, there doesn’t seem to be any limit to the gullibility of those involved and those pushing it.
Here’s the genesis of the lie. When you take a result of 32.6% of all papers that accept AGW, ignoring the 66% that don’t, and twist that into 97%, excluding any mention of that original value in your media reports, there’s nothing else to call it – a lie of presidential proportions.
From the original press release about the paper:
Exhibit 1:
From the 11 994 papers, 32.6 per cent endorsed AGW, 66.4 per cent stated no position on AGW, 0.7 per cent rejected AGW and in 0.3 per cent of papers, the authors said the cause of global warming was uncertain.
Exhibit 2:
“Our findings prove that there is a strong scientific agreement about the cause of climate change, despite public perceptions to the contrary.”
I pity people whose argument is so weak they have to lie like this to get attention, I pity even more the lazy journalists that latch onto lies like this without even bothering to ask a single critical question.
Of course try to find a single mention of that 32.6 percent figure in any of the news reports, or on Cook’s announcement on his own website.
Though, some people are asking questions, while at the same time laughing about this farce, such as Dan Kahan at Yale:
Now, Cook has upped the ante, allowing the average person to help participate in the lie and make it their own, as Brandon Schollenberger observes, Cook has launched a new “Consensus project” to make even more certain the public gets his message:
The guidelines for rating [the] abstracts show only the highest rating value blames the majority of global warming on humans. No other rating says how much humans contribute to global warming. The only time an abstract is rated as saying how much humans contribute to global warming is if it mentions:
that human activity is a dominant influence or has caused most of recent climate change (>50%).
If we use the system’s search feature for abstracts that meet this requirement, we get 65 results. That is 65, out of the 12,000+ examined abstracts. Not only is that value incredibly small, it is smaller than another value listed in the paper:
Reject AGW 0.7% (78)
Remembering AGW stands for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by humans, take a minute to let that sink in. This study done by John Cook and others, praised by the President of the United States, found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it.
(Update: some folks aren’t getting the significance of Schollenberger’s findings, using Cook’s own data and code, which have been shown to be replicable at Lucia’s comment thread, Schollenberger finds 65 that say AGW/human caused, but there’s 78 that reject AGW. Cook never reported that finding in the paper, thus becoming a lie of omission, because it blows the conclusion. Combine that with the lack of reporting of the 32.6%/66.1% ratio in Cook’s own blog post and media reports, and we have further lies of omission.)
It’s gobsmacking. But, I see this as a good thing, because like the lies of presidential politics, eventually this will all come tumbling down.
Read Scholleberger’s essay at Lucia’s.
UPDATE: Marcel Crok has an interesting analysis as well here: http://www.staatvanhetklimaat.nl/2013/05/17/cooks-survey-not-only-meaningless-but-also-misleading/
“DirkH says:
May 17, 2013 at 5:14 pm
Wamron says:
May 17, 2013 at 12:15 pm
“Does anyone think that without losing WW2 the Third Reich would have crumpled under the weight of reason alone?”
Of course. The Nazis were economic numpties. They would have gone the way of the Chavez regime which just ran out of toilet paper, and with the exact same reason.”
The Chavez regime has collapsed BECAUSE CHAVEZ DIED. Doh!
And it was still a democracy.
Until Winston Churchill refused peace with Germany and Operation Barabarossa went tits up the Third Reich was doing swell, and it would have continued to do so had it been allowedto do so
The dominant ideology of today will continue to oppress us unless it is taken down by aggressive cultural subversion. Facts and reason will never do it. .
Of course, complete economic disintegration of Western European states is still far more likely to be what eventually changes things. I would rather it could be averted, but I’ll probably be dead by then anyway, as will most of the readers here.
“Wamron says:
May 18, 2013 at 5:51 am”
Winston Churchill was a keen supporter of the 1912 “feeble minded persons” act of 1912. Fortunately the act was not passed into law.
Patrick..what in Hell is the point you are trying to make?
Unless you can indicate some relevance to your comment I will assume you are one of the people he might legitimately have wanted so categorised.
The papers chosen have global warming keywords in the abstracts. 66.4% were excluded because
1. They did not say it was AGW.
2. They did not say it wasn’t AGW.
So what’s the default reason.? Natural Variability is the reason. Therefore NOT AGW.
Different colour -Different issue- Same Sentiment
Part of the 3 percent and proud
Sceptics need to grow some balls.
indigo says:
“Only 0.7% of scientific papers on climate change reject anthropocentric global warming”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
If you mean “anthropogenic”, then that is a false statement.
• • • • •
Daneel Olivaw says:
“dbstealey, you should read pro-AGW blogs then since they often cite cases of censorship in this blog you’re reading.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I have read my fill of ‘pro-AGW’ blogs. I have also attempted to comment numerous times on RealClimate, SkS, Open Mind, etc., only to be routinely censored. So what you’re doing is called “psychological projection”: imputing your own faults, or the faults of your cohorts, onto WUWT.
WUWT keeps control of comments per its Policy page. What you wrongly label “censorship” is simply policing comments that violate site Policy, and very, very few comments are ever snipped; far less than 1%. That is very different from altering the wording of a comment, or deleting a key sentence, in order to change the meaning. SkS does that.
Since you cannot find an example of WUWT ever doing likewise, you are projecting SkS’s wrongdoing/censorship onto this site in a failed attempt to equate WUWT with Cook’s censoring, dishonest and unreliable SkS.
Alarmist blogs have made the deliberate decision to delete comments based on the fact that they cannot be credibly answered. They feel that they are forced into that position, because if they allowed comments from both sides of the debate to be posted, then the actual science would destroy their catastrophic AGW narrative. And the catastrophic AGW narrative is the sole raison d’etre for the existence of RC, SkS, tamino, etc.
So the choice is theirs, and they have chosen to censor, rather than allow both sides of the debate to be posted. Censoring the comments of scientific skeptics costs them plenty of traffic, but apparently they believe the tradeoff is worth it, in order to promote their alarmist agenda. But it is certainly not honest.
<>
In other news, Mitt Romney won the election with 250 million endorsements over Obama’s 60 million.
What should become clear to all in the aftermath of John Cook’s risible attempt to shore up the failing climate scam, is this; When it comes to climate change, any lie will do.
The lie doesn’t need legs, wings or even an element of truth, no matter how childish and concocted it will do the media circuit and the will get traction before it dies.
Any lie will do.
This Cook survey should never be allowed to die until everyone understands it for the deception that it is.
“Wamron says:
May 18, 2013 at 7:07 am”
You mentioned something about someone you, clearly, know nothing about.
Obama is an expert at percentages; after all, he got more than 100% of the votes of the eligible population in some ridings. Like to like.
The figures for the authors who don’t give a position in the abstract of their paper, but give their opinion in the second round is very interesting. From Cook’s survey:
Among self-rated papers not expressing a position on AGW in the abstract, 53.8% were self-rated as endorsing the consensus.
That gives a complete different view on the 60% papers which don’t give an opinion in their abstracts. If we may use that figure for all of the 60%, then we have complete different ratio’s of endorsement for AGW:
Within the margins of error of the search (which still are huge):
97% of 3894 papers (with position in the abstract) + 53.8% of 7931 papers (without position) = 67.4% of 11944 papers which endorse the AGW position. The rest of the papers doesn’t have a position (the bulk), are neutral or oppose AGW.
That is the figure that Cook should have published. That would have him spared a lot of criticism.
FerdiEgb says:
May 19, 2013 at 2:19 am
That is the figure that Cook should have published. That would have him spared a lot of criticism.
Obviously the problem with that is: it would not have saved the 97% consensus number, but be very far away from it.
To keep things in perspective: In my opinion, most reasonable people (and scientists!) could not argue directly with any of Cook’s categories 2 through to 6 (below) (and noting my edited comments marked).
Only Categories 1 and 7 (in my opinion) represent unjustifiable positions.
Note his grouping of categories 1, 2 and 3 implies all are solidly endorsing a CAGW position.
From the paper: Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature Cook et al
To simplify the analysis, ratings (below) were consolidated into three groups:
1. Endorsements (including implicit and explicit; categories 1–3
2. No position (category 4)
3. Rejections (including implicit and explicit; categories 5–7).
Original categories:
(1) Explicit endorsement with quantification: Explicitly states that humans are the primary cause of recent global warming eg ‘The global warming during the 20th century is caused mainly by increasing greenhouse gas concentration especially since the late 1980s’
(2) Explicit endorsement without quantification: Explicitly states humans are causing i>(‘some’ my edit) global warming or refers to anthropogenic global warming/climate change as a known fact: eg ‘Emissions of a broad range of greenhouse gases of varying lifetimes contribute to global climate change’
(3) Implicit endorsement Implies humans are causing global warming: E.g., research assumes greenhouse gas emissions cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause ‘. . . carbon sequestration in soil is important for mitigating global climate change’ (lack of quantification, my edit)
(4a) No position. Does not address or mention the cause of global warming.
(4b) Uncertain Expresses position that human’s role on recent global warming is uncertain/undefined: eg ‘While the extent of human-induced global warming is inconclusive. . . ’
(5) Implicit rejection. Implies humans have had a minimal impact on global warming without saying so explicitly E.g. proposing a natural mechanism is the main cause of global warming: eg ‘. . . anywhere from a major portion to all of the warming of the 20th century could plausibly result from natural causes according to these results’
(6) Explicit rejection without quantification. Explicitly minimizes or rejects that humans are causing global warming: eg ‘. . . the global temperature record provides little support for the catastrophic view of the greenhouse effect’.
(7) Explicit rejection with quantification: Explicitly states that humans are causing less than half of global warming: eg ‘The human contribution to the CO2 content in the atmosphere and the increase in temperature is negligible in comparison with other sources of carbon dioxide emission’.
The paper is hopelessly broad and actually vague in conclusion.
I myself would give a “yes” to a statement like ‘Emissions of a broad range of greenhouse gases of varying lifetimes contribute to global climate change’ as in Cook’s category 2 …(Endorsements (including implicit and explicit; categories 1–3)
And … he’d take that as a “Yes” and a strong endorsement of … um … climate science? … or of a looming catastrophe? …or as agreement on a call to immediate, world wide emergency action?