We’ve all been subjected to the incessant “97% of scientists agree …global warming…blah blah” meme, which is nothing more than another statistical fabrication by John Cook and his collection of “anything for the cause” zealots. As has been previously pointed out on WUWT, when you look at the methodology used to reach that number, the veracity of the result falls apart, badly. You see, it turns out that Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers, rather than letting all authors of the papers rate their own work (Note: many authors weren’t even contacted and their papers wrongly rated, see here). The result was that the “97% consensus” was a survey of the SkS raters beliefs and interpretations, rather than a survey of the authors opinions of their own science abstracts. Essentially it was pal-review by an activist group with a strong bias towards a particular outcome as demonstrated by the name “the consensus project”.
In short, it was a lie of omission enabled by a “pea and thimble” switch Steve McIntyre so often points out about climate science.
Most people who read the headlines touted by the unquestioning press had no idea that this was a collection of Skeptical Science raters opinions rather than the authors assessment of their own work. Readers of news stories had no idea they’d been lied to by John Cook et al².
So, while we’ll be fighting this lie for years, one very important bit of truth has emerged that will help put it into its proper place of propaganda, rather than science. A recent real survey conducted of American Meteorological Society members has blown Cook’s propaganda paper right out of the water.
The survey is titled:
Meteorologists’ views about global warming: A survey of American Meteorological Society professional members¹
Abstract
Meteorologists and other atmospheric science experts are playing important roles in helping society respond to climate change. However, members of this professional community are not unanimous in their views of climate change, and there has been tension among members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) who hold different views on the topic. In response, AMS created the Committee to Improve Climate Change Communication to explore and, to the extent possible, resolve these tensions. To support this committee, in January 2012 we surveyed all AMS members with known email addresses, achieving a 26.3% response rate (n=1,854). In this paper we tested four hypotheses: (1) perceived conflict about global warming will be negatively associated–and (2) climate expertise, (3) liberal political ideology, and (4) perceived scientific consensus will be positively associated–with (a) higher personal certainty that global warming is happening, (b) viewing the global warming observed over the past 150 years as mostly human-caused, and (c) perception of global warming as harmful. All four hypotheses were confirmed. Expertise, ideology, perceived consensus and perceived conflict were all independently related to respondents’ views on climate, with perceived consensus and political ideology being most strongly related. We suggest that AMS should: attempt to convey the widespread scientific agreement about climate change; acknowledge and explore the uncomfortable fact that political ideology influences the climate change views of meteorology professionals; refute the idea that those who do hold non-majority views just need to be “educated” about climate change; continue to deal with the conflict among members of the meteorology community.
From the abstract, it is clear the authors didn’t expect to find this result, as they were likely expecting something close to the fabled 97%. They give this away when they advise in the abstract steps that can be taken to “correct” the low number reported.
The introduction says:
Research conducted to date with meteorologists and other atmospheric scientists has shown that they are not unanimous in their views of climate change. In a survey of earth scientists, Doran and Zimmerman (2009) found that while a majority of meteorologists surveyed are convinced humans have contributed to global warming (64%), this was a substantially smaller majority than that found among all earth scientists (82%). Another survey, by Farnsworth and Lichter (2009), found that 83% of meteorologists surveyed were convinced human-induced climate change is occurring, again a smaller majority than among experts in related areas such as ocean sciences (91%) and geophysics (88%).
So clearly, none of the work to date matches Cook’s pal reviewed activist effort.
The most important question in the AMS survey was done in two parts:
“Is global warming happening? If so, what is its cause?”
Respondent options were:
- Yes: Mostly human
- Yes: Equally human and natural
- Yes: Mostly natural
- Yes: Insufficient evidence [to determine cause]
- Yes: Don’t know cause
- Don’t know if global warming is happening
- Global warming is not happening
Here’s the kicker:
Just 52 percent of survey respondents answered Yes: Mostly human.
The other 48 percent either questioned whether global warming is happening or would not ascribe human activity as the primary cause.
Here is table 1 from the paper which shows the entire population of respondents (click to enlarge):
Note the difference between those who cite some climate publications and those who don’t. People are often most convinced of their own work, while others looking in from the outside, not so much. As we know, the number of “climate scientists” versus others tends to be a smaller clique.
Dr.. Judith Curry writes:
Look at the views in column 1, then look at the % in the rightmost column: 52% state the the warming since 1850 is mostly anthropogenic. One common categorization would categorize the other 48% as ‘deniers’.
So, the inconvenient truth here is that about half of the world’s largest organization of meteorological and climate professionals don’t think humans are “mostly” the cause of Anthropogenic Global Warming the rest will probably get smeared as “deniers”
That’s a long way from Cook’s “97% consensus” lie.
References:
[1] Meteorologists’ views about global warming: A survey of American Meteorological Society professional members doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00091.1 http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00091.1
[2] Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article).
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[SNIP again – not interested in playing this game with you Bryan, take a 24 hour time-out – Anthony]
Why do the percentages sum to 99% in the last column? Erroneously rounding down?
So 4% of the people that study the subject are flat earthers? And if it turns out not to be the case, then the real flat earthers will be 52%.
Interesting.
Not sure how this from the paper sits with the claim in the headline:
“As we mentioned above, asking about a 150-year time frame rather than a 50-year time
frame may also have changed the strength of the relationships between global warming views
and other variables. For example, expertise may have been a stronger predictor of views on human causation if we had asked about a shorter timeframe. Because the evidence for human
causation is much stronger for the last 50 years (Core writing team et al., 2007), we would expect experts, who are presumably familiar with this evidence, to be substantially more likely to view
global warming in this period as human-caused than non-experts who were not familiar with the evidence. Conversely, the evidence is weaker for human causation over the past 150 years.”
Seems the two studies were asking different questions and the authors of this one acknowledge that.
Yes, mostly natural is so low. Why?
From what I’ve seen of his posts, Dumb Scientist’s tag seems to have been come by honestly.
But science isn’t about majority votes or consensus.
All this survey tells us is… the results of Cook’s bogus research was… well, bogus.
The results are interesting but the fact that the survey was allowed to happen at all is the big news. Times are changing. Something is getting hotter and it’s not the weather.
Lol – would this be the same Meteorologists who can’t get their own weather forecasts correct three days down the road?
REPLY: …and some climatologists who can’t get their models correct three years down the road?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT-5-yr-means1.png
– Anthony
It is interesting that people here are busy spinning things by coming up with hypotheses of why there might be a bias in favor of global warming in this survey. However, there are two important sources that are probably biasing the results the other way:
(1) The question was phrased, “Do you think that the global warming that has occurred over the past 150 years has been caused…”. The 150 year time frame means that the people who answered “mostly by human activity” were actually agreeing to a stronger statement than has been made by the IPCC which instead focusses on the warming that has occurred over the last 50 years. (The authors themselves even note this potential issue with the way the question was worded.)
(2) Of all the professional scientific societies that they could have surveyed, APS is probably the most “skeptical” because it contains a lot of forecast and broadcast meteorologists, who are generally known to be more skeptical of AGW on the whole than scientific researchers. I imagine that if you did this survey among members of the American Geophysical Union, you would get a higher percentage agreeing with the attribution statements, just as one gets a higher percentage once one filters it by area of expertise and by whether one is actively publishing in any field…and especially actively publishing in the field.
(3) The nature of the questions, based on the past rather than the future may also have affected the results. For example, if you look at the original STATS survey results (http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html), you see a stronger response to the question of the danger for the future than for the attribution in the past. For example, 85% of the respondents saw climate change as posing a great or moderate danger over the next 50 to 100 years (with about equal numbers saying great 41% or moderate 44%).
E Wiebe says:
November 20, 2013 at 12:44 pm
E.g., “In conclusion, given the potential for human society and the earth’s eco-systems to be harmed by climate change, it is imperative that members of the scientific community – and the professional societies that represent them – take all reasonable measures to ensure that what is known about the risks, and about options for managing those risks, are shared with decision
makers who should be considering that information.”
E Wiebe,
What is the potential for human society and earth’s eco-systems to be harmed by climate change? Conversely, what is the potential that they will benefit from climate change? “We don’t know!” is the only honest answer. How should we weigh these nebulous potentials for harm or benefit? “We don’t know!” is again the only honest answer. Given that, what ‘reasonable measures’ would/could/should we take to ‘manage those risks’…. or promote those potential benefits? We really don’t have a clue! It’s a ‘house of cards’, with no solid foundation and the flimsiest of construction, teetering one layer on top of the next.
Climate changes on this planet. It always has. It always will. What is the ‘optimal climate’? Optimal for whom? “We don’t know!” is yet again the only honest answer. What we do know is we are intelligent and adaptable. We know how to adapt to climate change. It’s already encoded in our very DNA, from hundreds of thousands of years of successful adaptation. Let’s go with our strong suit, adapting to our normally varying climates. Let’s not waste precious resources on creating climate models that produce predictive results little better than consulting fresh goat entrails, pretending to soothsay our future from them, and then casting destructively expensive CO2 spells in hopes of limiting a variable planetary climate system that defies our current and near future ability to know or model.
MtK
i bet those 97 percenters were all on fed grants to research “climate change”…
In case of Homeopathy I would attribute more weight to opinions of those not publishing in that particular field, but are educated in a neighboring discipline, in spite of the fact they have their own peer reviewed journals, schools, organizations &. conferences.
It all comes down to the question how far climate science has advanced along the road leading to a full-fledged pseudoscience. To that question one would never expect an honest answer from those inside.
Sure humans are the cause of global warming – by manipulating data, not maintaining the data collection mechanisms correctly and playing fast and loose with statistical methods.
Simples …
Jimbo says:
November 20, 2013 at 1:10 pm
Thanks for the followup, Jimbo! Those really HUGE buildings in the Prince of Wails compound must be the CO2 containment structures!
Most “scientists” agreed at one point that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Even if it is 97%, so what? It’s all part of the AGW debate tactics:
1. Call Names
2. Answer data without data
3. Invoke moral authority (97%) thing
4. Declare debate over
Know their game, call them on it, force them to data. They lose every time.
Lol – would this be the same Meteorologists who can’t get their own weather forecasts correct three days down the road?
REPLY: …and some climatologists who can’t get their models correct three years down the road?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT-5-yr-means1.png
– Anthony
================
LOL – perfect laugh on a day with my high for the day @ur momisugly -18C and a low for the night @ur momisugly -28C.
Alvin: “Yes, mostly natural is so low. Why?”
There’s a few possibilities. The first of which is that it has been a steady drumbeat of propaganda for over 2 decades now. Specifically, it’s been taught to children and so is the only metaphysical model they know. But also, people have a rather strange connection to reality. In that they consider that things are ‘fixed’ or, at least fixed in the same sense as completely regular — such as orbits. The idea that chaotic systems are… well, chaotic, is largely lost on them. Nevermind that weather is just a system and that they’re well familiar with it. They simply don’t draw any connections from the one to the other.
The results show that 73% (52% + 10% + 11%) feel that humans have at least some role to play in global warming … do they not?
Sorry … that should be 62%
I suspect that the majority of the AMS members that believe in AGW responded and that those with no strong belief did not. IOW this survey, like many others done online, is mostly self-selected and really not worth much.
Jon says:
November 20, 2013 at 2:55 pm
The results show that 73% (52% + 10% + 11%) feel that humans have at least some role to play in global warming … do they not?
————————
If you’re following the walk out at this year’s shindig at the UN Climate Change meeting the “humans” most to blame have walked out blaming the rich countries for refusing to pay the blackmail they demanded. China being the leader walking out – honest to God!
As this poll seems to have been very important to the policy outcomes of the AMS executive surely good governance and freedom from bias and therefore far fewer reasons to cast severe doubt on the pool outcomes would have been ensured by the AMS if they would have had a professional pollster either do this poll or at least analysis these claimed results rather than the apparent very amateur committee doing it with what appears to be an already built in global warming affirmative bias.
26.3% response merely tells us that the committed on both sides of the debate have responded. But it leaves 73% of those contacted as the loose end in this poll.
Human nature being what it is a fairly large proportion of that 76% of non respondents are just as likely to have taken a look at the poll and said to themselves “I just can’t be bothered” or increasingly like so many of us out here, “I’m sick to death of this whole bloody global warming scam and they can take a running jump for all I care”
Then there is that last group who probably looked at the poll and said to themselves “If I fill that poll out the way I feel about this whole damn climate warming scam and somebody finds that out, which in a pro CAGW outfit like the AMS is quite likely, then somebody from the more fanatical side of the AMS will likely try and make sure my job future and promotion prospects are probably gone for good ”
At a guess, no models involved here, the true figure if all meteorologists had responded without fear or favor is likely to be closer to two thirds of it’s members being on the more skeptical side of the global warming debate and maybe three quarters of them just refusing to believe in the Catastrophic Anthopogenic Global Warming meme, itself another differentiation in the climate argument which is now steadily creeping into this whole argument.
A man-made climate change is a next charlatanry in a line with decades-lasted a gender-change-story of a twin mutilated.
To date, a collection of related works by Michael Kerjman, an author of significant “The X-challenge: the realm of senses”, paved a path to understand this merely natural process.
Jon says:
November 20, 2013 at 2:55 pm
The results show that 73% (52% + 10% + 11%) feel that humans have at least some role to play in global warming … do they not?
====
Jon, that 11% is 11% of the 20% (labeled “insufficient evidence – unknown”) (~2%) which was an even smaller number of respondents to the follow up (second) email…
..the bigger question is who are the 74% that didn’t respond at all
Noting that most meteorologists either work for a business (ie Weather Channel) or the government (NOAA, NASA, etc) that have a global warming promotion agenda….