We’ve seen the “If 99 doctors said…” argument, or facsimiles, used often by global warming enthusiasts in recent months. George Clooney used it when interviewed at the Britannia Awards. (See the Open Letter to Lewis Black and George Clooney.) James Cameron used it in the trailer for the upcoming ShowTime series “Years of Living Dangerously”. (Refer to the open letter to Mr. Cameron and the other executive producers of that show.) And on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart included a clip of Dan Weiss of the Center for American Progress using it (See the Open Letter to Jon Stewart.)
I responded to those arguments and discussed many other topics in the posts linked above, with links to more-detailed explanations and examples…and, of course, with links to my ebooks.
The following is something I wrote for my upcoming book with the working title The Oceans Ate My Global Warming (or another possible title CO2 is Not a Control Knob). I thought you might use for it when you see the “If 99 doctors said…” argument again.
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Imagine you’re running a persistent slight fever. You visit a new clinic. The nurse takes your vitals and enters them into a computer program. A short time after the computer model completes its simulations, the doctor arrives, advises you of the computer-diagnosed ailment, and prescribes controversial high-cost medications and treatment.
You’re not comfortable with the service, diagnosis, prescription or treatment, so you check out online the computer model used by the clinic. It is proclaimed to be wonderful by its programmers. But, the more you research, the more you discover the model’s defects. It can’t simulate circulation, respiration, digestion, and other basic bodily functions. There are numerous research papers exposing the flaws in the model, but they are hard to find because of all of the other papers written by the model programmers extolling its virtues.
Of course, you would not accept the computer-based medical diagnosis from a model that cannot simulate basic bodily functions and processes. But that’s the position we’re faced with climate science.
We need a second opinion for the slight warming the Earth had experienced. Unfortunately, it is not likely to be coming anytime soon, not until there are changes to the political agendas that drive climate science funding.
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Enjoy your Super Bowl Sunday…for those celebrating. For everyone else, enjoy your day.
Gareth Phillips says:
If the temp has not gone down it has still warmed so the trend is still up and I believe, a tad subjectively I’ll agree, that we are starting to see the results of that climate shift in the appalling weather affecting the UK at present.
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But Garth, didn’t you notice, the trend where you live (UK) is DOWN. Quite sharply!
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
The last few years have been completely “average” and the “mean” of the past 10 years is a piddly .3C (a THIRD OF A DEGREE) above the average they use. So that .3C is what is causing your appalling weather??
When you said above ” I believe that our climate is warming faster than would be expected,”, I hope you were not referring to UK temperature. Because your temperatures have been on a sliding board the past ten years.
Gareth Phillips says on February 2, 2014 at 1:43 pm
“By the way, I also question how valid the idea of a ‘pause’ in the rate of warming is. If the temp has not gone down it has still warmed so the trend is still up and I believe, a tad subjectively I’ll agree, that we are starting to see the results of that climate shift in the appalling weather affecting the UK at present.”
Gareth, why do you question the pause? It is real and it is recorded by those “consensus” people of who would rather deny it if they could. And it has been going on for 16 years. In all these years, haven’t you had any thoughts about what it means? Do you know that according to those consensus people of yours global warming is caused by the greenhouse effect from carbon dioxide that we are constantly adding to the atmosphere? There is more carbon dioxide in the air now than ever before but it is doing no such thing as warming the atmosphere. As a scientist I can tell you that its failure to do any warming for 16 years is proof that the theory of greenhouse warming is just plain wrong. The theory your consensus uses goes back to Svante Arrhenius in the nineteenth century. It applies only to pure carbon dioxide, not to a mixture of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The correct theory for a mixture of gases in the real atmosphere was published by the Hungarian scientist Ferenc Miskolczi. It predicts that because our atmosphere has a mix of two greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and water vapor, it can not cause greenhouse warming. Exactly as it is happening today. You could, of course, ask why it began only 16 years ago. The answer to it is that it did not begin 16 years ago. The reason you haven’t heard of it before is that we have incompetent and dishonest people watching global temperature. As an example, there was another pause of 18 years in the eighties and nineties that was covered up by fake warming in the IPCC temperature records. I wrote a climate book “What Warming?” in 2010 that you could benefit from by reading it. In it I pointed out the fake warming in the eighties and nineties and even put a warming about this into the preface. Nothing happened for two years but then three temperature sources involved decided suddenly to not show it any more. They secretly and retroactively changed their data for the eighties and nineties and said nothing about it. As to the bad weather in UK, your friends the consensusists constantly tell us that weather is not climate. It has no connection with the existence of the pause. Bad weather happens everywhere and there is no way to change it, not even by an edict of the UK Parliament Energy and Climate Change Committee.
A doctor has a degree qualification which can be verified Do these 99% climate scientist have degree qualifications in relevant subjects which can be verified?
II we can track down this group
will we be able to verify their qualifications or Is the ” 99% group” merely a shorthand way of saying “Quite a lot of people I’ve read about who probably think this way ,if I remember rightly?”
Maybe actors or journalists are not given to clarity of language. ( It’s difficult to write clearly but it ” should be attempted by all candidates ” )
Gareth Phillips says: “the majority are usually right”.
I like your idea of a scientific progress by popular vote.
I’m sorry, what doctor makes a diagnosis solely on the basis of a computer model? What a stupid analogy.
If you have anything less than a PhD in climate science or a closely related field your deluded opinion on AGW is less than worthless.
There is a consensus, but from an unlikely source with an unexpected conclusion. Even the IPCC doesn’t believe its models anymore (the scientists, that is, not the politicians who write the “Summary for Policymakers”). The following is an excerpt from IPCC5, recently released.
ERRORS IN THE MODELS
The discrepancy between simulated and observed GMST(global mean surface temperature)trends during 1998–2012 could be explained in part by a tendency for some CMIP5 models to simulate stronger warming in response to increases in greenhouse-gas concentration than is consistent with observations… This finding provides evidence that some CMIP5 models show a larger response to greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic factors …than the real world. As a consequence, it is argued in Chapter 11 that near-term model projections of GMST increase should be scaled down by about 10% (Section 11.3.6.3). This downward scaling is, however, not sufficient to explain the model-mean overestimate of GMST trend over the hiatus period.
Let me translate – “the models don’t work and we don’t know why”
Does this sound like there is consensus that CO2 is warming the climate?
Link to the final draft full report
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5_WGI-12Doc2b_FinalDraft_Chapter02.pdf
What exactly constitutes a “degree” in climate science?
The worst doctors are the ones who think they can make the diagnosis by an exercise of the will, and this is what climate science has come to.
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This is for the benefit of the likes of George “Looney” – I refer to the case of Barry Marshall and Robin Warren.
Contrary to the consensus of the entire medical profession, and the pharmaceutical industry, these two Australians, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, demonstrated the true cause of peptic ulcers. And they were right. Just click the following link:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2005/press.html
So, to the George “Looney” brigade and all the James Camerons out there, who believe in consensus science, there is no such thing as consensus science. The ’99 doctors thing’ is irrelevant to science.
Galileo once said, “The authority of one thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of an individual.” How right he was.
Einstein left us with some words of wisdom, “We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.”
Where does that leave George “Looney”?
99 doctors say that ulcers are caused by a poor lifestyle, stress, alcohol and that you need to get less stressed, drink less alcohol, get fit, take all of these medicines and you MAY get better. – The journals say so, the research says so, my peers say so – its right ok!
That’s what the consensus was not that long ago.
One doctor questioned, nay CHALLENGED the consensus. Who’s believed now?
“If 99 Doctors said ……”
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Politely ask for the list of 99 Doctors.
If you see the names ;
–
M.Mann
…….
P.Gleick
…….
S.Lewandowsky
……….
Go to another hospital immediately!!!
Hi Tom,
I’m in the Uk, being treated on the National Health Service for an incurable illness. I am in my eightieth year.
My consultant didn’t wait to be asked – “look at the actuarial tables for life expectancy for a man your age and with a bit of luck and our efforts, you’ll match those figures”.
Happy with that, I went down to the pub for a pint……
Siberian_Husky said “If you have anything less than a PhD in climate science or a closely related field your deluded opinion on AGW is less than worthless”.
So Einstein’s opinions (as a humble patent office clerk) must have been “less than worthless” then – and what if you have no formal qualifications but observe (from actual data) that AGW has not occurred for at least 12 years, despite CO2 increasing? Doesn’t “climate science” (or your “closely related field[s]”) apply normal scientific method of stating falsifiable hypotheses – or do you suggest that my (non-qualified) observation here is also “deluded”?
Perhaps I should assume (hope?) that you missed a closing “\sarc” tag from your post…
If 99 doctors said I had a life-threatening fever, but I felt well and healthy,
then I would recommend the 99 doctors turn their thermometers sideways and go treat somebody who was actually ill.
TimC- you’d make the same school boy error like if you said the earth was cooling during 1940 to 1960 or whatever restriction of domain you want to make. The level of ignorance on this blog beggars belief.
Einstein was an outlier. You and your denialist buddies sadly are not…
Siberian_husky says “The level of ignorance on this blog beggars belief”.
Ah: I see where you come from – it’s just prejudice and name-calling.
Please state a falsifiable hypothesis as to global averaged surface temperatures in future years, to follow scientific method. Absent that your (sweeping) comments are worthless.
My own “restriction of domain” (as you call it) is principally the satellite records (the surface thermometers have been “homogenised” just too much), such as at:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
As you will see, there has been no (averaged) lower atmosphere warming since 1997.
And now I will leave this thread to your intemperate ravings.
Fabi says:
February 2, 2014 at 3:20 pm
Gareth: As a surgeon, I’d suggest you get a second, independent, opinion.
Thank you Fabi. As a surgeon I would hope you would be more specific, can you clarify on which part of the debate a second opinion would be helpful? Healthcare? Trials? Climatology? You need to be more specific in your points if you want me to respond, if the post was just satire, it’s very good!
Otherwise, many thanks to everyone who responded, we may have opposing viewpoints but I really appreciate the civility in which they have been expressed.
For way more than a hundred years it was the medical consenus to lay newborn children on their belly. By the end of the 1980’s this was reversed to lay babies on their back and the “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome” declined by a factor of 10 till 2005. Imagine all the babies killed by this medical consensus!! Fred in Switzerland
Just like with your patient with a high fever so did the industrialization. I vaguely recall terrible air pollution in the US (1970s) until the clean air acts made the air today much cleaner. Over the last 17 years China has also experienced rapid industrialization just like many other countries around the world too. Anyway, we will have to agree to disagree as the essay you showed me is not peer reviewed and there really wasn’t anything in it to explain my question. Cheers.
I always figured it was more like this:
CAGW is like 99 doctors all telling you that you can live a longer better life if you cut off your right hand and your left leg when you have no injury to either. To those of us who have the ability to think, this is unacceptable without a direct threat to our lives in the near-term future, and it goes against common sense to simply cut off the leg and arm of every person just because scientists said it is a good thing. Now, they do have this computer model that “supports” this assertion with people without those limbs living a marginally longer life, but why would you cut off half your mobility just because a computer model and 99 % of scientists said it was a good thing? They never ran the cost/benefit analysis, or proved the case that its actually a good thing, so do you still blindly trust those doctors with their saws to do the deed?
Its a huge crock of BS in the end because its a logical fallacy to believe in experts simply because of who they are. You are claiming that experts are unfallible and never make mistakes, and ergo that assumption completely misses every time in our past when the experts were wrong and the “alternate hypothesis” was correct.
And to add to that, the treatment that is proposed is stated as being the only alternative without several alternatives being trotted out, and the treatment involves putting more power into a central Government to solve the crisis. We are given no alternatives, only the tripe that if you don’t cut off the legs and arms of your industrial countries that otherwise you will all burn in hell. (and that is the symbolism these charletons generate as well.)
Climate Science is in it’s early stages, rather like medicine a while back – if 99 doctors had said leeches were good for a condition or mercury for another, most people would have taken them at their word – even if it was wrong advice which did no good or else killed them.
3 doctors said to me, you don’t have coronary artery disease only high bloodpressure. Fourt said you have symptoms that indicate coronary artery disease and wanted to make examination to prove that he is right. . . . . I wrote this 21 days after 5 veins bypass surgery. Still i dont believe GAGW. Climate chances and we have tiny fraction in warming, but it is mostly natural.
Siberian_Husky says at February 2, 2014 at 6:40 pm
Hmm, I don’t know what degree Siberian_Husky has but it clearly isn’t in a science.
In science, observations trump opinion.
Computer models are used to test hypotheses (opinions about how the world works) against observations of how the world works. But until the models are tested they are still merely opinions written in mathematical language.
And when the models are tested and they don’t match the observations then the opinions contained therein must be discarded.
But the problem with Climate “Science” is that the opinions are alwed to over-rule reality.
A Phd in climatology trumps a Phd in “climate science” (aka modelling). Dispute anything in here,..
http://drtimball.com/2013/many-climate-reconstructions-incorrectly-attributed-to-temperature-change/
Or this;
http://drtimball.com/2012/static-climate-models-in-a-virtually-unknown-dynamic-atmosphere/