UPDATE: While this paper (a rebuttal) has been accepted, another paper by Cook and Nuccitelli has been flat out rejected by the journal Earth System Dynamics. See update below. – Anthony
“0.3% climate consensus, not 97.1%”
PRESS RELEASE – September 3rd, 2013
A major peer-reviewed paper by four senior researchers has exposed grave errors in an earlier paper in a new and unknown journal that had claimed a 97.1% scientific consensus that Man had caused at least half the 0.7 Cº global warming since 1950.
A tweet in President Obama’s name had assumed that the earlier, flawed paper, by John Cook and others, showed 97% endorsement of the notion that climate change is dangerous:
“Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” [Emphasis added]
The new paper by the leading climatologist Dr David Legates and his colleagues, published in the respected Science and Education journal, now in its 21st year of publication, reveals that Cook had not considered whether scientists and their published papers had said climate change was “dangerous”.
The consensus Cook considered was the standard definition: that Man had caused most post-1950 warming. Even on this weaker definition the true consensus among published scientific papers is now demonstrated to be not 97.1%, as Cook had claimed, but only 0.3%.
Only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate papers Cook examined explicitly stated that Man caused most of the warming since 1950. Cook himself had flagged just 64 papers as explicitly supporting that consensus, but 23 of the 64 had not in fact supported it.
This shock result comes scant weeks before the United Nations’ climate panel, the IPCC, issues its fifth five-yearly climate assessment, claiming “95% confidence” in the imagined – and, as the new paper shows, imaginary – consensus.
Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: a Rejoinder to ‘Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change’ decisively rejects suggestions by Cook and others that those who say few scientists explicitly support the supposedly near-unanimous climate consensus are misinforming and misleading the public.
Dr Legates said: “It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when on the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%.
“It is still more astonishing that the IPCC should claim 95% certainty about the climate consensus when so small a fraction of published papers explicitly endorse the consensus as the IPCC defines it.”
Dr Willie Soon, a distinguished solar physicist, quoted the late scientist-author Michael Crichton, who had said: “If it’s science, it isn’t consensus; if it’s consensus, it isn’t science.” He added: “There has been no global warming for almost 17 years. None of the ‘consensus’ computer models predicted that.”
Dr William Briggs, “Statistician to the Stars”, said: “In any survey such as Cook’s, it is essential to define the survey question very clearly. Yet Cook used three distinct definitions of climate consensus interchangeably. Also, he arbitrarily excluded about 8000 of the 12,000 papers in his sample on the unacceptable ground that they had expressed no opinion on the climate consensus. These artifices let him reach the unjustifiable conclusion that there was a 97.1% consensus when there was not.
“In fact, Cook’s paper provides the clearest available statistical evidence that there is scarcely any explicit support among scientists for the consensus that the IPCC, politicians, bureaucrats, academics and the media have so long and so falsely proclaimed. That was not the outcome Cook had hoped for, and it was not the outcome he had stated in his paper, but it was the outcome he had really found.”
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s imminent Fifth Assessment Report, who found the errors in Cook’s data, said: “It may be that more than 0.3% of climate scientists think Man caused at least half the warming since 1950. But only 0.3% of almost 12,000 published papers say so explicitly. Cook had not considered how many papers merely implied that. No doubt many scientists consider it possible, as we do, that Man caused some warming, but not most warming.
“It is unscientific to assume that most scientists believe what they have neither said nor written.”
###
Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change
David R. Legates, Willie Soon, William M. Briggs, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9
Abstract
Agnotology is the study of how ignorance arises via circulation of misinformation calculated to mislead. Legates et al. (Sci Educ 22:2007–2017, 2013) had questioned the applicability of agnotology to politically-charged debates. In their reply, Bedford and Cook (Sci Educ 22:2019–2030, 2013), seeking to apply agnotology to climate science, asserted that fossil-fuel interests had promoted doubt about a climate consensus. Their definition of climate ‘misinformation’ was contingent upon the post-modernist assumptions that scientific truth is discernible by measuring a consensus among experts, and that a near unanimous consensus exists. However, inspection of a claim by Cook et al. (Environ Res Lett 8:024024, 2013) of 97.1 % consensus, heavily relied upon by Bedford and Cook, shows just 0.3 % endorsement of the standard definition of consensus: that most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic. Agnotology, then, is a two-edged sword since either side in a debate may claim that general ignorance arises from misinformation allegedly circulated by the other. Significant questions about anthropogenic influences on climate remain. Therefore, Legates et al. appropriately asserted that partisan presentations of controversies stifle debate and have no place in education.
================================================================
UPDATE: – Cook and Nuccitelli paper rejected:
Bishop Hill writes:
The Benestad (Cook, Nuccitelli) et al paper on “agnotology”, a bizarre concoction that tried to refute just about every sceptic paper ever written has been rejected by Earth System Dynamics
Based on the reviews and my own reading of the original and revised paper, I am rejecting the paper in its current form. The submission is laudable in its stated goals and in making the R source code available, but little else about the paper works as a scientific contribution to ESD. While I think as an ESDD publication at least a discussion was had and the existence of the R routines has been brought to the attention of the various interested communities, the manuscript itself is not a good fit for this journal and would need substantial further revisions before being ready (if ever) for this journal.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
========================================================================
OH NO! It’s worse than they thought!
“I wonder if he’d sign on to a declaration that the Earth is 10,000 years old and that humans and dinosaurs lived together. That is also an evangelical belief, after all.”
Dan,
I suppose you think John Cook (along with Kathleen Hayhoe) will also “sign on” because they too are admitted Evangelicals.
By your logic I suppose, you being a green advocate, would “sign on” to legalization of incest just like your fellow German greens.
http://notrickszone.com/2013/09/03/germanys-green-party-wants-to-ban-car-driving-on-weekends-and-legalize-incest/
philincalifornia says:
September 3, 2013 at 11:21 am (Edit)
Is there any retribution for making a US President look like an idiot ??
———————————————————————————————
Like self impeachment you mean?
Bill Illis says:
September 3, 2013 at 11:21 am
It has Obama’s name and picture on it. His name and likeness is an implicit endorsement of the contents of those tweets. If he disagrees with an opinion expressed by OfA, in his name, then he should refute the statement. He didn’t, so …
_____________________________________________________________
philincalifornia says:
September 3, 2013 at 11:21 am
Is there any retribution for making a US President look like an idiot ??
The president is doing an exemplary job, himself, at making the president look like an idiot.
Retribution?
By any and all means available!
In response to commenters wondering how we obtained our results when Cook had not made his data available, in fact he did release a data file listing the titles and authors of all 11,944 abstracts in his survey, together with his or his co-authors’ assessment of what he called their “level of endorsement” of the “consensus” that most of the global warming since 1950 was anthropogenic. Level 1 was “explicit endorsement with quantification”: i.e., the abstracts stated specifically that more than 50% of the warming since 1950 was attributable to Man.
I wrote a program to read down the entire comma-delimited file and count the number of level 1 entries. There were only 64 out of 11,944. Startled by how low the figure was, I did a search using the search facility in Notepad, and again found 64 entries.
I then obtained and read all 64 abstracts, and found that only 43 of them explicitly endorsed the consensus as Cook et al. had defined it in the introduction to their paper: that more than half of the global warming since 1950 was anthropogenic.
Cook concealed the fact that he and his own team had only found 64 papers endorsing the consensus by counting them together with papers that explicitly or implicitly endorsed the notion that Man was causing some warming, but without quantifying how much. Even skeptics tend to agree with that. There were 3896 papers explicitly or implicitly endorsing the notion that we cause some warming, among which the 64 that were marked as endorsing the notion that more than half of post-1950 warming was manmade were hidden by lumping together the three “levels of endorsement” in a single number, and not revealing separately how many papers fell into each “level of endorsement”.
Trouble was, even 3896 papers amounted to only 33% consensus. So Cook et al. arbitrarily excluded all 7930 papers that expressed no opinion either way, and – hey presto – 97.1% consensus. It was as dishonest as that.
But even wickedness can have a value. Inadvertently, Cook et al. have provided definitive evidence that the IPCC has no basis whatsoever for its absurd “95% confidence” that more than half of all post-1950 warming was manmade. That is a purely political statement, and Cook et al., without realizing it, have demonstrated the very opposite of what they had intended to demonstrate, and of what they had said they had demonstrated. Their paper is a laughing-stock, and the journal in which it was published (which may even have been created specially as a vehicle for it) ought really to do the decent thing and withdraw it.
Dan @ur momisugly September 3, 2013 at 11:30 am;
You’ve certainly devised an excellent formula for stimulating commentary.
~~~~
If the Climate Change venue comes unraveled, say beginning with the IPCC making strategic concessions in the forthcoming SPM, to forestall challenges from national ministers on the hiatus-problem … that will serve to enhance the stature of Fundamentalist signatories, above & beyond what they could have enjoyed, without having been persecuted.
One should have clearly in mind, how persecution works, in religious contexts.
If the vagaries of climate don’t unfold in support of the scenarios proposed by the Movement, it will be double-bad news for them. Not only will they have failed to secure their objective beachhead, but religious (and other) figures whom they have revile, will gain. Over & above what would have accrued, had they just been left to their own personal views.
Those who are disparaged “on account” of their faith, derive both personal & social payoff from the experience. One is a better (stronger, truer, more-credible, wiser) Christian, etc, for having thus ‘paid’ for keeping the faith.
And if it then turns out that the persecution was in addition “false”, then the honor of having been mistreated for the sake of one’s beliefs, is much enhanced.
For climate models to now prove false, will strongly benefit religion …. purely & simply due to it having been used against the believer, but all the more so, if the attack is shown to have relied on false premises.
richard telford says:
Thanks for illustrating how silly it is to use consensus as a scientific argument.
richard telford says:
September 3, 2013 at 11:57 am
“Shock news: gravity consensus in doubt as only 0.3% of papers with gravity in title explicitly endorse gravity as being responsible for more than 50% of falling.”
Richard, what do you think; is John Cook the new Newton, or the new Einstein? Can’t make up my mind. Oh, and maybe you believe that Galileo threw stuff from the Tower of Pisa to measure something; in that case – is John Cook the new Galileo, maybe?
What’s da consensus saying?
“0.3% climate consensus, not 97.1%”
NOW, it’s worse than they thought!
Is TOL still waiting for the data?
Without any paper at all you just need to apply the Paradox of Consensus and you know Cook had Cooked the books. Now where is my Helicobacter pylori and my quasicrystals? So it is possible to get a Nobel when you go against consensus. You just have to be right and everyone else to be wrong. That’s science.
Regarding Gore’s quote “The winter that never came: New Zealand experiences its hottest winter on record”.
Well, I can say winter definitely did come, and ski fields reported a good season. So while it was a generally warmer (and drier) than usual winter it also wasn’t the warmest ever, with the official NIWA statement being “The nation-wide mean temperature was 1.2°C above the winter average, based on NIWA’s seven-station temperature series, making this the warmest winter on record since 1909.”
Personally, I’d like to see more winters like this and I don’t think anyone was complaining. Farmers found there was improved pasture growth and productivity was up.
PS There is no consensus that man is responsible for most of the post 1950 warming. The science is definitely not settled and the debate is certainly not over. It’s just started.
The point is that the more the paper is ridiculed the less likely it will be referred to by the IPCC in future. The less likely other scientists will cite it. They will but just fewer. Just take a look at Mann’s Hockey stick and the IPCC’s next report.
Gotcha! You fool. Read on and enjoy………… See John Cooks name?
Lord Monckton said: “Cook concealed the fact that he and his own team had only found 64 papers endorsing the consensus by counting them together with papers that explicitly or implicitly endorsed the notion that Man was causing some warming, but without quantifying how much.”
This is similar to the way the police (and road safety activists) report road accident statistics. They refer to “KSIs” — killed and seriously injured” — because although deaths are declining (cars continue to get safer), SIs aren’t. This is because SIs can be flexed since the definition is arbitrary. But taken together, who would dare argue against policies for reducing that figure? The result is the relentless reduction in speed limits across the country simply on the emotive basis that “speed kills”.
Truly we see the same manipulation of truth — circulation of misinformation calculated to mislead — performed by those in authority in so many different areas nowadays, it would be very surprising if it *wasn’t* being used as a technique by the AGW lobby.
Dan, here are your creationists. Oh how embarrassing for you. God help you. Pun intended.
Amen to that Dan. 😉 I will stop flogging you for now as long as you promise to keep religion out of the debate. Otherwise I will come back to kick you butt some more. Ouch!
Dan says:
September 3, 2013 at 11:30 am
Dan, not sure what your point is here. That statement is fairly unobjectionable to many Christians. And if you are going to say that Christians who are scientists shouldn’t be listened to because of their strange beliefs, you’ll knock out many, perhaps most scientists on the planet.
Look, I happen to think that the Christian idea, which is that Christians have an invisible but very powerful friend who listens to whatever the Christian might ask for, and who is willing to occasionally suspend natural laws to fulfill the Christian’s requests, is mondo goofy. My daughter used to have an invisible friend, but she gave it up when she got older. For starters, why would an omnipotent being give a damn what I wanted? The whole idea of an invisible friend is about as a-scientific as you can get, even anti-scientific.
However, from all indications, holding such bizarre beliefs doesn’t keep someone from being a good scientist. I don’t understand how that works, but work it obviously does, given the number of important scientific ideas that have come from people who also believe that there is an invisible being who hangs on their every word.
So the fact that David Legates believes in just such an invisible friend should be no surprise … many excellent scientists throughout history have had the same blind spot. Isaac Newton, as far as I know, would have had no trouble agreeing with Legates’ statement … you gonna advise we ignore him as well?
So what if Legates or others harbor strange beliefs about invisible beings? We’re interested in their science, not their wacky ideas about invisible omnipotent companions whose job seems to be just waiting around to be asked to do something …
w.
Well Willis, I would say that most religious people are able to separate their religious world from their real world. Faith requires no proof but scientific progress certainly does and anyone with an inquisitive mind recognises that fact.
I am an atheist myself but I would never measure a religious scientist’s ( or anyone else’s) work through the lens of their faith. The trouble with so many atheists is that they think they are intellectually superior to someone who has a religious faith and that arrogance is distasteful in my opinion and it is pleasing to see that you are not amongst that set.
A religious scientist is not an anomaly as most people are able to keep the two worlds separate in their minds, which is as it should be.
(if ever). Ha ha. Queue the laughter. (i.e. NEVER).
Jimbo,
Thank you for your excellent rebuttal of “Dan” and his ad hominum attack on Dr. Legates. As an evangelical, non-scientist myself, I grow weary of the CAGW crowd’s hypocrisy concerning people of faith. (i.e. Dr. Roy Spencer, etc.)
I have never personally bought into the CAGW hype precisely because of my faith; believing that God designed His creation to be flexible enough to withstand whatever it needed to.
Any citizen has a legitimate self interest in exposing Cook’s incorrect application of scientific method and reason in what has come to be recognized as his fanatical crusade against all citizens who oppose his CAGW religion.
John
“scientists and their published papers had said climate change was “dangerous”.”
Hun??
Dangerous?
I thought their point was on AGW not danger.
They also didnt say climate change was caused by purple underpants . Big deal
Did someone forget the survey of authors also found 97% in support of the IPCC position?
Re: Willis —
Its interesting to observe the emotional reaction that the CAGW crowd has to any scientists who subscribes to a traditional religious belief system.
Karen Armstrong in here excellent book “The History of God” makes a very cogent argument that every culture throughout all of human history has either developed religion independently or has absorbed the religious traditions of other cultures. There seems to be something biological about our need to have a codified belief system in matters of morality and mortality. People who claim to be non-religious are in fact religious but are simply unaware that their personal belief system has immutable structure.
There is only one logical explanation for the anger on the part of CAGW believers directed at religious people — that is that the post-normal CAGW belief system is, in itself, a religion. Its proponents are acting the way we see some religious zealots react to people who are not of their same faith — they want to destroy them.
climate “science”….no:
4 Sept: Courier Mail: Rob Kidd: University of Queensland scientists accused of falsifying research
UNIVERSITY of Queensland scientists have been accused of fabricating research that was published in a prestigious European scientific journal.
UQ referred the claims to the Crime and Misconduct Commission in July and asked for the study to be retracted pending the outcome.
***A university investigation has found “no primary data”…
The researchers received a $20,000 grant from a “non-government organisation” to conduct the work, which UQ had decided to return pending the outcome of the investigation.
Prof Hoj said he accepted there could be a “short-term hit” to the reputation of the university but UQ had a “moral obligation to inform the wider community as fast as possible”…
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/university-of-queensland-scientists-accused-of-falsifying-research/story-fnihsrf2-1226709953275
UQ: UQ investigates events leading to retraction
Statement from The University of Queensland President and Vice-Chancellor Professor Peter Hoj
A former UQ staff member from the Centre for Neurogenic Communication Disorders Research was corresponding author on the paper.
Published online in October 2011 in the European Journal of Neurology, the paper was titled Treatment of articulatory dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation…
http://www.uq.edu.au/news/?article=26661
——————————————————————————–
Bill Illis says:
September 3, 2013 at 11:21 am
“The President did not tweet the 97% consensus point. ….”
The HMFIC (Commander) is responsible for everything his organization (Unit) does or fails to do.
Few wish to apply the standard.