Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Environmental Research Letters ought to have known better than to publish the latest anti-scientific propaganda paper by John Cook of the dubiously-named Skeptical Science website. Here are just a few of the solecisms that should have led any competent editor or reviewer to reject the paper:
- It did not discuss, still less refute, the principle that the scientific method is not in any way informed by argument from consensus, which thinkers from Aristotle via Alhazen to Huxley and Popper have rejected as logically fallacious.
- Its definition of the “consensus” it claimed to have found was imprecise: that “human activity is very likely causing most of the current anthropogenic global warming”.
- It did not put a quantitative value on the term “very likely”, and it did not define what it meant by “current” warming. There has been none for at least 18 years.
- It cited as authoritative the unscientifically-sampled surveys of “consensus” by Doran & Zimmerman (2009) and Anderegg et al. (2010).
- It inaccurately represented the views of scientists whose abstracts it analysed.
- It disregarded two-thirds of the 12,000 abstracts it examined, on the unscientific ground that those abstracts had expressed no opinion on Man’s climatic influence.
- It declared that the one-third of all papers alleged to have endorsed the “consensus” really amounted to 97% of the sample, not 33%.
- It suggested that the “consensus” that most recent warming is manmade is equivalent to the distinct and far less widely-supported notion that urgent action to prevent future warming is essential to avert catastrophe. Obama fell for this, twittering that 97% found global warming not only real and manmade but also dangerous.
Yet the most remarkable conclusion to be drawn from Cook’s strange paper is that the “consensus” – far from growing – is actually collapsing.
A little history.
It was Naomi Oreskes, a “historian” of “science”, who started the “consensus” hare running in the literature in 2004 with a non-peer-reviewed essay in Science alleging that not one of 928 abstracts she had reviewed had disagreed with the “consensus” that “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”.
Oreskes’ definition of “consensus”, though less imprecise than Cook’s, falls well short of stating that manmade warming may prove catastrophic.
The conclusion of Oreskes’ essay was that three-quarters of the abstracts she reviewed endorse the “consensus” either explicitly or, by evaluating impacts or proposing mitigation, implicitly. A quarter took no view. None, she said, disagreed with the consensus position.
Schulte (2008) reviewed 539 papers in the three years following the period studied by Oreskes, using the same search term (“global climate change”) and the same definition of consensus. He found that “the proportion of papers that now explicitly or implicitly endorse the consensus has fallen from 75% to 45%.”
Only 2% of the papers reviewed “offer new field data or observations directly relevant to the question whether anthropogenic warming has prevailed over natural variability in the past half-century”.
Just one paper mentioned the possibility of catastrophic climate change, but without providing any evidence for catastrophe. No papers provided any quantitative evidence whatsoever for the consensus as defined, still less for catastrophe.
Schulte concluded: “There appears to be little basis in the peer-reviewed literature for the degree of alarm on the issue of man-made climate change which is being expressed in the media and by politicians.”
On no basis, Oreskes later asserted that Schulte had “misrepresented” her results. In fact he had reported them straightforwardly and had simply carried her method forward for a further three years.
Finally, Cook alleged that a third of the papers he had reviewed explicitly or implicitly endorsed the “consensus”. However, several of the scientists whom he said had endorsed the “consensus” say they had done no such thing.
Even if he had assessed the abstracts fairly, the 33% endorsement of the “consensus” that he reported is significantly less than the 45% endorsement that Schulte reported, and less again than the 75% “consensus” reported by Oreskes:
The “consensus” is indeed collapsing.
One might examine Cook’s 12,000 abstracts to discover how many (or, rather, how very few) explicitly or implicitly endorse the notion that catastrophe will follow if CO2 emissions continue to grow.
However, any such survey would be of no more scientific value than that of Cook. As the planet continues to fail to warm at anything like the rate that the usual suspects have so confidently but unwisely over-predicted, it will eventually become apparent to all that science was not, is not, and will never be done by mere headcount.
References
Anderegg, W.R.L., J.W. Prall J. Harold, and S.H. Schneider, 2010, Expert credibility in climate change, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 107: 12107-9.
Cook, J., D. Nuccitelli, S.A. Green, M. Richardson, B. Winkler, R. Painting, R. Way, P. Jacobs, and A. Skuce, 2013, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, Environ. Res. Lett. 8: 024024 (7 pp), doi:0.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024.
Doran, P., and M. Zimmerman, 2009, Examining the scientific consensus on climate change, EOS Trans. Am. Geophys. Union 99: 22-23.
Oreskes, N., 2004, The scientific consensus on climate change, Science 306: 1686.
Schulte, K.-M., 2008, Scientific consensus on climate change?, Energy & Environment 19:2, 281-286, doi:10/1060/095830508783900744.
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I’m pretty sure that accurately comparing explicit paper endorsements to surveys of author POV would show that every theory is collapsing, Chris.
Survey biologists about acceptance of evolution in 2013, then survey their papers in 2015 and voila… A Theory in Crisis. Of course it isn’t, despite decades of claims to the contrary.
“60% of the time it works every time” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjvQFtlNQ-M
On a tangent, even if this were true, does it not simply prove there is a bias in funding for climate change related science? How many of the papers were submitted for funding with no climate change reference and refused funding until there was a global warming aspect to the study included? How many papers that would have been classified as sceptical never got published or funded in the first place? How much re-defining of peer review, pal review and gatekeeping has been in play?
This was a bunch of funding fraud scammers who got caught in the spotlight when Al Gore decided to out them on his comeback tour from losing the election.
He dared people to stop him from manipulating energy markets, calling George Bush a terrorist for not doing more to stop the country from stopping purchases of Mid Eastern oil.
He said he had found out that it was really, a good thing, he lost the election, because he’d discovered civilization itself “could have a catastrophe.” He referred to it as such many times early on but later cleansed that from his speech on it.
He exposed frauds who claimed the atmosphere’s tropopause, a sheen of carbon dioxide that sits in space, posed between the balance of gravity and mass, at the top of the water cycle: when the Water cycle churns the nitrogen and oxygen around, causing more drag on the surface, warming the nitrogen and oxygen as well as, the water itself, of course – there’s a large upwelling that’s the really sole cause of disturbance in the layers of gas overall.
When the water boils off a lot of radiation due to resonance changes – the gases rising USING the photons are able by virtue of climbing on top of everything because of molecular motion locally, causing it to energetically buzz to the top of the atmospheric lower layer –
when the water gets to a certain point, lack of compression allows photonic energy to get out of phase with the electrons: and it falls off the electrons which fall back into a contracted size –
when this happens of course the water molecules all having relatively nearly identical moment and energy containment, are seen dumping radiation off in good sized chunks, in a method quite identical seeming with boiling.
This turbulent boiling drags CO2 up and the CO2 although heavier, becomes subject to a second feature of the convective upwelling, of storm cells: the oxygen in the mix of dry air, also emits a dose of energy at similar altitudes because they’re both, oxygen molecules, and, oxygen molecules all have identical valence numbers.
Nitrogen has an energy orbital that dumps light out to space not too far away; and the dry mix dump energy around, the same place the water does, there’s partial overlapping I think, I can’t remember.
This dumping of energy leaves the water, being ice: it starts falling down again and it actually tends to melt and re-rise up at the top of a particular boil off and cycle more than once: a refrigerative cycling:
the air dry, without the water, is primarily the Nitrogen and the Oxygen and the CO2. Since they all dump energy in altitudes relatively nearby each other, they push each other around, and there is a point where CO2 that gets chuffed out in the belch of energy, settling back, finds a very cold and, being continually recharged entity due to storms everywhere,
this cold, and JUST HAVING CONTRACTED Layer, OF nitrogen, and oxygen, the water having before long fallen out in nighttime shut down of the storms that sunlight creates,
when the CO2 settles, it finds itself landing on a tight band of gas that settles slowly; because nitrogen and oxygen’s compression ratios don’t support a lot of thermal tumbling, relative to say water.
The tropopause is this band of CO2 that sits there like a thin bubble of water looking molecules that are, actually, CO2 molecules. You see it in fighter jet photographs where the guy’s near it. It looks like liquid mirror, the effect you see in the movies: it’s the wave face of a gas field that’s comprised of oxgen molecules having that similar color response characterstic you see copied in movies.
James Con Man Hansen claimed he and others were afraid it was going to start getting quite thick as the storm cells chuff more and more up at that height which is higher than where nitrogen and oxygen dump energy and cool.
He said he and others were ‘afraid’ there could be – you guessed it THUH SKY on FAHr!’
It was crass political lying designed to procure funds. Period. Hansen always said he saw NO PROBLEM LYING about FAKE WEATHER to PROCURE FUNDING; those who know of him can verify this easily it was his trademark. That and referring to himself as “one of the smartest men on earth” because most people don’t get to go to school to study what happens when spinning balls collide. (Most of modern physics mechanics was derived from observing things deflecting at 90 degrees in physics particle study and testing their theories using athletic and billiard and toy balls as analogs for particles or momentary force-field encounters)
Hansen was a funds scammer from the beginning and he was working with about 13 or 14 guys to scam funds on research that “a wide array of thuh smartist minn in thuh werld are wurread abowt.”
He ginned millions up this way for Goddard Institute and, much more significantly he allowed his international climate research friends to piggyback off N.A.S.A.’s reputation for research investment to keep up.
Al Gore lost the election and told his followers when he saw how willing a group they were to obey his every whim to distract them from the unpleasantness of CrazyIslam inc.
belonging to Wacko Bin Laden and friends
Gore was FURIOUS at losing the election and told his followers that it was so urgent we all had to install his policies anyway. ASK PEOPLE who REMEMBER when it came OUT.
He flat out said it was terroristic not to invest in alternative energy.
What did he have lying around after the election? Some low-relative value ALTERNATIVE OIL and Other ENERGY PRODUCTS stocks d.e.a.r. o.l.d. d.a..d.d.y. had left him, in GOOD OLD OCCIDENTAL OIL company,
third largest valued oil company on earth,
but not third largest oil handler caws they had about 40% of their holdings in … Alternative Energy and Oil supplies.
No?
Go check what I’m telling you.
So he said we were all too worried about the terror war so we had to check on other energy supplies not his word.
=====
Anyway that was how the political cover up got so high powered.
And how the whole thing self-reinforced and still does. Al Gore told people it was too urgent to keep on obeying old laws that obviously weren’t working, he was thinking the change had to come from within as people just “occupied something” to stop government and industry from functioning so their attention could be demanded and demands, obeyed.
The reason the tropopause was justified as the potential problem Hansen said,
was that the tropopause, being an important radiator of heat at the earth’s standard frequency of infrared heat ejection, getting thicker, could act to change temp gradient beneath it.
Hansen used vicious insults against people all during his career and Gore gave him the executive-connected clout to continue his schemes even after they were caught to the point they wouldn’t move around and discuss the issues at ALL for a while, then they worked together to come to a message they’d decided the issues were too smawurt for thim liddL peepul.
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The obvious reason it never related to temperature is that the water signature absorbing similar frequency light dwarfs carbon dioxide: and carbon dioxide is, still after all, heavier than nitrogen and oxygen. The surface of the pool of nitrogen and oxygen delimits the amount of CO2 that can sit there like that, because after all, it’s only a relationship between non rigid gas entities that are – especially in the situation of nitrogen and oxygen, being churned all day, every day, by the various storms that track along the globe, as the sun heats the water,
and the giant oceanic basin of phase change refrigerant, starts cooling the earth.
The giant frigid blue oceanic basin of phase change refrigerant also cools the nitrogen and oxygen: not just by lofting them up to the point expansion, drives photonic/electronic resonances out of phase, and ejection of photons out occurs.
It also cools them through conduction as it falls back down. The main reason it ever falls as rain, is that although up at the top of the refrigerant cycling the water’s doing, it always falls as ice,
on the way back down, it cools some nitrogen and oxygen, picking up heat from them until that ice, re-melts – and it thusly re-phased falls to earth.
Obviously none of that allows for much heating by the giant frigid oceanic bowls of atmospheric pressures phase-change, refrigerant.
The Carbon Climate Forcing hypothesis was created to FORCE Carbon Commodity Markets, plain and simple. This Wall Street creation was first empowered under Big Bush, who ramped the Ronnie Ray Gun annual climate funding from $20 million per year in 1988 to $1 billion by 1992. Slick Willy doubled this by 2000 and Baby Bush continued the $2 billion per year grant scam. All of this excess research is for endangerment findings against Carbon….and as we all know….if all you fund is findings for danger, danger is all you will find. We now have ‘science’ texts on every level that require posted errata or pulp recycling. I look forward to the toilet tissue made with ‘recycled climatology text’ content.
When I was a child, McDonald’s was advertising their hamburgers as “made with 100% beef”. Unfortunately, no one knew what percent of the hamburgers was made with 100% beef.
People can come up with statistics to prove anything, 14% of people know that – Homer Simpson
Correction – “What percentage of the hamburger was made with 100% beef”
IMPORTANT:
The actual sentence from the paper is “We examined a large sample of the scientific literature…to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW).” The parenthetical is awkward, but the sentence is innocent of tautology. The misquote in Monckton’s second bullet should be corrected.
Given the media coverage of this “paper”, I conclude it is proof that the MSM is just an AGW parrot. Exhibit A: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/16/us-climate-scientists-idUSBRE94F00020130516
Not only does Reuters parrot the study uncritically, they add in this claim: “The report found an overwhelming view among scientists that human activity, led by the use of fossil fuels, was the main cause of rising temperatures in recent decades.” I think we can say that “main” is a synonym with “principal” which means Reuters is claiming that the “overwhelming” view is a Category 1 abstract assessment from the study. That’s patently false.
No offense to Lord Monckton, but a first year journalism student could take apart both the Reuters reporting and the study’s conclusions.
@Joe Kirklin says:
@The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
“Joe, please don’t use Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a joke.”
……………………………….
“For most things I’d agree with you but it’s remarkably reliable for quick references to something like a Whiskas advertising slogan. “
Actually, Wikipedia is:
a – NOT authoritative
b – good for anything which is not controversial – such as bit sequences for IP packets
c – subject to sudden revisions (including joke inclusions) for things which are in the news
d – interesting to hop around in and find odd links….
“Implicitly endorsed” just means that someone got a grant to investigate what global warming would do if it happened. Those papers provide information on how politicians give out grant money but have no other use.
Whoops – I missed out one line
e – useless for anything which IS controversial – but unfortunately there is no way of finding out what items are controversial at any moment in time…
As can be seen, the root of the problem lays, once again, in govt, which controls funding and thus
controls the direction of research and what gets written. Independent thought and avenues of
inquiry are mostly eliminated.
I think that I see a trend in the consensus position. Much like the trend in the level of scariness in the warnings throughout the years.
What you have to do is NOT look at any currently presented information on Global warming. That’s just like looking at weather – it’s the information the researchers are predicting TODAY. It might be quite different tomorrow, as, indeed, it was yesterday.
What you need to look at is the LONG-TERM movement. The ‘Trend of Trends’, if you will. I got this off Skeptical Science, so it MUST be true. Now, for Global Warming warnings, these started off very scary. In the 1990s, we were all going to die in short order. Seal level was going up 35m, and about 80% of us were going to die. The rest would be clinging to the rocks in Antarctica.
By the mid-2000s, this had been modified a bit, but it was still bad news. A billion homeless by 2050, and 40% of species wiped out.
Now we find that nothing’s going to happen to us, but it may be a problem for our grandchildren.
You see the trend? Clearly becoming less menacing as each year passes. I estimate that, at this rate, by 2018 people will be calling for more Global Warming and seeing it as an undoubted blessing as agriculture booms. If I had access to the Met Office computer prediction software I could give you a much more precise figure, but the general slope is unmistakable…
Perhaps someone could give me a grant to continue this work..?
But 100% of all studies that set out to prove the consensus found that there indeed is a consensus. I trust that this consensus will endure.
Olaf Koenders says:
In the near future, children won’t know what science is.
—
Very good comment. Unfortunately, it rings just a bit too true to be taken as a joke.
Olaf Koenders says:
“In the near future, children won’t know what science is”
LOL : > )
Correct. Only “attribution” papers are worthy of inclusion in a consensus of knowledgeable authorities on the question in point. “Me too” “impact” papers should not be included.
Ian Weiss says:
The actual sentence from the paper is “We examined a large sample of the scientific literature…to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW).” The parenthetical is awkward, but the sentence is innocent of tautology. The misquote in Monckton’s second bullet should be corrected.
==========================
One possible interpretation, but, having read the paper I would have to agree with Lord Monckton’s implicit interpretation that the intent of the parenthetical was to hone the definition of GW to be AGW. After making this statement the author refers to AGW, not GW throughout his paper. It appears to me that the point of the parenthetical was to equate GW with AGW.
@Michael Palmer
True but as a witty paraphrase of “In the future, children won’t know what snow is” the study deserves the ridicule – far funnier than ‘John Cook and Environmental Research Letters don’t know what science is in the present’!
that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW).
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so?….a better quality of life makes it warmer
…which is also a better quality of life
I thought there was no “global temperature”? If some places warmed, some cooled and some remained the same, then there is no “global warming”. Period.
Ian Weiss says:
May 22, 2013 at 6:48 am
“We examined a large sample of the scientific literature…to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW).” The parenthetical is awkward, but the sentence is innocent of tautology.
========
I don’t agree. The parenthetical is clearly a reference to the abbreviation immediately preceding. What the authors are saying is that GW is an abbreviation for anthropogenic global warming, or AGW,
Which is correct – this is the common usage . When someone refers to “Global Warming” they are not referring to natural warming – they are referring to anthropogenic global warming, or AGW.
Thus, Monckton is correct. The paper is saying that “human activity is very likely causing most of the current anthropogenic global warming”.
Add as others have pointed out, it is surprising that 3% of the scientist don’t agree. The reason for this is likely the use of the word “most”. These 3% likely didn’t agree because “most” is technically incorrect. The statement should have said “all”. the correct statement is:
TRUE: “human activity is causing all of the current anthropogenic global warming”
PERHAPS TRUE, PERHAPS FALSE: “human activity is very likely causing most of the current anthropogenic global warming”
The second sentence is “perhaps false” because the term “most” is technically incorrect. however the use of the phrase “very likely” confuses the question, because “all” and “most” are “very likely” to be the same if the sample is small enough.
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley (5:55 am) – Wrong cat food mate, Authur never touched Whiskers, he was a Kattomeat cat.
These zealots do like this 97% figure, don’t they? Not as easily disprovable as 100%, which also has the air of a North Korean referendum on whether Kim is a smashing kind of guy, yet close enough to suggest that all except a few oddballs agree. When presented with dissenting views but not possessing the wherewithal to assess them, the uncritical everyman assigns them to the oddball contrarian 3% and moves along.
Cook and Lewandowsky don’t prove anything with their surveys. Being a psychologist, Lewandowsky understands the power of suggestion and acceptance of consensus on the mind of the relatively uninformed. He could choose to display a professional’s knowledge of this and encourage us all to assess evidence on its own merits, overcoming psychological tendencies and helping us all to reach an objective position on the topic. Instead, he and Cook prefer to encourage us to continue to look through a faulty lens and filter out potentially-important information that doesn’t fit the ‘perceived wisdom’. If this doesn’t mark them down as biased advocates, nothing does.
There are many erudite people (on both sides of the debate) who, because of their expertise, suffer from confirmation bias and filter out contrary data or viewpoints. The general public, with no horse in the race, will tend to accept the considered view of the experts in such a complex field. If a false consensus can be proclaimed, the political battle is half-won.
Climategate and the subsequent failure of COP15 at Copenhagen were like the use of a defibrilator on the arrested heart of the AGW issue. It restarted the debate among the general populace, just at a time when another powerful psychological force was about to be reinvigorated: the return of harsher European and North American winters meant many people whose experiences had tallied with the IPCC prognosis suddenly saw a divergence between the ‘consensus’ and their own eyes. It’s harder to convince people that ‘the experts are nearly unanimous’ in their subscription ot (C)AGW when the real world appears to be moving in the opposite direction.