Quote of the week – cue popcorn

Crispin in Waterloo says:
January 15, 2014 at 10:41 am
“London, the Guardian’s home city, seems to be the only place in the world where everyone drives on the Left. ”
Ummm, Crispin, it used to be called “The Manchester Guardian”, and I am reliably informed that most of Japan drives on the correct side of the road.

elmer says:
January 15, 2014 at 9:20 am
This is also quite popcorn worthy:
Why Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility: Only 1 of 9,136 Recent Peer-Reviewed Authors Rejects Global Warming
http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/01/08/why-climate-deniers-have-no-scientific-credibility-only-1-9136-study-authors-rejects-global-warming

That article is just a follow-up addendum by James Powell to his earlier article, which I critiqued then as follows:
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Here are my comments on a survey by James Powell, posted online in various sites last year (2011?), of 13,950 papers dealing with climate change. It analyzed their abstracts and “found” that only 24 rejected manmade global warming. I posted the following critical comments on the site below (not the main place it was posted). I suspect it was this survey that inspired what Cook is up to now (5/2013):
http://oilprice.com/The-Environment/Global-Warming/Contrary-to-Popular-Belief-Scientists-are-United-on-Climate-Change.html
The article states:

“To be classified as rejecting, an article had to clearly and explicitly state that the theory of global warming is false or, as happened in a few cases, that some other process better explains the observed warming. Articles that merely claimed to have found some discrepancy, some minor flaw, some reason for doubt, I did not classify as rejecting global warming.”

How many papers that “explicitly state that the theory of global warming is false” would get by peer review with that phrase intact? How many would even be submitted to peer review if they included that phrase? They therefore tend to be more circumspect and merely cite a discrepancy, some flaw (minor perhaps only in the author of this article’s opinion), etc.
Here’s a link to 1100+ peer-reviewed papers supporting skeptical arguments critical of ACC/AGW alarmism:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
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The article states:
“Global warming deniers often claim that bias prevents them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. But 24 articles in 18 different journals, collectively making several different arguments against global warming, expose that claim as false. Articles rejecting global warming can be published, . . . .”

Strawman. The claim is not that skeptics are 100% “prevented” from being published, but that that it is difficult (and hence rare) to get them published, or to get them published without being watered down, as I hinted above.
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The article states:
“If there is disagreement among scientists, based not on opinion but on hard evidence, it will be found in the peer-reviewed literature.”
AND:
“A few deniers have become well known from newspaper interviews, Congressional hearings, conferences of climate change critics, books, lectures, websites and the like. Their names are conspicuously rare among the authors of the rejecting articles. Like those authors, the prominent deniers must have no evidence that falsifies global warming.”

IOW, an article will be classified as skeptical only if it presents hard evidence. BUT an article will be counted accepting/endorsing even if it presents no hard evidence, but merely implicit opinion:

“Articles about methods, paleoclimatology, mitigation, adaptation, and effects at least implicitly accept human-caused global warming and were usually obvious from the title alone.”

Denial must be explicit, but acceptance may be implicit. This double standard biases the results of this article. By how much is unknown. For that, the author should have indicated how many fall into the “implicitly accepting” category.
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The article states:
“If there is disagreement among scientists, based not on opinion but on hard evidence, it will be found in the peer-reviewed literature.”

But the weakness of the warmist case isn’t in the “hard evidence” so much as in the inferences drawn from that evidence, the selectivity applied in deciding which evidence is the most relevant, the inferences drawn from those relevant bits of evidence, the assumptions made, etc. It is at those matters where the main thrust of skepticism has been directed.
But journals want to publish “findings.” This biases them against publishing wide-ranging, argumentative critiques. (To be fair, they rarely publish similar argumentative essays from the warmist side either.) They have a just-the-facts attitude. But the facts don’t speak for themselves. Argumentation has therefore moved to other venues.
What’s needed is an online venue where viewpoints can be argued among credentialed scientists, with the peanut gallery roped off into a separate section where their comments won’t disrupt the discussion, but can be drawn upon by the participants if desired. (Seen but not heard, IOW.) This is what has finally gotten underway with the establishment this month of the Climate Dialogue site, at http://www.climatedialogue.org/
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The article concludes:
“Scientists do not disagree about human-caused global warming. It is the ruling paradigm of climate science, in the same way that plate tectonics is the ruling paradigm of geology. We know that continents move. We know that the earth is warming and that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause. These are known facts about which virtually all publishing scientists agree.”

So what? (Irrelevant thesis.) Skeptics don’t deny that. What they deny is that this warming will continue at its current pace; that it would be very harmful if it did so—or even harmful on balance at all; and that there are amplifying factors that will accelerate the current trend. The alarmists’ case rests on the assumptions of strong positive feedbacks and the absence or weakness of negative feedbacks. That’s where their case is weakest.

The article states:
“By my definition, 24 of the 13,950 articles, 0.17 percent or 1 in 581, clearly reject global warming or endorse a cause other than CO2 emissions for observed warming. The list of articles that reject global warming is here.”
[i.e., at http://jamespowell.org/styled/index.html ]

Hmm . . . There’s nothing in that list by the following skeptical scientists, at least half of whom have presumably published papers properly classified as skeptical:
Syun-Ichi Akasofu, Claude Allègre, John Christy, David Douglass, Don Easterbrook, William M. Gray, Richard Lindzen, Nils-Axel Mörner, Fred Singer, and Roy Spencer.
I took their names from Wikipedia’s “List of [35] scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming
Here are four other names, half of whom I presume wrote articles that were missed: Zbigniew Jaworowski, Augusto Mangini, Nathan Paldor, and Richard Tol.

Dana Nuccitelli are the type of people that have made the Guardian an absolutely trash paper and can only see sales getting worse. At least people are not forced to buy it like the BBC TV licence.