A new paper by Dr. Richard Tol published today in ScienceDirect, journal of Energy Policy, shows that the Cook et al. paper claiming that there is a 97% consensus among scientists is not just impossible to reproduce (since Cook is withholding data) but a veritable statistical train wreck rife with bias, classification errors, poor data quality, and inconsistency in the ratings process. The full paper is available below.
Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the literature: A re-analysis
Richard S.J. Tol dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2014.04.045
A claim has been that 97% of the scientific literature endorses anthropogenic climate change (Cook et al., 2013. Environ. Res. Lett. 8, 024024). This claim, frequently repeated in debates about climate policy, does not stand. A trend in composition is mistaken for a trend in endorsement. Reported results are inconsistent and biased. The sample is not representative and contains many irrelevant papers. Overall, data quality is low. Cook׳s validation test shows that the data are invalid. Data disclosure is incomplete so that key results cannot be reproduced or tested.
Conclusion and policy implications
The conclusions of Cook et al. are thus unfounded. There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct. Cook et al., however, failed to demonstrate this. Instead, they gave further cause to those who believe that climate researchers are secretive (as data were held back) and incompetent (as the analysis is flawed).
It will take decades or longer to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero—the only way to stabilize its atmospheric concentration. During that time, electoral fortunes will turn. Climate policy will not succeed unless it has broad societal support, at levels comparable to other public policies such as universal education or old-age support. Well-publicized but faulty analyses like the one by Cook et al. only help to further polarize the climate debate.
Full paper available in plain text here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421514002821
And a PDF here:
Yawn Rustybutt. You have no fans here.
It now looks like all my comments are being pre-moderated. They have been success in censoring and outright deleting a number of my comments. They really cannot tolerate any form of dissent.
The paper is definitely pay walled:
“Choose an option to locate/access this article: Purchase $19.95”
The most recent freely available draft that I found is here:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bz17rNCpfuDNRllTUWlzb0ZJSm8/
They finally let my comments through. But Dana has not responded to my request for accuracy. His guard dogs have snapped at me instead. What a pathetic site.
“It will take decades or longer to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero—the only way to stabilize its atmospheric concentration.”
Huh? Carbon dioxide emissions will NEVER be zero. Ever.
And the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is only “stable” for periods of time. History shows that it has fluctuated wildly and quickly as well as a little and over time.
Tol’s paper makes my head hurt the same way Cook’s does.
Look how scared they are of Tol’s paper:
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2014/06/ethon-flew-through-night-bearing-great.html
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2014/06/in-spirit-of-deep-climate-anonymous-as.html
http://www.realsceptic.com/2014/06/05/richard-tols-97-percent-scientific-consensus-gremlins/
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/06/04/the-consensus-on-climate-change/
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/06/busted-how-ridiculous-richard-tol-makes.html
http://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2014/06/05/bravo-richard-tol-bravo/
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-contrarians-accidentally-confirm-97-percent-consensus.html
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/jun/05/contrarians-accidentally-confirm-global-warming-consensus
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/27di3k/richard_tol_accidentally_confirms_the_97_global/
Brandon Shollenberger says:
” Richard Tol basically just hand-waved away entire categories (mitigation and impacts) because they don’t provide evidence showing the cause of global warming. That’s questionable, at best, as a consensus isn’t about papers showing evidence. It’s about papers showing agreement.”
You do realize climate change and AGW are two different things. One should really not confuse climate change with man made climate change 😛
If the paper does not show man is causing global warming (or climate change) (or hell at least says man is the cause) but does show impacts of climate change how can you be sure the paper is endorsing MAN made climate change?
Your erroneously suggesting that all papers on climate change irregardless of cause should be counted as FOR man made climate change. Thats just wrong.
Climate change can be entirely due to natural processes so without explicitly stating it is due to humans in the paper you cant count it as stating its due to humans.
Also if your going to talk questionable go back and scrutinize the cook paper.
A paper like this would be included in the “for” section as it agrees that c02 is causing warming, and it doesnt reject the warming. You know, this paper only pegs the warming to 2100 to be 0.1C but of course, thats warming and anthropogenic so it counts…. amirite?
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217979214500957
Quote from the abstract
“The anthropogenic fraction is then used to evaluate the additional warming by analysis of its spectral contribution to the outgoing long-wavelength radiation (OLR) measured by infrared spectrometers embarked in satellites looking down. The anthropogenic CO2 additional warming extrapolated in 2100 is found lower than 0.1°C in the absence of feedbacks.
Aphan, don’t expect a response to tough questions. Multiple of mine were deleted.
Tol’s paper is fantastic, as all they can do is cherry pick red herrings from his complete destruction of Cook’s worthless paper. I am actually going to hold a celebration party with some champagne in honor of Dr. Tol’s paper being published that the zealots said would never be. Cook et al. is now completely refuted in the peer-reviewed literature and I will make sure everyone knows about it.
“hoped to add it to the huge pile of bricks that already undermine the Cook et Pal study”
Undermined by bricks? An interesting metaphor that implies they only reinforce and hold up the Cook paper.
Cream,
Clearly I view a pile of bricks differently than you do. Where I come from, a pile of them is always the result of something thats been torn down, demolished. (New bricks come on pallets and are carefully stacked to prevent breakage) Cook et al is so filled with flaws that we’ve been pulling “bricks” out of it’s foundation since day one.
We also call really bad basketball shots that die at the rim “bricks”. That metaphor works for Cook et al too. 🙂
You know Rusty, that cartoon could also mean that a single sceptic argument carries more weight than that of ‘thousands’ [sic] of AGW scientists.
😉
Exactly how many papers did you ‘rate’ in Cook’s paper Rusty?
http://hiizuru.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/tcp_raters2.gif
Rustneversleeps is George Morrison of the SKS team. He has made that known through a WordPress blog and through a google+ account.
He was a TCP rater and a commenter on the rebuttal to Tol.
“My advice: if you so strongly believe Cook’s paper is without fault, petition him to release all the data, and let’s replicate it. Otherwise your opinion is just noise in the face of Cook preventing science from doing replication.
Let us know when you’ve got that taken care of. – Anthony”
Yawn. Can’t be bothered to see if anyone else has picked this up so I will anyway. There is nothing to stop you, Anthony, me, Margaret or anyone else replicating it. You don’t need Cook’s data. You do your own sample from the same databases of papers he used. It’s that simple. Surprised no one has done it. On second thoughts, since the result is pretty likely to be more or less the same, I think I know why no one else has done it.
And for RustNeverSleeps, Richard Tol is showing us that it’s better to burn out than to fade away.
Steven Burnett says:
June 4, 2014 at 5:46 pm
You covered just about everything in your summary, but left out the Bjorn Lomborg view:
15 Even if the conclusions were correct, and human emissions WERE a significant contributer to AGW, the costs of cutting back on CO2 far outweigh the benefits- it’s cheaper to adapt to a slightly warming climate.
[More wasted effort by a banned commenter. Deleted. -mod]
stone, you shouldn’t make things up to criticize people:
I have never suggested anything of the sort. You’d know this if instead of saying:
You tried seeing what I’ve said about this paper. I’m one of the most vocal critics of this paper. I was even the first person to discover the tricks Cook et al played with definitions for their paper. When the paper was newer, I accused them of laundering lies in order to exaggerate their results. More recently, I said this regarding their response to Richard Tol:
I’m fine with criticism, but it’s ridiculous when one of the most vocal critics of a paper can be painted as a supporter of the paper simply because he points out issues with some of the criticisms of that paper.
Here’s a hint. People on the same “side” can disagree on individual points.
Aphan
Well, whatever bricks you have, Tol has certainly not been finding flaws in Cooke!
rustynuts says: Be bold and take a stand! Like, say, like Dr. Tol did in his conclusions!:
“There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans.”
=====
OK Rustly , I’ll be bold. I’m in no doubt that the published literature is full of S***, politically biased, filtered by gatekeepers and has little to do with objective science.
Notwithstanding that , Cook’s figure of 97%, like those that went before him is a crock of s*** that is not even representative of biased state of the published literature.
“It will take decades or longer to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero—the only way to stabilize its atmospheric concentration. ”
Don’t forget that Richard Tols is/was an IPCC insider, who’d finally had enough of the exaggerated claims and had the courage, like Curry did years ago, to say enough is enough!
He will probably get vilified, painted as a D-nier, heretic and turn-coat but he is essentially a warmist, trying to distance himself from being a wolf-crying alarmist.
Brandon, since Google has spidered most of thread.php links that are belatedly password protected, isn’t it possible to find something in google cache, or waybackmachine that has already archived, that is what they belatedly don’t want anyone to see?
Dr. Tol apparently says:
“It will take decades or longer to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero—the only way to stabilize its atmospheric concentration. During that time, electoral fortunes will turn. Climate policy will not succeed unless it has broad societal support, at levels comparable to other public policies such as universal education or old-age support.”
But: Water vapor is responsible for 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect, an effect which is vital to keep the world warm (15C instead of -18C). The other greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide, and various others including CFCs, contribute only five per cent of the effect, carbon dioxide being by far the greatest contributor at 3.6 per cent.
Carbon dioxide as a result of man’s activities is only 3.2 per cent of that, hence only 0.12 per cent of the greenhouse gases in total. By far the greatest source of manmade CO2 is cement manufacture, and by far the greatest contributor is China.
Therefore, there is no point whatsoever in the USA devoting a dollar of expenditure or an atom of energy in reducing its CO2 emissions to zero. In fact, there is no reason for anyone in the world to do so.
Tol’s conclusion: “There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct.”
Right, well Im glad we’ve got that sorted out. Let’s get on with fixing it then.
Cue denialist heads exploding…
I can’t ‘rate’ Tol’s paper because I only have the Abstract and Conclusions. It was stupid for the research of Cook et al (2013) to be based just on rating papers by their abstracts. I won’t emulate Cook’s stupidity by rating Tol’s paper now. I’ll rate it only if I have access to the full paper.
John
Here is a full PDF of Richard Tol’s paper – http://ge.tt/2S33cCj1/v/0
You have to admire the Siberian Hussey and her pal Rusty Bed-springs for being bold enough to comment here. I wonder if they have also visited SS and advised John Cook to release his data, code and the method by which he achieved his 97% Consensus figure?