By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Shock news from the Heartland Institute’s Ninth International Climate Change Conference: among the 600 delegates, the consensus that Man contributes to global warming was not 97%. It was 100%.
During my valedictorian keynote at the conference, I appointed the lovely Diane Bast as my independent adjudicatrix. She read out six successive questions to the audience, one by one. I invited anyone who would answer “No” to that question to raise a hand. According to the adjudicatrix, not a single hand was raised in response to any of the questions.
These were the six questions.
1. Does climate change?
2. Has the atmospheric concentration of CO2 increased since the late 1950s?
3. Is Man likely to have contributed to the measured increase in CO2 concentration since the late 1950s?
4. Other things being equal, is it likely that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will cause some global warming?
5. Is it likely that there has been some global warming since the late 1950s?
6. Is it likely that Man’s emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases have contributed to the measured global warming since 1950?
At a conference of 600 “climate change deniers”, then, not one delegate denied that climate changes. Likewise, not one denied that we have contributed to global warming since 1950.
One of the many fundamental dishonesties in the climate debate is the false impression created by the Thermageddonites and their hosts of allies in the Main Stream Media (MSM) that climate skeptics would answer “No” to most – if not all – of the six questions.
That fundamental dishonesty was at the core of the Cook et al. “consensus” paper published last year. The authors listed three “levels of endorsement” supporting some sort of climate consensus.
Level 1 reflected the IPCC’s definition of consensus: that most of the global warming since 1950 was man-made. Levels 2 and 3 reflected explicit or implicit acceptance that Man causes some warming. The Heartland delegates’ unanimous opinion fell within Level 2.
Cook et al., having specified these three “levels of endorsement”, and having gone to the trouble of reading and marking 11,944 abstracts, did not publish their assessment of the number of abstracts they had marked as falling into each of the three endorsement levels. Instead, they published a single aggregate total combining all three categories.
Their failure to report the results fully was what raised my suspicions that their article fell short of the standards of integrity that the reasonable man on the Clapham omnibus would have expected of a paper purporting to be scientific.
The text file recording the results of Cook’s survey was carefully released only after several weeks following publication, during which the article claiming 97% consensus had received wall-to-wall international publicity from the MSM. Even Mr Obama’s Twitteratus had cited it with approval as indicating that “global warming is real, man-made and dangerous”.
The algorithm counted the number of abstracts Cook had allocated to each level of endorsement. When the computer displayed the results, I thought there must have been some mistake. The algorithm had found only 64 out of the 11,944 papers, or 0.5%, marked as falling within Level 1, reflecting the IPCC consensus that recent warming was mostly man-made.
I carried out a manual check using the search function in Microsoft Notepad. Sure enough, there were only 64 data entries ending in “,1”.
Next, I read all 64 abstracts and discovered – not greatly to my surprise – that only 41 had explicitly said Man had caused most of the global warming over the past half century or so.
In the peer-reviewed learned journals, therefore, only 41 of 11,944 papers, or 0.3% – and not 97.1% – had endorsed the definition of the consensus proposition to which the IPCC, in its 2013 Fifth Assessment Report, had assigned 95-99% confidence.
Now that we have the results of the Heartland Conference survey, the full extent of the usual suspects’ evasiveness about climate “consensus” can be revealed.
Cook et al. had lumped together the 96.8% who, like all 100% of us at ICCC9, had endorsed the proposition that we cause some warming with the 0.3% who had endorsed the IPCC’s proposition that we caused most of the warming since 1950.
In defiance of the evidence recorded in their own data file, they had then explicitly stated, both in their article and in a subsequent article, that 97.1% had endorsed the IPCC’s proposition.
Amusingly, 96.8% is 97% of 97.1%. In other words, 97% of the abstracts that formed the basis of the “97% consensus” claim in Cook et al. (2013) did not endorse the IPCC’s definition of the consensus, as the article had falsely claimed they did. However, those abstracts did endorse the more scientifically credible Heartland definition.
Among the unspeakable representatives of the MSM who came to the Heartland conference to conduct sneering interviews with climate “deniers” was a smarmy individual from CNN.
He asked me, in that supercilious tone with which we are all too familiar, how it was that I, a mere layman, dared to claim that I knew better than 97% of published climate scientists. I referred him to Legates et al. (2013), the peer-reviewed refutation of the notion that 97% of scientists endorse the IPCC’s assertion that most of the warming since 1950 was man-made.
The CNN reporter said that the result in Legates et al. was merely my “interpretation”. So I pointed to a row of internet booths nearby and said, “If I count these booths and find that there are, say, 12 of them, and if you count them and find there are indeed 12 of them, then our finding is not a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of fact, that any third party can independently verify.”
I challenged him to go away, before he broadcast anything, and count how many of the 11,944 abstracts listed in the Cook et al. data file were marked by the authors themselves as falling within Level 1. If he counted only 64, I said, then his count would accord with mine. And our counts would not be an “interpretation” but a fact, whose truth or falsity might readily and definitively be established by any third party performing exactly the same count as ours.
He said he would check, but with that look in his eye that seemed to speak otherwise.
The results of my survey of the 600 Heartland delegates reveal that the difference between the Thermageddonites and us is far less than they would like the world to think. Like most of them, we fall within Cook’s endorsement levels 2-3. Unlike them, we do not claim to know whether most of the global warming since 1950 was man-made: for that is beyond what the current state of science can tell us.
Above all, unlike them we do not misreport a 0.3% consensus as a 97.1% consensus.
You may like to verify the results recorded in Cook’s data file for yourself. I have asked Anthony to archive the file (it resides here: cook.pdf ).
[UPDATE: David Burton writes: I’ve put the Cook 2013 data into an Excel spreadsheet, which makes it a lot easier to analyze than from that cook.pdf file. There’s a link to it on my site, here: http://sealevel.info/97pct/#cook ]
If the reporter from CNN who interviewed me reads this, I hope he will perform the count himself and then come back to me as he had undertaken to do. But I shall not be holding my breath.
Chris Schoneveld said on July 13, 2014 at 9:06 am:
Who wouldn’t want to respond to a Jefferson, Nixon, and Wales?
To any reasonable scientifically literate person all of these questions are rhetorical, which is the whole point of the exercise, to expose claims that mainstream skepticism includes Sky Dragon paper tiger denial of the greenhouse effect as being slander. Are mainstream serious climate alarm skeptics whistleblowers or are they mavericks? The public is still trying to figure that out, with no help lately from Goddard or Nova and now Marohasy who seem quite proud to be public mavericks that prevent whistleblowers from being taken seriously. We now have blunt proof of fraud in the bladeless input data of the latest Marcott 2013 hockey stick. Was this exposed by anyone at this conference? Is it exposed on the Reference page of any skeptical blog? Has it been presented on TV or to Congress? Are the majority of skeptics utter fools? That’s also a rhetorical question given that the answer to my last two questions seems to be no. Hand skeptics a nuclear warhead and they become pacifists and weirdos.
Chris Schoneveld says:
July 13, 2014 at 9:06 am
Leif, tell me, as a reputable scientist haven’t you anything better to do that wasting your time responding to every Tom, Dick and Harry?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Leif should be commended for his responses. As for his colleagues who question his time spent here, they should be questioning their own lack of participation. By withdrawing from the conversation, they are giving those whom spout the very nonsense they claim discredits the forum a free voice to poison the discussion. If they want a credible discussion to occur, they should be participating in it and putting their credentials and reputable opinions on the table to improve the quality and accuracy of the discourse. By withdrawing, they are declaring themselves an elitist clique with no responsibility to converse with the masses because there are half wits among them.
Is it possible to answer “yes” to questions 1 to 5 inclusive and “don’t know” to question 6? Man’s emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases may well have contributed to global warming but not “measured” global warming.
To date there is no proof that anthropogenic C02 has contributed a measurable amount to increased temperatures globally or indeed that the increase in CO2 has actually resulted in increased temperatures globally.
While increased levels of C02 may well have contributed to global warming there is no proof that other natural forces have not been the primary and, possibly, even the sole cause of the measurable increase in temperatures that, we are told, has been seen since 1950.
Perhaps Dr Svalgaard or Steven Mosher can point me to the conclusive evidence that anthropogenic CO2 has contributed a MEASURABLE amount to global increased temperatures.
Until then science tells me that I should remain an agnostic and not a blind believer.
“davidmhoffer says:
July 13, 2014 at 9:51 am ”
I like that post a lot!
Monckton of Brenchley says:
July 13, 2014 at 9:16 am
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I am at a loss to see the point of the survey.
Quite obviously, no one would say an unqualified NO to any of the questions.
Sceptics would always say possibly, may be, lets see the data/evidence etc.
It is clear beyond doubt that man has some impact on environmental conditions, and this impact can lead to alterations in the micro regional climatic response. That is exactly what UHI is, and I doubt that any sceptic disputes UHI. Agriculture, de-forestation, daming rivers and flooding valleys all lead to micro regional micro climatic response.
The quality of the data sets is so bad that no one knows what temperature is doing, still less to what extent it is influenced by CO2. That means that nothing can be firmly denied,
if the data was of better quality and longer duration, no doubt we would have the answer whether changes of concentration of CO2 from arobout 280ppm to 400ppm in earth’s atmosphere has had any impact on temperature,
The actual percentage should be 33%. See:
http://understandingagw.org/?p=177
“6. Is it likely that Man’s emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases have contributed to the measured global warming since 1950?”
Fluxes across the sea-atmosphere interface: Heat exchange between ocean and atmosphere is a product of a number of processes: solar radiation heats the ocean; net long wave back radiation cools the ocean; heat transfer by conduction and convection between the air and water generally cools the ocean as does evaporation of water from the ocean surface.
http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/climate/lectures/o_atm.html
While short-wave radiation will warm both surface end subsurface layers, long-wave radiation will cause a cooling of the surface depending on the temperature and humidity of the air.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2153-3490.1963.tb01399.x/pdf
With that, and that CO2 has not got the heat capacity to carry warmth through to the night cycle as water vapour does, shouldn’t we be looking for a net negative effect on global mean surface temperature from increases in atmospheric CO2?
“6. Is it likely that Man’s emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases have contributed to the measured global warming since 1950?”
Hell yes. Even if only a hundredth of a percent, it counts, and mankind has released amounts of greenhouse gases that wouldn’t be in the atmosphere without our doing so.
To argue against such an absolute statement, you’d have to be one of those stark raving loonies who flatly reject the greenhouse effect exists at all to argue otherwise, which would be negating the question by saying there are no greenhouse gases at all.
If there is one thing troubling about this survey, is how many have forgotten their schoolchild days and how true-or-false questions work. “Well being a thinking person I’d give a qualified yes/no/maybe…” They don’t exist.
Yes or No, On or Off. This is simple binary logic, not a reason for a dissertation! “Well I can’t give +5 for TTL, only +2.3 at best…” That is not an option.
davidmhoffer, I would agree with you if the subject was a scientific one, not a silly opinion poll at a conference.
I was typing my post on my tiny tablet as Lord M was responding on his own. It seems I not only “understood” his motives, but was “astutue” enough to use my own experience with convention lighting to determine he likely hadn’t seen any raised hands in the back.( I wonder why those thinking people didn’t protest out loud on the spot for clarity’s sake if not their own integrity? )
According to Leif, my ability to understand and be astute resulted in my actions and posts being accurate. I can only wonder what his were the result of.
REPLY: I had a clear view of the back, I didn’t see any hands – Anthony
CM of B said:
“”Whether or not a few hands were raised, the conclusion remains: the preponderance of climate skeptical opinion is not willing to disagree that we may have some influence on the climate.””
Yes sir, deforestation, farming, hydro-electric dams, irrigation, urban sprawl. smog,
all this human activity can be shown to affect climate.
CO2, there is no evidence that CO2 warms the planet. there is evidence that it doesn’t.
Namely:
Constantly increasing atmospheric CO2 with no increase in temperature since 1998.
No increase in the RATE of temperature rise since 1979, per RSS satellite data.
Aphan says:
July 13, 2014 at 1:57 pm
According to Leif, my ability to understand and be astute resulted in my actions and posts being accurate. I can only wonder what his were the result of.
The difference between us is simple and stark: I concentrate on the poll, you wonder about people.
lsvalgaard says:
July 13, 2014 at 2:50 pm
Aphan says:
July 13, 2014 at 1:57 pm
According to Leif, my ability to understand and be astute resulted in my actions and posts being accurate. I can only wonder what his were the result of.
The difference between us is simple and stark: I concentrate on the poll, you wonder about people
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No sir. From my observation you concentrate on MISREPRESENTING the poll in order to attack the character of “the people”. Transparent, and stark indeed.
lawrence Cornell says:
July 13, 2014 at 3:41 pm
From my observation you concentrate on MISREPRESENTING the poll in order to attack the character of “the people”.
Lemme see: I have not attacked your character but you are attacking mine. What does that make you?
It is late in the game and I reluctantly take one more swipe at the dead horse, but it seems to me that Lord M. was performing a spoof on the Cook et al. 97% consensus claim and/or the many warmists who insist that some very high per centage of scientists agree yada, yada, yada.
If my surmise is correct then one might say the spoof was a failure if it is necesary to point that it is a spoof.
Whether or not the poll performance was a spoof, I fail to see why so many have taken so great offense at it.
Lighten up, it’s better for your blood pressure.
FACT: Sensationalist Goddard blanket bans consistent constructive criticism. Then his frat boy cheerleaders taunt us silent ones after Goddard allows in a post, suddenly. Gavin Goddard is just a horse’s ass miscreant pushing a culture war as if Darwin was still just a complete baffoon. He’s the skeptical version of Al Gore. Skewer this pig already.
davidmhoffer says:
July 13, 2014 at 8:59 am
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Wow! That was quite a rant. This –
“You pollute this blog with your blather, and you smear skeptics as you do it. If skeptics much accept such as you into their ranks in the name of free speech or whatever passes for it on Anth_ny’s blog, then I must henceforth describe myself as a lukewarmist, if no other reason that not to be associated with your utter nonsense.”
– is just over the top. What is about my simple repeatable empirical experiments that gets you so riled? In 2011 I found out that LWIR (even if emitted from a cooler object) can slow the cooling rate of a hotter material, but it just doesn’t work for liquid water that is free to evaporatively cool. But the AGW hypothesis states that DWLWIR is keeping the oceans 33C hotter than they would otherwise be. So I conducted some further experiments to see if the 255K assumption was correct for water in the absence of atmospheric cooling and DWLWIR. What’s so wrong with that? Why do you rage so?
You say –
“In order for empirical experiment to disprove it, you would have to have two identical earth’s to experiment on, one with and one without CO2.”
No. All that is needed to disprove the idea of a net radiative GHE is an experiment showing that the oceans in the absence of atmospheric cooling and DWLWIR would be 33K or more hotter than the 255K assumption that is the very foundation of the hypothesis.
“I submit to you that you have no such duplicate earth, and as a consequence your claim is either an outright lie or a complete inability to understand the physics and the terminology you so freely throw around as if you do.”
No lie. I am not claiming a duplicate earth. I am clearly claiming that experiments into the difference between “selective surface” and “near blackbody” demonstrate why the oceans can be 33K warmer than the 255K assumption without DWLWIR having any role.
“Further, the experiment that you do trot out on various threads claiming to produce the results you insist prove your position does not, and can not, duplicated the processes of the atmospheric air column in either function or scale.”
Experiment? Just one? On various threads I have shown multiple experiments, including –
Ability of CO2 to both absorb and emit LWIR
The two shell radiative model
Effect of LWIR on the cooling rate of water that is free to evaporatively cool
Selective surface effect in rigid materials
Selective surface effect in liquids
Relative height of energy entry and exit effecting circulation and temperature profiles in gas columns
Gravity bias in conductive exchange between surface and atmosphere
Pressure effecting conductive exchange between surface and atmosphere
You do indeed frequently point to real world observation. I would point out that currently environmental measurements are rapidly diverging from climate models and it is fair to question the assumptions underlying these models. Clean, repeatable empirical experiment is the best way to check these assumption.
The claim that DWLWIR is what is keeping the oceans 33K above 255K fails the most basic checks.
lsvalgaard says:
July 13, 2014 at 3:52 pm
lawrence Cornell says:
July 13, 2014 at 3:41 pm
From my observation you concentrate on MISREPRESENTING the poll in order to attack the character of “the people”.
Lemme see: I have not attacked your character but you are attacking mine. What does that make you?
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A keen observer,paying attention.
And I have not attacked your character at all in that sentence, just your behavior.
Please also pay attention when responding to me, I’ll not let you change meanings of words or make up motivations as you seem fond of, like that certain sentences attack your character as opposed to your behavior.
If you can’t debate on the merits of the actual words said the meanings thereof I have no time for you. As a Doctor I would think you would debate from a stronger, more integral position of fact and understanding rather than having to twist and moan for a better angle.
Frankly it’s really a shame to see it, until today I would have expected better from someone of your reported education and stature. I have been disappointed but not suprised.
There’s a little something for your character. I’m not impressed.
lawrence Cornell says:
July 13, 2014 at 4:55 pm
And I have not attacked your character at all in that sentence, just your behavior.
As a behaviorist [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism ] I don’t see the difference.
Now, in general, when you accuse somebody of something, quote exactly what bothers you. In what way was what I said a MISREPRESENTATION? I have alleged [and many commenters agree] that the thing was just a PR-stunt. Is this what you think is a MISREPRESENTATION? or do you have a different nefarious motivation for your utterance?
While I agree with the point that most (but sure as hell not nearly all) skeptics acknowledge increased CO2’s role in warming, although think it’s been exaggerated, the “poll” as conducted was rubbish.
Leif’s right here, in other words.
Christoph Dollis says:
July 13, 2014 at 6:53 pm
Leif’s right here, in other words.
Something for lawrence Cornell to ponder…
Konrad;
You do indeed frequently point to real world observation. I would point out that currently environmental measurements are rapidly diverging from climate models and it is fair to question the assumptions underlying these models.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
At no point sir, did I support the models. I’m a major critic of the models. So don’t take me to task for something I never said. The facts that YOU have the physics wrong in no way suggests that the models have it right, and at no time did I suggest they did.
As for the rest of your rant, there is so much you clearly don’t understand that there is little use having a point by point discussion about it. Your argument rests on the oceans not being 33K above 255K. Sadly, that’s not even what the claim is, and your entire rant thus falls apart because it debunks something that wasn’t claimed. There is a marked difference between the temperature of the oceans and the surface temperature of the oceans, and if you understood Stefan-Boltzmann as it applies in this case you would understand your mistake. All your other errors are just piled up on top of that one.
But leave the details out of it. The bottom line remains that if YOUR physics was right, the earth would be colder than the moon. It isn’t. If YOUR physics was right, Venus would be colder than Mercury. But it isn’t. If YOUR physics was right, jungles at the equator would be colder on average than deserts at the equator, but they aren’t. In your world, you’ve constructed a long, complex thread of reasoning that is wrong assumption piled upon wrong assumption, but put together in a logical fashion which then conclude that 2+2=5 and you’ve built an experiment that proves it. All I’ve got is two popsicle sticks and two more popsicle sticks, and when I shove them into one pile, there’s four. Count ’em four. The earth is warmer than the moon, Venus is warmer than Mercury, jungles are warmer than deserts, and the difference between them is the presence of radiatively active atmospheric components. I don’t need to go into the details of why you are wrong anymore than I need nothing more than popsicle sticks to prove that 2+2=4.
Aphan says:
July 12, 2014 at 5:25 pm
when he was asked this question:
“So the fact that there are people who frequent this board who have odd and unacceptable points of view discredits the entire site and all skeptics?”
(lsvalgaard) Perhaps the asker was thinking of people like you…
I remind you of this because you just claimed that the simple and stark difference between us was that your focus was the poll and I am the one who wonders about people. I wonder about a lot of things. Like how the “number” of your posts that were directed at people, and your opinions of them, compares to the humber of your posts “focused on the poll”. Or why you allow your obvious biases/assumptions to interfere with what should be an objective observation of facts.
I couldn’t care less whether you are a sceptic or a luke warmer or a flaming worlder. Those are labels based on one’s personal opinion and everyone is perfectly entitled to their own. Of course it’s possible that you’re having a stroke or going through withdrawal/off your meds, or perhaps experiecing some other form of frustration that might cause temporary insanity upon which this whole episode can be attributed. But if not, for someone so clearly concerned about people’s behavior discrediting groups they are associated with, your behavior here in this thread is anecdotal evidence that will discredit the field of “science” far more than any “half wit” posting at WUWT can discredit a group opinion/label.