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
===========================================
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)
Andrew,
“..I emailed a sample of scientists…”
Interesting “sample”. You insult your reader’s intelligence and undermine your own position with such a blatantly biased sample. If Cook’s methodology is weak, yours is pathetic.
JP
Great stuff, but spoiled by
“making it’s conclusions baseless and it’s promotion…”.
The difference between “it’s” and “its” is something you learn in primary school.
Any semi-literate AGWer will jump on that slip to discount the whole article.
“I emailed a sample of scientists”
For refuting a research article, this will not convince anybody. How big a sample, and how chosen? Were there other answers? All we see here is 3 quotes from people that seem to be picked.
@atarsinc
(see also my comment a few above yours)
“Interesting “sample”.”
Yep! If he wants to do a thorough critic he already blew it there. There are two possibilities to save him. Or he forgets these answers he got and only uses a random sample of the articles, or he writes to all the authors of the 12000 articles (will he do this kind of work?).
“You insult your reader’s intelligence and undermine your own position with such a blatantly biased sample.”
To me it seems he is not insulting everybody’s intelligence here. It appears to me he is trying to imply that the Cook article rated articles differently from the original article authors ratings. Thereby he is distorting the Cook study. For many here in this thread, who I guess didn’t take any time to look at the Cook study (and at the same time may consider themselves “skeptic”), this goes down well. To me it seems he wants to obfuscate what is in the Cook study and give readers the incorrect impression that it rated whole articles, fucked up with that (probably not by accident), therefore can’t be trusted, as all those pesky warmists, must be watermelons, and so forth (yeah yeah, I am exaggerating in the later part of this sentence 🙂 ).
“If Cook’s methodology is weak, yours is pathetic.”
100% agree
Natural Climate change has been hiding in plain sight
http://climatechange90.blogspot.com/2013/05/natural-climate-change-has-been.html
Is that supposed to be argument for why Cook and company believe to know more about the papers than their authors?
Or are you arguing that the methodology used in the paper is worthless and the results unreliable?
Very interesting, Skeptical Science “Crusher Crew” founders are already trying to spam my post.
RoHa, thanks for pointing out the typo and it is corrected.
Keep telling yourself that.
Please provide the definition of the word “sample” how I used it. You don’t want to insult everyone’s intelligence here and pretend to know more about an article than the author? Wait isn’t that what Cook et al. did?
@poptech
“Is that supposed to be argument for why Cook and company believe to know more about the papers than their authors?”
It is about you implying that the Cook article did something what they are very clear about that they did not. They rated abstracts as they said. You imply they rated articles. That’s obfuscation. You omit they asked original authors on their opinion regarding the whole articles as a control on their rating of the abstracts. Why did you not mention that? Did you read the comment I made before the one you responded to? Did you actually read the Cook article? Your post here fails spectacularly as a criticism.
“Or are you arguing that the methodology used in the paper is worthless and the results unreliable?”
You can argue with the methodology all you like. You should however give a fair representation of the methodology when you want to argue about it. You do not. You do not give any idea of your own methodology btw.
According to a survey, 87% of surveys pre-select and categorise the samples to support the statistics they want to come up with.
I am not sure why you believe this to be an argument? So by rating only the abstracts they were not attempting to imply a position to the entire paper and authors?
That is irrelevant to the fact that they falsely classified papers and used these false classifications to draw their conclusions. Cook et al. (2013) is flawed and the results cannot be trusted.
Dr. Scafetta has clarified a matter that has confused me (as a non-scientist).
Until now I have relied on the Wikipedia précis of the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ (2007) viz. “Most [ the majority i.e. over 50% ] of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely [ over 90% sure, whatever that means ] due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”.
@Poptech
You are clutching at straws! Stop digging!
“”Reich Eschhaus: It is about you implying that the Cook article did something what they are very clear about that they did not. They rated abstracts as they said. You imply they rated articles. That’s obfuscation.”
I am not sure why you believe this to be an argument? So by rating only the abstracts they were not attempting to imply a position to the entire paper and authors?”
They rated abstracts by a scheme as they said they did. There is nothing implied in one direction or the other. They were not ‘attempting to imply a position to the entire paper and authors’ as you correctly say. That is what the whole procedure of asking authors to rate their whole articles is about! As a control to what extent the rating of abstracts is in agreement with the original articles’ authors opinion on their whole article. You obscure this whole procedure. And that’s an argument.
“”You omit they asked original authors on their opinion regarding the whole articles as a control on their rating of the abstracts.”
That is irrelevant to the fact that they falsely classified papers and used these false classifications to draw their conclusions. Cook et al. (2013) is flawed and the results cannot be trusted.”
You are taking the piss? Did you read my first comment? They classified abstracts as they said, and compared their classification of abstracts with ratings to the whole article as given by the original authors. There is no 100% agreement there. So tell me what is flawed? You didn’t show any such thing?
Btw what is your methodology? Do you have one? Can you understand methodology in an article which you do not like?
ursus augustus says:
May 21, 2013 at 1:26 pm
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.
Couldn’t agree more, but I cannot resist commenting that his troll comments as “scientific paper” is a total distraction. If he had simply gazed at inkspots to divine his 97% consensus revelation he could not have shown himself to be a better acolyte of Lewandowski.
What is remarkable about it all is that the MSM fawned all over it as if it was relevant, and that actual scientists (as distinct from Cook) admit that they would not get their papers published if they said anything that the peer review thought police would object to. Confirmation that climate science, its “scientific” publications and its reporting by the MSM is completely and thoroughly corrupted. That is worth reflection and an acute awareness in our consciousness. How sad.
atarsinc says:
Interesting “sample”. You insult your reader’s intelligence and undermine your own position with such a blatantly biased sample. If Cook’s methodology is weak, yours is pathetic.
PopTech’s methodology is fine. Bias is not at issue when finding counter-example. To the contrary, it is an efficient and standard SOP for QA/QC exams – you look for error first where you expect to find it. Had Cook performed any QA/QC at all on this half-assed crock of feces, he would have saved himself at least some of the embarassment attendant to foisting this crap on the world. But he didn’t do even enough QA/QC to hide his own dishonesty.
On the other hand, assessing bias is of prime importance to determining the validity of Cook’s … ahem … “methodology”. We know from these counter examples that Cook categorizes blatant skeptics as AGW proponents. We also know that his … ahem … “methodology” … intentionally mischaracterizes mitigation and effects studies as “implicitly accepting AGW” when that is patently false. Bias indeed.
The only question left remaining is whether Cook is incompetently fraudulent, fraudulently incompetent, or just a petulant little cartoonist playing at being a pseudo-scientist.
@JJ
“”Interesting “sample”. You insult your reader’s intelligence and undermine your own position with such a blatantly biased sample. If Cook’s methodology is weak, yours is pathetic.”
PopTech’s methodology is fine. Bias is not at issue when finding counter-example. ”
You are ignoring that the Cook article does compare their ABSTRACTS rating with the article authors self-rating of the WHOLE ARTICLES. From Cook’s article it is clear that the abstract rating does not 100% agree with authors’ article self-ratings (counter examples are thus regarded in the Cook article). Therefore the question of PopTech’s sampling method is highly relevant. The rest of your argument is thus irrelevant.
Reich.Eschhaus says:
“So tell me what is flawed?”
=======================================
You’re kidding. Right?
Cook’s entire claim is fatally flawed. It is nothing but propaganda. Spin.
Reading comprehesion is not your strong suit, is it? I suggest you read the article and comments, and at least try to understand how they easily pick Cook’s juvenile game playing to pieces.
Poptech says:
May 21, 2013 at 4:53 pm
” Wilcon says: For refuting a research article, this will not convince anybody.
Keep telling yourself that.”
I do not see how a hand-picked sample of n=3 (out of what, 4000?) is going to convince anybody who is not already a believer.
Wilcon says:
“For refuting a research article, this will not convince anybody. How big a sample, and how chosen? Were there other answers? All we see here is 3 quotes from people that seem to be picked. “
In order to show that a claim is discreditied it isn’t neccessary to discredit every single item in that claim, but merely to show that part of the basis of the claim is false. In this case it would be obvious to anyone who knows anything about the hype of AGW that simply reading the abstracts of a paper is not going to show everything about that paper.
Here are simply three examples that show that even reading the abstracts should have been enough to correctly classify them, however they were still wrongly categoriesed. The question as to how many others there may be does not need to be asked as this is not a statistical exercise, but one of fact.
When coupled with the incorrect use of statistics by Cook et al, the paper is completely discredited and reflects badly on the authors and anyone else who wishes to associate themselves with it.
@dbstealey
What is it that you want to tell me?
I have been arguing that Poptech’s criticism is no such thing because he ignores/misrepresents/ doesn’t understand/ or whatever the methodology used in the Cook paper.
If PopTech wants to criticise the paper, then Poptech should do it right.
Again what’s your point? Except asking me to look somewhere else and test my reading skills.
SQUIRELL!
@Jantar
“Here are simply three examples that show that even reading the abstracts should have been enough to correctly classify them, however they were still wrongly categoriesed. The question as to how many others there may be does not need to be asked as this is not a statistical exercise, but one of fact.”
So you also ignore that in the Cook article the ratings of abstracts is compared to the self-ratings of the article authors of the whole articles. Why is that? Did you read the Cook article or have you only (very skeptically) read that was posted about it here?
“When coupled with the incorrect use of statistics by Cook et al, the paper is completely discredited and reflects badly on the authors and anyone else who wishes to associate themselves with it.”
Ah well… Ignore my two last questions. I found the answer!
LOL!
Jantar says:
May 21, 2013 at 5:53 pm
“In order to show that a claim is discreditied it isn’t neccessary to discredit every single item in that claim, but merely to show that part of the basis of the claim is false. In this case it would be obvious to anyone who knows anything about the hype of AGW that simply reading the abstracts of a paper is not going to show everything about that paper.”
But that is a straw man, no one has ever claimed that reading and abstract is going to show everything about a paper. The Cook team explained how they based classifications on the abstracts. And then they emailed all the authors asking how they would classify their own papers. 1200 authors wrote back with self-classifications, and often these were more pro-AGW than the Cook team’s abstract classifications. So Cook & co. tell us in the paper about evidence their own classifications are not perfect.
Here we have a post containing quotes from only 3 authors who self-classify their papers as less pro-AGW than the Cook team thought. Of course such exist. How do these 3 compare with the hundreds of authors the Cook team heard from? And we have no information about this tiny sample was picked.
That is why I said this post would convince nobody who was not already a believer.
Reich.Eschhaus says:
You are ignoring that the Cook article does compare their ABSTRACTS rating with the article authors self-rating of the WHOLE ARTICLES.
You are ignoring that Cook’s entire thesis is that rated abstracts = article opinion = scientist opinion = consensus opinion = truth. Every step in that chain is a falsehood.
“From Cook’s article it is clear that the abstract rating does not 100% agree with authors’ article self-ratings (counter examples are thus regarded in the Cook article).”
‘Regarded’. Heh. Cute. Note that Cook claims that the self-rated articles are ever so slightly more likely to be pro-AGW than the abstracts. The counter examples … exemplify the counter.
“Therefore the question of PopTech’s sampling method is highly relevant.”
PopTech’s assessment method is perfectly fine. He compared three authors’ opinions on AGW with the opinion that gets Cooked up for them. 100% wrong. Do the stats on that, and derive an estimate for the population error rate. It is not “vanishingly small”, and it demonstrates Cook’s bias.
And then there is the methodological error of categorizing effects and mitigation studies as “implicitly accepting AGW”. Sorry, but no.
Amateur hour bullshit.