UPDATE: More inconsistency:
Cook survey included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral.
— Richard Tol (@RichardTol) May 22, 2013
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When asked about the categorizations of Cook et al, – “It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming”
Guest essay by Andrew of Popular Technology
The paper, Cook et al. (2013) ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature‘ searched the Web of Science for the phrases “global warming” and “global climate change” then categorizing these results to their alleged level of endorsement of AGW. These results were then used to allege a 97% consensus on human-caused global warming.
To get to the truth, I emailed a sample of scientists whose papers were used in the study and asked them if the categorization by Cook et al. (2013) is an accurate representation of their paper. Their responses are eye opening and evidence that the Cook et al. (2013) team falsely classified scientists’ papers as “endorsing AGW”, apparently believing to know more about the papers than their authors.
Dr. Idso, your paper ‘Ultra-enhanced spring branch growth in CO2-enriched trees: can it alter the phase of the atmosphere’s seasonal CO2 cycle?‘ is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; “Implicitly endorsing AGW without minimizing it“.
Is this an accurate representation of your paper?
Idso: “That is not an accurate representation of my paper. The papers examined how the rise in atmospheric CO2 could be inducing a phase advance in the spring portion of the atmosphere’s seasonal CO2 cycle. Other literature had previously claimed a measured advance was due to rising temperatures, but we showed that it was quite likely the rise in atmospheric CO2 itself was responsible for the lion’s share of the change. It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming.”
Dr. Scafetta, your paper ‘Phenomenological solar contribution to the 1900–2000 global surface warming‘ is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; “Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%“
Is this an accurate representation of your paper?
Scafetta: “Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission.
What my papers say is that the IPCC view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun. This implies that the true climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling is likely around 1.5 C or less, and that the 21st century projections must be reduced by at least a factor of 2 or more. Of that the sun contributed (more or less) as much as the anthropogenic forcings.
The “less” claim is based on alternative solar models (e.g. ACRIM instead of PMOD) and also on the observation that part of the observed global warming might be due to urban heat island effect, and not to CO2.
By using the 50% borderline a lot of so-called “skeptical works” including some of mine are included in their 97%.”
Any further comment on the Cook et al. (2013) paper?
Scafetta: “Please note that it is very important to clarify that the AGW advocated by the IPCC has always claimed that 90-100% of the warming observed since 1900 is due to anthropogenic emissions. While critics like me have always claimed that the data would approximately indicate a 50-50 natural-anthropogenic contribution at most.
What it is observed right now is utter dishonesty by the IPCC advocates. Instead of apologizing and honestly acknowledging that the AGW theory as advocated by the IPCC is wrong because based on climate models that poorly reconstruct the solar signature and do not reproduce the natural oscillations of the climate (AMO, PDO, NAO etc.) and honestly acknowledging that the truth, as it is emerging, is closer to what claimed by IPCC critics like me since 2005, these people are trying to get the credit.
They are gradually engaging into a metamorphosis process to save face.
Now they are misleadingly claiming that what they have always claimed was that AGW is quantified as 50+% of the total warming, so that once it will be clearer that AGW can only at most be quantified as 50% (without the “+”) of the total warming, they will still claim that they were sufficiently correct.
And in this way they will get the credit that they do not merit, and continue in defaming critics like me that actually demonstrated such a fact since 2005/2006.”
Dr. Shaviv, your paper ‘On climate response to changes in the cosmic ray flux and radiative budget‘ is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; “Explicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimise“
Is this an accurate representation of your paper?
Shaviv: “Nope… it is not an accurate representation. The paper shows that if cosmic rays are included in empirical climate sensitivity analyses, then one finds that different time scales consistently give a low climate sensitiviity. i.e., it supports the idea that cosmic rays affect the climate and that climate sensitivity is low. This means that part of the 20th century should be attributed to the increased solar activity and that 21st century warming under a business as usual scenario should be low (about 1°C).
I couldn’t write these things more explicitly in the paper because of the refereeing, however, you don’t have to be a genius to reach these conclusions from the paper.”
Any further comment on the Cook et al. (2013) paper?
Shaviv: “Science is not a democracy, even if the majority of scientists think one thing (and it translates to more papers saying so), they aren’t necessarily correct. Moreover, as you can see from the above example, the analysis itself is faulty, namely, it doesn’t even quantify correctly the number of scientists or the number of papers which endorse or diminish the importance of AGW.”
The Cook et al. (2013) study is obviously littered with falsely classified papers making its conclusions baseless and its promotion by those in the media misleading.
CVs of Scientists:
Craig D. Idso, B.S. Geography, Arizona State University (1994); M.S. Agronomy, University of Nebraska – Lincoln (1996); Ph.D. Geography (Thesis: “Amplitude and phase changes in the seasonal atmospheric CO₂ cycle in the Northern Hemisphere“), Arizona State University (1998); President, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (1998-2001); Climatology Researcher, Office of Climatology, Arizona State University (1999-2001); Director of Environmental Science, Peabody Energy (2001-2002); Lectured in Meteorology, Arizona State University; Lectured in Physical Geography, Mesa and Chandler-Gilbert Community Colleges; Member, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); Member, American Geophysical Union (AGU); Member, American Meteorological Society (AMS); Member, Arizona-Nevada Academy of Sciences (ANAS); Member, Association of American Geographers (AAG); Member, Ecological Society of America (ECA); Member, The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi; Chairman, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (2002-Present); Lead Author, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (2009-Present)
Nicola Scafetta, Laurea in Physics, Università di Pisa, Italy (1997); Ph.D. Physics (Thesis: “An entropic approach to the analysis of time series“), University of North Texas (2001); Research Associate, Physics Department, Duke University (2002-2004); Research Scientist, Physics Department, Duke University (2005-2009); Visiting Lecturer, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (2008, 2010); Visiting Lecturer, University of North Carolina Greensboro (2008-2009); Adjunct Professor, Elon University (2010); Assistant Adjunct Professor, Duke University (2010-2012); Member, Editorial Board, Dataset Papers in Geosciences Journal; Member, American Physical Society (APS); Member, American Geophysical Union (AGU); Research Scientist, ACRIM Science Team (2010-Present)
Nir J. Shaviv, B.A Physics Summa Cum Laude, Israel Institute of Technology (1990); M.S Physics, Israel Institute of Technology (1994); Ph.D. Astrophysics (Thesis: “The Origin of Gamma Ray Bursts“), Israel Institute of Technology (1996); The Wolf Award for excellence in PhD studies (1996); Lee DuBridge Prize Fellow, Theoretical Astrophysics Group, California Institute of Technology (1996-1999); Post Doctoral Fellow, Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto (1999-2001); The Beatrice Tremaine Award, Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (2000); Senior Lecturer, Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel (2001-2006); The Siegfried Samuel Wolf Lectureship in nuclear physics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel (2004); Associate Professor, Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel (2006-Present)
Just like Cook, another one who believes to know more about the papers than their authors.
Warms my heart to real scientists.
What I find to be remarkable about Cook’s “analysis” is that Idso, Scafetta and Shaviv are known to be critical of what might be called the “strong” AGW view, and have argued that CO2 influence is minor at best. Shaviv, along with Svensmark, has argued for a cosmic ray influence that affects long term (Phanerozoic) climate trends (see for instance Shaviv and Veizer July 2003, GSA TODAY). Dr. Scafetta made his views clear above. Craig Idso is or was affiliated with the Science and Public Policy Institute and can reasonably be termed a luke-warmist at most. The SPPI is pretty clearly sceptical of any strong influence by CO2 on the climate.
The short of this is that Anthony’s “sample” are ALL sceptical or moderately sceptical of any strong linkage between climate and CO2 levels. What’s more this is readily found public information on the internet. So, did Cook deliberately mislead, did his researchers fail to read, or what?
100% of authors cast out cook’s consensus claims, court told.
http://www.desmogblog.com/2012/11/15/why-climate-deniers-have-no-credibility-science-one-pie-chart
Thu, 2012-11-15 10:26
“” I searched the Web of Science for peer-reviewed scientific articles published between 1 January 1991 and 9 November 2012 that have the keyword phrases “global warming” or “global climate change.” The search produced 13,950 articles. “”
“” I read whatever combination of titles, abstracts, and entire articles was necessary to identify articles that “reject” human-caused global warming. To be classified as rejecting, an article had to clearly and explicitly state that the theory of global warming is false or, as happened in a few cases, that some other process better explains the observed warming. Articles that merely claimed to have found some discrepancy, some minor flaw, some reason for doubt, I did not classify as rejecting global warming. Articles about methods, paleoclimatology, mitigation, adaptation, and effects at least implicitly accept human-caused global warming and were usually obvious from the title alone. John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli also reviewed and assigned some of these articles … “”
What I couldn’t achieve with reading skills such as these gods amongst mortals display.
Colorado Wellington says:
May 21, 2013 at 10:03 am
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You are correct. Phil “Spreadsheit” Jones is not a scientist, since he doesn’t practice the scientific method.
A combination of both. Cook and his team members who helped crowd source this are incredibly incompetent and dishonest.
I knew the study was completely bogus when I saw the ridiculously low numbers he had for ones classified as “implicitly minimize/reject AGW” which missed hundreds of papers,
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
This is due to a combination of misclassification and omission. The Web of Science does not search the full paper but only the abstract and they did not search for review papers which are completely valid. Thus many valid papers include the search phrases in the body of the paper but never showed up in this study.
These egregious examples discredit his entire paper.
My last post went into the filter.
I prpoose a a new name for Cook…. ”Chef (of) Shite”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/21/cooks-97-consensus-study-falsely-classifies-scientists-papers-according-to-the-scientists-that-published-them/#comment-1311879
I forgot the /sarc tag.
Also, I should point out the bolding may be too subtle.
What this shyster is claiming is that the three of them read “” read whatever combination of titles, abstracts, and entire articles was necessary to identify articles that “reject” human-caused global warming. “” out of @13,900 articles……
In less than a week.
I base my estimate on the dates and allow some slack for the ‘writing’ of the piece of garbage surrounding the central strawman.
izen, why did Cook and company falsely classify these scientists’ papers? Do they believe to know more about the papers than their authors? How did this pass peer-review?
“Frankly, you’ve got three scientists that very much do not approve of the IPCC AGW stance, and are willing to discount/discredit/debunk it.
So why are we celebrating this obvious inducement to charges of cherry picking?”
I think you’ve missed the bigger picture. These are 3 scientists that would be known to NOT endorse Cook’s 97% value, and yet somehow their true views are lumped into the consensus as if they don’t have a contrary view. How many others of the 97% are mischaracterized? Based on the statements of these three, I have a feeling a lot of the 97% is actually in the “doesn’t take a position” category.
Nice work Andrew. It doesn’t take much solar amplification (much solar effect beyond the miniscule variation in solar irradiance that is the only solar effect included in the IPCC models) for CO2 to be completely benign. High 20th century levels of solar activity had to end sometime, at which point CO2 would be acting to moderate natural cooling. If the CO2 effect turns out to be stronger (contra-indicated by the “pause” in warming now that the sun has gone relatively quiet) it will still be modest, and any modest warming is benign. If CO2 is weaker, then we will soon be wishing it were stronger.
From wobble on May 21, 2013 at 9:41 am:
No.
Not meaningless, but they are known to be skeptical as I worded it, and “debunked” was just me knowing what WUWT references I could quickly find and link to, which just happened to not be totally complimentary.
Duh! Of course he did, we all know that.
And with that, you’ve lost me.
Right or wrong, and normally wrong, we skeptics are held to a higher standard, intellectually and morally. No Gleick’s accepted here. Like an anti-gun group whose “innocent child victim of gun violence” turns out to be a 20-yr old drug-pushing gangbanger who’s a suspect in three drive-by shootings, our “poster children” need to be impeccable or we will be discredited.
So what’s wrong with digging up some examples the opposition can’t claim must be inherently biased?
Three papers down, just 11,000 to go. Tis a mere pin prick methinks. Must admit, I would have put the second abstract in the category chosen by the reviewers. It isn’t hard to see why. Try doing a more random sample – email a hundred scientists from the list, pro, con, whatever shade of skeptic you can find (proper definition please) then report the findings. I am sure we can all rely on some good cherry picking to get the results we want.
By the way, you can repeat the crowd sourcing experiment if you wish to check it. That’s science at work, that is.
What a brilliant article. Thank you. The IPCC will not be happy. Things aren’t looking good for them right now from many angles.
I guess this is what you call “Cooking the books”
Well 3 papers being misinterpreted out of 12,000. Divide by 2 & carry the one, then subtract the ones with no view. I know conclude that 97% of the papers were misinterpreted. I used “Cooked Math” to reach my conclusion. :O)
/sarc
BTW Obama didn’t tweet the link. It says on his account that tweets sent by Obama end with BO. I didn’t see the “BO” on the tweet. I could have missed it. Now Obama can say he knew nothing about the tweet.
If they couldn’t identify these known scientists which are skeptical towards AGW then it is a pale study not showing anything. What is shown is that 97% not in a very obvious way rejects the AGW theory.
John C(r)ook says:
“Articles about methods, paleoclimatology, mitigation, adaptation, and effects at least implicitly accept human-caused global warming and were usually obvious from the title alone.”
Bullshit.
Articles about mitigation and effects assume AGW as a premise, i.e. IF AGW is true as advertised, THEN this is what may happen to X resource, or this is Y action that may be taken to mitigate. This does not “accept human-caused global warming” as anything other than a hypothetical.
The vast majority of articles “accepting human-caused global warming” are of this type, and it means absolutely nothing other than that studying those hypotheticals is where the funding dollars are to be found. It does not mean that the author accepts that the hypothetical is true. He may believe that the hypothetical is unlikely to occur, is an unsupported conjecture, or is absolute bullshit. They all pay the same.
Unless an article has a conclusion about AGW as a finding, that article says nothing, implicitly or otherwise, about the validity of the AGW premise.
This is yet another of Cook’s fallacious methods in support of his fallacious appeal to authority.
Cook is a tiny little pipsqueak of a person who felt it necessary at one stage to team up with Loony Lewandowski FFS. This toilet paper of his is a steroid and angel dust fuelled version of the Lewny’s cheap fraud some time back and should just be flushed away from our consciousness. Waste no more time on him, please.
Not sure what this post is aiming at. In the study
a) the abstracts (around 12000) were rated according to a predefined classification
and
b) the ratings of the abstracts were compared with the article ratings of the original authors (for around 2100 articles they got feedback from the original authors).
b) was done as a check on the abstract ratings and within the study it is clear that there is no 100% overlap between the abstract ratings and the ratings of the original authors of whole articles.
So, what is surprising here?
btw, did you ask more article authors or were these picked on your intuition? Did you ask the authors if they have contributed to the author’s self-ratings? Inquisitive minds want to know!
This is excellent work Andrew, well done. What are the next steps. Should these comments by the authors be taken to the reviewers? Or should a bigger case be built. One thing for certain is that this ‘cook’ non-scientist needs to be exposed to his peers so he may understand the scientific method is for academics not for failed cartoonists.
More pitiful propaganda about the Cook fairy tale paper, courtesy of the New York Times:
[I wasn’t aware that failed cartoonist John Cook is “a physicist” or that he has earned any PhD to be a “post-doctoral fellow” but the NY Times says it so both must be true??!!]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/science/kepler-telescopes-troubles-a-maya-pyramid-in-ruins-and-more.html?_r=0
Time to show that there is an overwhelming consensus among scientologists that there’s an overwhelming consensus among scientists. That would surely do the trick.