Consensus is irrelevant in science. There are plenty of examples in history where everyone agreed and everyone was wrong.
While I admit to being quite surprised they’d allow him equal time, I doubt he’ll win any converts as much of the readership thinks 97% consensus is a fact, and they don’t really want to hear anything different. Tol writes:
Most of the papers they studied are not about climate change and its causes, but many were taken as evidence nonetheless.
…
Dana Nuccitelli writes that I “accidentally confirm the results of last year’s 97% global warming consensus study”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I show that the 97% consensus claim does not stand up.
At best, Nuccitelli, John Cook and colleagues may have accidentally stumbled on the right number.
Read Tol’s essay here: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2014/jun/06/97-consensus-global-warming
arthur4563 says:
Tol neglected to point out how old a lot (most?) of these papers were. Like who cares what
someone believed 20 years ago? Not even the IPCC still believes what it used to.
Don’t jump to unwarranted conclusions. If you actually read papers of that age they were often still attempting to do real science at that time.
Tol neglected to point out the lack of credibility of a survey designed and conducted by a keenly interested (and biased) individual, as well as Cook’s bizarre and dopey design : if you want to know the opinions of scientists about global warming, YOU ASK THEM, STUPID. You don’t rummage thru a bunch of old published papers and try to divine the authors’ opinions about things often not even mentioned in those papers.
The needless and pointless subjectivity of this study suggests the authors wanted to manipulate the results to support their own beliefs. This isn’t science. This is PR.
Or something.
The Guardian has a nice $1Billion+ nest egg in its trust from the recent sale of the Autotrader enterprise.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2014/01/guardian-sells-trader-media
So it can continue to fulminate about carbon dioxide for a long time yet, while still using profits from the internal combustion engine to cover the losses of trustafarian journalism.
In this area I won’t expect to see much sign of the trumpeted ‘era of editorial innovation’.
Leo Geiger says: June 7, 2014 at 3:43 am
Everyone agreeing because the real-word obervations are overwhelming, has nothing to do with a consensus. In the former case, no consensus is required. A consensus is a social construct, with orthodoxy policing, which has the same social mechanisms as orthodoxy policing in religion. They typically arise within science as a response to high uncertainty plus strong policy implications. They do not (at core) represent a hoax or a delusion, and are the result of relatively well known cultural evolutionary mechanisms. Yet the social construct of a consensus has no relationship whatever to the workings of the real-world, either the climate system or anything else, so really should have no place in science, and should be resisted.
Ooh. I love Bertrand Russell quotes:
>>Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
>>The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
>>The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
At this point, what difference does it make?
I am calling for a Monty Python skit to look at the various ways to design studies to address RBT’s – see “Our new consensus study” http://ecologicallyoriented.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/our-new-consensus-study/
Richard Tol was right to dig into the matter. What he found out is important for those who might believe the scientific method is democratic; but it is not.
Yes, ever since Galileo and even before his times, experimental proof (with data and methods) is of the essence
“Well UK did in the 1950s by not burning Anthracite (black coal) in Greater London, to stop SMOGS.”
Anthracite is actually almost pure carbon, very similar to Welsh steam coal, and not responsible for smogs, mostly used for steam raising, especially in nautical and railway applications, rarely seen in domestic use due to being in short supply and expensive.
The types of coal mostly responsible for smogs are the bitumenous variety, sea coal and lignite.
The first attempt to clean up the atmosphere in London was in 1272 when King Edward I banned the burning of sea coal on pain of death. One miscreant was in fact executed, after which the law was ignored altogether until the Clean Air Act of 1956 came into force.
I respected Richard Tol’s finding of the IPCC’s blatant exaggeration it purposely uses toward achieving a goal of causing alarm.
Now I am gaining more respect for Tol as I incrementally learn more about his recent paper that seems to indicate virtually no scientific method was implemented by Dana Nuccitelli, John Cook and associates in their 2013 ‘Consensus’ paper.
Nuccitelli’s PR in The Guardian insults the community of the scientific method.
John
Seriously… Do we skeptics have our own study to counter and say, “No this study that was much more professionally done says the consensus is 55%.” I get this 97% crap has big enough holes to fly a 747 through it but do we have ANYTHING to respond with other than to say “well that study was terrible.” People need a number they don’t want to just hear the other guy did it bad. Someone give us a number. Stop researching how the other guy did it and let’s make our own and one that is done objectively and cannot be dismissed. As a fellow skeptic, give me a real number or drop it.
bushbunny says:
Catweazle is correct. House coal is bituminous coal. Anthracite does not burn on an open grate but requires additional draught. Trianco Anthracite burning boilers are still available. http://www.trianco.co.uk/products/trg-solid-fuel
Some American locomotives were built specially to burn Anthracite, but in the UK, Welsh steam coal was favoured by the GWR for their steam locomotives. The LMS, LNER & the SR built locomotives with wide fireboxes that would consume Bituminous coals mined in the areas they served.
http://himedo.net/TheHopkinThomasProject/TimeLine/BeaverMeadows/HopThomasMasterMechanic/Warner_DevAnthraciteLocomotive.htm
Seacoal was coal from Northumberland, shipped down the East Coast to London.
http://www.englandsnortheast.co.uk/CoalMiningandRailways.html
Old Seacoal Lane joins Farringon Street & Limeburners Lane. The River Fleet, now the Fleet Sewer, runs underneath Farringdon Street to the River Thames. Prior to being built over, it was the Fleet Canal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Fleet
Why do I know this? I worked for the British coal industry from 1962 to 1965, I am a heritage steam railway supporter & I managed a Whitbread’s pub called the New King Lud in 1967/8, very near Old Seacoal Lane . It’s very changed around there now. Everything I would recognise has been demolished.
The fact that the Guardian has allowed this riposte to the 97% paper is unexpected and interesting. The Guardian has tied itself firmly to the 97% meme. Dana’s regular column is called “Climate Consensus – The 97%”. It is officially the accepted heading of every one of his Guardian articles.
So why has the Guardian decided to accept that their headings are ridiculous?
Perhaps it is a result of the local and Euro elections here in the UK last week. Those fascinating results included the failure of the Green Party to pick up votes from the Lib Dems. Instead the Lib Dem vote disappeared. At the last General Election the Guardian endorsed backing the Lib Dems… this has alienated many of their core readership who do not like pledge-breakers and Tories.
So this time Guardian has been urging the Greens as the left wing alternative. But as that has failed the Guardian needs to backtrack on its eco-suicide agenda. It needs to go back to Labour and the industrial working class interests over the bored Brighton schoolteachers.
Or it needs to push Labour away from the manufacturing classes. The Guardian has been urging this.
Once again, Tol’s debating arsenal is as unsupportable as his opponent’s. Tol is basically saying that if you do it right, the thing the opponent is saying will look more like it’s supposed to look to the rest of us, not getting at all that he is putting lipstick on his opponent’s pig.
Consensus can sometimes stifle research and curiosity. My hat goes off to those stubborn scientists who went against consensus. Nothing should be immune from constant testing, checking and observations, nothing.
We used to think the world was flat. Then we found out it was spherical. Then we found out it was an oblate spheroid
We had a consensus.
IMPOSSIBLE?
UNHEALTHY FOODS?
The last study was actually funded by the British Heart Foundation, MRC and others.
Science should never be settled.
The upside down, anti-paleo diet Food Pyramid is indeed a perfect example of everyday madness of scientific crowds that required no grand conspiracy, just a single activist professor named Keys who like Hansen went straight to policy makers with a single bullet theory. The extreme arrogance of most of the medical profession against cholesterol hypothesis skeptics even continues to this day. It’s great news for skepticism in general that the current urban professional crowd who have yet to figure out climate fraud have already started to recognize the dietary science fraud coming from government and older doctors. Why point to Agenda 21 conspiracies that come off as paranoid rants when everyday corruption of science already has such clear precedent?
Some idiot commenter at the Guardian said:
Below is one of the reasons they kept banning me from the Guardian – contrarianism.
Economics! Not to mention Lord Stern’s co2 investments.
There’s still the a priori (or is it historical?) argument that in a real science if one cannot do careful experiments and/or if one is dealing with a very complex system, then it is highly unlikely that nearly everyone will agree on basic causes. The basic problem is control – if you don’t have really good controls in your empirical work, then results from different investigations will be all over the map – and you will have little agreement, even on what’s what. (One example, hybridization experiments before Mendel where pure lines were not used – the results were a mess. Another example: animal nutrition and feeding experiments before well-controlled diets were available.)
Given that in climate science, they are dealing with the entire atmosphere-hydrosphere-etc-etc, even talking about good controls is a joke. Hence, a 97% consensus must be viewed with suspicion – in somewhat the same spirit as evaluating claims about cold fusion or perpetual motion machines.
My word, such sound and fury from Cook’s activist output, a goofy amateur hour study that equated boilerplate mention of man made warming in mere abstracts, akin to old books all thanking the king, to scientific support of climate *alarm*, and in Enron worthy fashion, a glossy brochure is now minted for the shareholders as a pretty smoke screen against those noisy critics:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/24_errors.pdf?f=24errors
Piled higher and deeper, just give Cook a Ph.D. already, in social “science” indeed.
Interesting. Dana must be reaching boiling point. He has had a comment removed by the moderator!
We are making progress. You make mistakes when you get angry I hear.
arthur4563 says:
June 7, 2014 at 4:38 am
if you want to know the opinions of scientists about global warming, YOU ASK THEM, STUPID.
Cook et al (2013) did just that. They emailed 8,457 authors to solicit their assessment of their research. Of those responding (~1200):.“Among respondents who authored a paper expressing a view on AGW, 96.4% endorsed the consensus.”
You’re welcome.
@rustneversleeps:
How many times do you need to be told that ‘consensus science’ is an oxymoron, moron??
If ‘consensus’ matters to you, then you should know that the CO2 consensus is firmly on the side of scientific skeptics — which you certainly are not.
The pre-Kyoto OISM Petition was co-signed by more than 31,000 American scientists and engineers, who each had to possess a degree in one of the hard sciences. They included more than 9,000 PhD’s, and they stated that CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere.
I challenge YOU to come up with even 10% of that number of scientists and engineers, who are willing to state that human CO2 emissions are harmful.
You can’t do it, chump, because no one else has been able to do it. You have no ‘consensus’, and your “97%” number is pure hogwash. You have yet to have an original thought. People like you are simply mindless tools for self-serving grant gravy train riders.
Calm down, dbstealey.
You seem to lose it every time a timid warmist dares to so much as make a peep hereabouts. What’s that all about, the “moron” stuff? Sensitive much, db?
It was your fellow “skeptic” (also a fellow quick-to-anger type apparently) arthur4563 who said:
if you want to know the opinions of scientists about global warming, YOU ASK THEM, STUPID.
and I merely pointed out that Cook et al (2013) did just that.
To your point, yes, science is not “done” by consensus, but evidence compels science to arrive at various consensuses. And one has clearly been achieved amongst climate scientists regarding AGW. The IPCC AR5 WG1 or the recent 3rd U.S. National Climate Assessment are just two recent examples of that… notwithstanding the fact that your OISM petition can haul out Ginger Spice, Hawkeye Pierce and Radar O’Reilly to take your side.
Several studies have been done – and published in the academic literature – using a variety of different methods, surveying and confirming the overwhelming scientific consensus. So it seems to me it is really more for “your” side to prove otherwise at this point.
By the way, since consensus means so very little to you, db, why do you seem to flip out when the topic arises?
Beautiful day here. Hope you are enjoying yours as well. best, rust…
@rustneversleeps:
More than 31,000 scientists and engineers were asked about the effect of GHGs. They responded by co-signing a statement saying that CO2 is harmless, and beneficial. They couldn’t email their statement; they had to physically sign it, then mail it in. In other words, they went out of their way to make their position known.
Contrast that with your nonsensical 79 nobodies. Can you even name them? What, exactly, did they sign? Anything? Or has your mind been colonized by Cook’s propaganda, to the point that you are unable to even ask yourself those questions?
I challenge you to post your mythical “studies… published in the academic literature – using a variety of different methods, surveying and confirming the overwhelming scientific consensus.” Go ahead. I’ll wait.
To support your ‘consensus’ nonsense, your bogus ‘studies’ will have to total more than 31,000 respondents, and you will have to name each one. I have done that several times now. I can name more than 31,000 professionals, all with degrees in the hard sciences, including more than 9,000 PhD’s, who flat Do Not Agree with Cook’s flatulence.
Finally, I see no such names as Ginger Spice, etc., in the OISM Petition. Where did you get that nonsense? From Cook, no doubt. And as usual, it is a flat out lie. But you believed it, so I suppose his propaganda worked on you.