97% Undercooked uncertainty

I’m still chuckling from this line:

For example, if one were to use the Cook paper regression to “predict” the probability for the Reject group for any year from 2013 on, they would get a negative value ( possibly because retractions would exceed new publications???).

The green “Endorse AGW” line looks like a ‘reverse’ hockey stick to me. : > )

lsvalgaard says:
The number of papers endorsing AGW is falling
And so is the number of papers rejecting AGW…
—————
When AGW becomes a declining issue, its no longer necessary, and indeed a waste of resources, to write papers to reject it.

lsvalgaard says:
May 24, 2013 at 8:46 am
“No, just the opposite. You should consider the rate as a proportion of the number of papers.”
I haven’t looked at it closely, but I believe the rate of decline is still less than the AGW believers. Plus, the smaller sample size is subject to much greater uncertainty. And you have still have not considered the effects of known gatekeeping.

I really don’t have a problem with the 97% number.
I don’t think there really is a much question about whether human-produced greenhouse gases will cause warming. The question is about how much and what will be the effects of it. That is where the uncertainty lies.

Clearly global warming was strongest around 1996/97, from whence it fell and has since steadied out. The temperature record confirms this basic shape.
So if we want the Earth to stop warming we just need scientologists to release fewer endorsing papers.
Thank you Mr Cook for finding the answer, you are the winner.

I’m glad to see “Reject AGW” has dropped, as it is unscientific to reject the evidence man has some effect on the global temperature, even though the evidence is saying it’s through land use changes and black carbon (soot) depositions, with regional effects summing up in the averages to a “global” effect.
Although I suspect most of the “AGW scare” is people wanting to believe humans are more important than a bacterium living on a skin mite on a hound dog’s backside, that not only can they make the tail wag, if they aren’t careful they could rise up and kill the poor suffering pooch. Indeed, humans are so powerful, they are the only thing that can cure that puppy’s fever and make it whole again!

“Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming …”
“Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming …”
Better read it twice.
Such goes nowadays through as “science” and published as such in a “scientific” paper,
peer-reviewed of course? And is used by newspapers and politicians? Seriously?
Never ever any scientist should even consider anymore to read, less publish in such a paper. Ignore them. Make them go away.
I am very surprised that serious people even try to show what bad science it is. Bad statistics etc. They are wasting time. It is not even close to science. It is cook-ed BS, as the title shows without any doubt.

The relative positive changes in the No Position data should almost mirror the negative changes in the Endorse data because they are each sub-sets of the same data set. If you add to one, you automatically subtract from the other.
I said “almost” because the Reject sub-set percentages changes very little, and there is some error in the digitization process. The take-away message, as Anthony suggests, is that the trend appears to be that the consensus is dwindling.

Stephen Mosher says , “As long as you stand outside “the consensus” you cant change it.”
That reminds me of the time I entered a House of Ill-Repute to convince the ladies of the error of their ways.
My wife didn’t believe me, either.

{ lsvalgaard says:
May 24, 2013 at 9:25 am
Doing the numbers, the rate of decline for the reject group is 10 times that for the endorse group.}
I’ll endorse that.

Steven Mosher says:
May 24, 2013 at 9:55 am
…
yes. if you deny the consensus you cant change it. If you accept the consensus ( GHGs cause warming) then you can change the debate How much warming and what if anything can you do about it.
As long as you stand outside “the consensus” you cant change it. Speak for the consensus, a different consensus, and you have a shot
—————
I agree completely. Why does Cook get to interpret the consensus? Merely because he seized the initiative to do so; he does not speak for everyone who believes that humans are warming the environment to some possibly negligible degree, he has simply stepped forward and done so.

Well, eh…
Cook:
“Oreskes 2007predicted that as a consensus strengthened, the number of papersrestating the consensus position should diminish. An elegant confirmation of this prediction that came out of our data is that as the consensus strengthened (e.g., the percentage of endorsements among position papers), we also observed an increase in the percentage of “no position” abstracts.”
Source:
http://www.culturalcognition.net/john-cook-on-communicating-con/

@Mark Bofill
Yes, Cook says Oreske predicted this and they confirmed this prediction (Reason: No need to mention it anymore when everybody agrees anyway).

Reich.Eschhaus says:
May 24, 2013 at 1:14 pm
———–
I think I ran across a reference to this too on SkS, but clearly I didn’t read thoroughly enough. 😉

I believe the following is the “real” problem with the Skeptic position
A paper comes out that has….. a hockey stick, …..a 97%, ….a hottest on record,…..weather extreme,…..”worst tornado in the history of the planet”……choose your hyperbolic headline, and it gets the attention of the unsuspecting (low information) public. They take it a face value because they don’t have any other information. They then support a politician who will “DO SOMETHING!” as solution that, as His Lordship has repeatedly pointed out, is worst than the problem.
In the interim, the original headline and substance of the of the original report is throughly destroyed/debunked, but that doesn’t make the headline, isn’t reported on the top of the hour news report on the radio. One side is the headline, the other is the buried (if presented at all) correction.
I don’t know how you flip that. I know it is important that we do.

It seems that Roger Pielke, Jr thinks that skeptics have lost the scientific argument and advocates political action on the consensus.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/political-science/2013/may/24/climate-sceptics-winning-science-policy
What do you make of his assertions? Is he suffering from cognitive dissonance? Or buttering both sides of his bread?

Tim Clark makes a very good point that should be addressed. Because if he’s part of the consensus, then so am I.

The reason the consensus canard survives and skeptics flounder on the point is by pretending “science” that can’t be quantified is viewed as a resolution. Skeptics can’t talk about their political divides among each other as a rule and therefore can’t challenge the largely statist agenda of warming advocates effectively in practice.
Oddly, on the details, the climate debate is mostly various left of center parties arguing the points. Most conservatives have concluded AGW is a farce in the entirety and ignore these detailed discussions for the most part. That’s defensible intellectually but puts skeptical in a poor broader position of debate. Hence we are left with liberals skeptics vs. liberal orthodox AGW discussions in many cases. Liberal skeptics simply minimize the politics driving AGW orthodoxy and the real logic of the debate is lost. AGW is political first and science is a deep second place. Here is the overly polite Dr. Lindzen summing it up;
http://torydrroy.blogspot.com/2009/07/prof-lindzen-on-agw-hoax.html
He comes close to saying it outright but comes from the same orthodox, left-wing liberalism that he is wired to likely in this lifetime. Even he can’t seem to say what most everyone knows privately. AGW is driven by central planning totalitarian designs for carbon interests and controls. It has nothing to do with weather results. That’s why the consensus hardly ever changes no matter how bad the model and prediction results ever are.
It’s time for skeptics of the technical to cross the Rubicon and point out the political corruption of the AGW agenda each and every time. It’s always there. For example what is the point of “endorse AGW” above without asking what the consequences would be if that group might go the other way? They would lose funding, peer recognition, friends. AGW is a politically correct litmus test, it’s science value is minimal as it quantifies nothing. As is often the case the article is interesting but the essential isn’t going to be discussed. The essential about “97%” isn’t just a vague question that creates a broad but undefined “consensus” but also how a near Orwellian culture beat a science community into submission for a generation to the shame of all involved. How much of that “97%” represent “Good Germans” for the “Cause” is worth real research as well. This can never be done from the framework of thinking who has the best graphs, data are going to win the debate. It would be over already if that was the case.
Start with the “endorse AGW” voting pattern and who they contribute to, that would simplify it and be far more meaningful.

“Researchers from the University of Colorado and Kansas State University have been awarded a grant for more than $850,000 to study the impacts of climate change on prairie dogs in the Boulder area.” http://learnmoreaboutclimate.colorado.edu/blog/view/id/86/cu-to-study-impact-of-climate-change-on-boulder-prairie-dogs
Does the Cook paper include “research” like the Colorado study? If so, it becomes even more misleading.

What a great collection of quotable contributions we have above today.
However shakily the survey sifts the free references to the beliefs of ‘scientists’ I have noticed something that to me, invalidates the claims of the paper altogether.
The survey is of abstracts and the debatable classification of the content of abstracts. Yet the claim is that ‘97% of scientists’ who support AGW in their abstracts are ‘being counted’. I do not see this counting taking place at all.
First, one has to get the names of the authors of each paper. One paper may have 1 or 2 authors and another may have 30. Then, one author may express his or her opinion 100 times is a series of papers. That should count as 1 author, not 100. It is the silly claim of this Cook paper that the number of papers represents a number of scientists who believe ….yet that number is not being counted.
A scientists who supports some identifiable belief in AGW – as defined by the surveyor – can only legitimately be counted once because their beliefs are unlikely to change. If the do change, then that should have been detected by the survey method.
Basically, the author is taking a measurement (totting up the occurrence of certain words in abstracts) and projecting the result as a value for an independent variable.(the number of scientists who believe a certain thing).
It is a variation on, “It rained last Thursday and my friends experienced it – ask them. I believe it rains every Thursday. It is raining, therefore we have a consensus today is Thursday.”
It is a brew of ad populum and ad ignorantium. David Garcia-Andrade must be turning in the his grave (author of the unavailable A New Look At Infinities: Casting Paradox Out Of Cantor’s Paradise (A mathematical Exorcism) in which mathematical zombies are finally laid to rest).

KPeters says:
May 24, 2013 at 4:30 pm
“Researchers from the University of Colorado and Kansas State University have been awarded a grant for more than $850,000 to study the impacts of climate change on prairie dogs in the Boulder area.” http://learnmoreaboutclimate.colorado.edu/blog/view/id/86/cu-to-study-impact-of-climate-change-on-boulder-prairie-dogs
Does the Cook paper include “research” like the Colorado study? If so, it becomes even more misleading.
————————
Yeah, there were all sorts of amazingly irrelevant studies in there, such as:

Role Of Blood-oxygen Transport In Thermal Tolerance Of The Cuttlefish, Sepia Officinalis
Mechanisms that affect thermal tolerance of ectothermic organisms have recently received much interest, mainly due to global warming and climate-change debates in both the public and in the scientific community. In physiological terms, thermal tolerance of several marine ectothermic taxa can be linked to oxygen availability, with capacity limitations in ventilatory and circulatory systems contributing to oxygen limitation at extreme temperatures. The present review briefly summarizes the processes that define thermal tolerance in a model cephalopod organism, the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, with a focus on the contribution of the cephalopod oxygen-carrying blood pigment, hemocyanin. When acutely exposed to either extremely high or low temperatures, cuttlefish display a gradual transition to an anaerobic mode of energy production in key muscle tissues once critical temperatures (T-crit) are reached. At high temperatures, stagnating metabolic rates and a developing hypoxemia can be correlated with a progressive failure of the circulatory system, well before T-crit is reached. However, at low temperatures, declining metabolic rates cannot be related to ventilatory or circulatory failure. Rather, we propose a role for hemocyanin functional characteristics as a major limiting factor preventing proper tissue oxygenation. Using information on the oxygen binding characteristics of cepbalopod hemocyanins, we argue that high oxygen affinities (= low P-50 values), as found at low temperatures, allow efficient oxygen shuttling only at very low venous oxygen partial pressures. Low venous PO2S limit rates of oxygen diffusion into cells, thus eventually causing the observed transition to anaerobic metabolism. On the basis of existing blood physiological, molecular, and crystallographical data, the potential to resolve the role of hemocyanin isoforms in thermal adaptation by an integrated molecular physiological approach is discussed.

and

Between A Rock And A Soft Place: Ecological And Feminist Economics In Policy Debates
The field of ecological economics includes both economic analysis on the one hand, and discussions of normative values and visions for society. on the other. Using feminist insights into cultural beliefs about the relative hardness and softness of these two sides, this essay discusses how ecological economists can use this unique between space in order to better inform policy. The current crisis of global climate change. it is argued. requires that economists move beyond modeling and measurement, while ecological thinkers need to re-examine beliefs about markets and profit. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved,
Between A Rock And A Soft Place: Ecological And Feminist Economics In Policy Debates

Steven Mosher says:
May 24, 2013 at 9:55 am
yes. if you deny the consensus you cant change it. If you accept the consensus ( GHGs cause warming) then you can change the debate How much warming and what if anything can you do about it.
As long as you stand outside “the consensus” you cant change it. Speak for the consensus, a different consensus, and you have a shot

Another way of looking at it is that there are some fringe people on the alarmist side who are flat out wrong, and than there are warmists who are just somewhat wrong. (Just like there are sceptics who are flat out wrong) Those people who are somewhat wrong can be convinced that CO2 is not a PRIMARY driver on the climate but rather just a small part of the whole, while the true believers will go on believing even if glaciers smacked them in the rump. This works both ways of course, so the best course is to study the data and the works of the scientists, and come to your own conclusions with an open mind.
As for fighting against it as someone asked earlier, the information age has changed everything. No longer can scientists sit in their ivory towers and pontificate what is best for the people behind closed doors. Everyone is now their own activist, and so the media feeding frenzy is starting to become more and more pointless. Most scientists nowadays simply release a simple press release that lazy reporters glance at and write an article about. The age of the old print media is dying because people can get the same information directly online.
More people read WUWT than any other site for global warming. The success of Fox News also shows that people are changing the old boys club and gaining power. So don’t be afraid of the old bad press release system or how the system attempts to hide any arguments against the “consensus” because the old-dated system no longer matters. If scientists continue to double down on logical fallacies such as “we can not explain X warming so it must be CO2” we will see them drop themselves into oblivion and eventually they will lose their positions as well as people wake up and start demanding actual standards in their science.
As the sceptic, this is easy to show. Just show the scientists who are incompetent like Marcott and Mann especially and how they lack any ability to communicate anything. Marcott for instance insists that his data is not robust and yet still makes conclusions in the abstract BASED on that. Mann is well yea just an incompetent fool. There are plenty of places to link for that, so there is no reason to say anything other than that. They are fools, and so parade this in front of warmists arguing that the science is settled. Show that they are quoting from the “village idiots” and show people how stupid it really is. And quote from the other scientists who do not make such unsubstantiated claims. Quote from the more honest scientists who realize that the question of CO2 as a primary driver is still unknown. And show people that your position is valid. You can not convince people that your position is the correct position if you can not prove it.
And all it takes is one little crack. That is what scares alarmists more than anything because they KNOW deep down that their claims are unsubstantiated and that positive feed-backs are a fable that is unproven as of yet. Stick to the science, the physics argues directly that CO2 will have an impact of about 1 degree C per doubling. According to the IPCC, any warming under 2 degrees C will probably not be bad at all. Use those two facts and scold those who argue about positive feed-backs and how 1 degrees C of warming over 100 years is all we have seen. (and that is rounded up.) Just do what I have done here and argue with facts that can not be denied. And if they are, you can ironically refer them to wikipedia and/or IPCC. If that is your source, how can they deny that? Who is the denier now?
That is why you have to stick to the guns. Stick to what you do know versus claims that you can not directly prove. The sun did it is not a good argument. The warming slowing down is a good argument, but that can get bogged down into arguments of who is the better expert. (A cartoonist or weatherman as most of my arguments tend to go.) And so the best weapon you have is charts that show the actual data so people can make up their own mind. Link to the data and include all of it as well. Show that the warming has slowed down but that the longer-term trend is one of warming. That is if you use this argument at all…because unless you really know your statistics you are likely to be argued into oblivion by people who think they know everything because some cartoonist told them so.
I know this is slightly long, but I think it is important that as sceptics we can argue our position. If you can not argue it without getting into name-calling contest than you might not have a position to argue from. Stick to facts and you will never lose.
Oh and the best argument of all: Show people how the corrupt side is the alarmist side. Show how the global warming celebrities make big bucks on spreading the fear, and how big companies finance it. Show how the big companies are taking advantage of people to sell their products from railroads to wind power salesmen to rich people simply getting a tax break. Or how companies increase the price of their goods and call themselves green just to take advantage of the gullible. Because if there is a hole in the philosophy of greendom, its the hole of “what to do about it.” Their solutions all involve making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Here is one example (of many): It is the rich people who can afford the novelty items like solar panels on the roof. The poor people of the world will never be able to install solar panels on their roofs because the cost to replace a roof is beyond most poor people. Poor people are forced to do the roof work themselves and can not afford to buy expensive solar panels because most of the time the tax credit would net them nothing since they already pay no taxes. (assuming they can even afford to fix the roof by themselves)That is just one example of many, but you need to show that the warmists are corrupt and are simply part of a group of rich people who want to gouge the lower income and lower middle class for their own benefit. Once you can prove that the greens are manipulated by rich people for their own ends, you can show the green as being gullible and on the side of greedy rich people which as we have seen before is quite effective against low information people who eat that kind of stuff up. But don’t take my word for it, do your own research and figure out you own example. And use it truthfully. People will realize things like this because the truth can never be hidden. If you make a claim, make sure you can back it up with citations. That is all I think, because frankly I wrote a lot more than I meant to.

KPeters says:
May 24, 2013 at 4:30 pm
That is the real cost to all our children. Another of the ‘thousands of papers by thousands of scientists’ to add to the devastatingly expensive heap. Another ‘global warming is real’ stick for us to be beaten with.
This is how a modern consensus builds. One pet project at a time.

KPeters, many people here quote the commenter’s name and the date and time, but not the body of the comment. This saves time and space. Personally I thought it was clear that the comments were his, not yours.
By the way, you both seem to be agreeing…

Eugene WR Gallun says:
May 24, 2013 at 8:23 pm
You, in your statement, totally misrepresent what the skeptic position actually is. MAINSTREAM SKEPTICS DO NOT DENY THAT GHGs CAUSE WARMING. Why did you imply that in your statement???? You have posted here many times and so you must know what the general opinion is here — yet you DELIBERATELY misstate it. That is not honest.
…
Secondly your suggestion that we join the consensus is a political trick as old as Lenin. Ask the opposition to join you — but retain complete control of the positions of power.
…
——————–
I believe you misunderstand Steven here and do him a certain ironic injustice. It is not his misrepresentation that mainstream skeptics deny that GHGs cause some (possibly trivial) warming, that belongs to Cook.
Why does Cook speak for the consensus? Because he has taken the initiative and done so, this and nothing more. Therefore he is in a position to misrepresent it, and turn a piece of uninteresting scientific trivia into the illusion of something much larger and use it for effective PR.
But I suspect you have a point regarding the second issue. Cook’s side gets to take advantage of a huge, friendly infrastructure that wants to get his message out. I imagine that this is the inevitable result of the huge sums of money that have flowed to create the IPCC establishment, and the thirst for power of politicians who exploit the cover the IPCC provide them. I understand that point and I don’t have a good answer. Still, that doesn’t make Steve Mosher a ‘conniving liar’. Don’t be a Dana Nuccitelli about your disagreements.

For anyone who doubted the ‘bait and switch’ tactic, here’s an example already from our good friend Lewandowsky:
http://theconversation.com/no-matter-how-strong-the-evidence-on-climate-change-deniers-will-keep-denying-14496
He starts with the trivial scientific truth in paragraph 2:

The authors then focused on the studies that expressed a position on the basic premise that humans are causing climate change. Of those roughly 4,000 papers that took a position, more than 97% endorsed the consensus.

He even explicitly acknowledges that the real debate is elsewhere in paragraph 9:

Scientific debate continues in the peer-reviewed literature and at scientific conferences, where the impact of ocean acidification, the rate that ice sheets and glaciers melt, and the prevalence of hurricanes, drought and disease are debated. Indeed, there is debate about the likely range of climate sensitivity, the temperature rise expected with a doubling of CO2 levels.

By paragraph 11 he has made the ‘PR Leap’:

What part of a scientific consensus that ‘humans are causing climate change’ equates to a consensus that we have something to worry about and that the climate isn’t just fine, you may ask? NO PART.
After the obligatory mention of conspiracy theorism he emphasizes the point yet again:

Indeed, in the case of climate change, we have arguably reached the point where it is the strength of the overwhelming scientific evidence that is compelling some people to accept a conspiracy theory in preference to a price on carbon or other government regulations.

Acceptance of the consensus == a price on carbon or other government regulations. Alternative is conspiracy theory.
Sickening.

The “feeding trough” regarding grants and funding HAS to be considered in these calculations. It is a HUGE “forcing”.

endorsing agw?
could it be more precise?
most of scientist classified as skeptic endorse agw…they merely say its effect is overestimated.