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From the “Cooking up another 97% consensus” department and Purdue University:
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A Purdue University-led survey of nearly 700 scientists from non-climate disciplines shows that more than 90 percent believe that average global temperatures are higher than pre-1800s levels and that human activity has significantly contributed to the rise.
The study is the first to show that consensus on human-caused climate change extends beyond climate scientists to the broader scientific community, said Linda Prokopy, a professor of natural resource social science.
“Our survey indicates that an overwhelming majority of scientists across disciplines believe in anthropogenic climate change, are highly certain of these beliefs and find climate science to be credible,” Prokopy said. “Our results also suggest that scientists who are climate change skeptics are well in the minority.”
Previous studies have shown that about 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists believe in human-caused climate change, and a review of scientific literature on the existence of climate change indicated that about 97 percent of studies affirm climate change is happening.
However, no direct surveys had assessed whether the general agreement on the impact of human activities on the Earth’s climate extended to scientists in other disciplines.
Prokopy and fellow researchers conducted a 2014 survey of scientists from more than 10 non-climate disciplines at Big Ten universities to determine the relative prevalence of belief in, and skepticism of, climate change in the scientific community.
Of 698 respondents, about 94 percent said they believe average global temperatures have “generally risen” compared with pre-1800 levels, and 92 percent said they believe “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.”
CREDIT (Environmental Research Letters image/J. Stuart Carlton)
Nearly 79 percent said they “strongly agree” and about 15 percent “moderately agree” that climate science is credible. About 64 percent said climate science is a mature science compared with their own field, and about 63 percent rated climate science as “about equally trustworthy” compared to their discipline.
Disagreement about climate change is rarely a simple dispute about facts, Prokopy said. People’s interpretation of information can also be influenced by their cultural and political values, worldview, and personal identity. Prokopy’s research team found that division over climate change was linked to disagreement over science – such as the potential effects of carbon dioxide on the Earth’s climate – but also differing cultural and political values, which the survey gauged in a section of questions on respondents’ general worldviews.
While cultural values did not appear to influence scientists as much as previous studies have shown they influence the general public on a variety of issues, including climate change, the survey indicated that “when it comes to climate change, scientists are people, too,” said lead author Stuart Carlton, a former postdoctoral research assistant in Prokopy’s lab.
“While our study shows that a large majority of scientists believe in human-caused climate change, it also shows that their beliefs are influenced by the same types of things that influence the beliefs of regular people: cultural values, political ideologies and personal identity,” he said.
Prokopy said she was “quite surprised to find cultural values influencing scientists as much as they are. This shows how strong these values are and how hard they are to change.”
Respondents’ certainty in their beliefs on climate change appeared to be linked to the source of their climate information. Certainty was correlated to how much of respondents’ climate information came from scientific literature or mainstream media, Prokopy said. The more respondents relied on scientific studies for information on climate change, the greater their certainty that human activity is causing the Earth’s temperatures to rise.
“Climate literature is very compelling and convincing,” she said. “Scientists are not fabricating their data.”
Nearly 60 percent of those who believe in climate change said they were “extremely sure” and about 31 percent said they were “very sure” average global temperatures have risen. Respondents who said they believe global temperatures have fallen or remained constant were “significantly less certain” in their beliefs, Prokopy said.
Carlton said the tendency of some media to portray climate change as more controversial among scientists than it actually is could decrease people’s certainty in whether climate change is occurring and its potential causes.
“The media probably do this for good reasons: They want to give each side of a story to try to be balanced,” said Carlton, now the healthy coastal ecosystems and social science specialist at Texas Sea Grant. “However, our study shows that there is very little disagreement among climate scientists or other scientists about the existence of climate change or the quality of climate science as a discipline. There are important questions about what we should do about climate change, but those are policy controversies, not science controversies.”
The survey results did not reveal many strikingly different responses by discipline, Prokopy said, though among the fields of study represented, natural resource scientists showed the highest amount of skepticism that global temperatures have risen.
Respondents across disciplines nearly unanimously agreed that climate science is credible, but views on its maturity and trustworthiness compared with their own discipline varied. Physicists and chemists, for example, rated climate science as a highly credible discipline but gave it lower marks in trustworthiness and overall maturity compared with their own fields. Prokopy said this was “not surprising given that physics and chemistry are some of the oldest, most established scientific disciplines.”
While previous studies showed that many prominent climate science skeptics were physicists, Carlton said this survey did not show similar evidence.
“The proportion of physicists and chemists who believed in climate change was right around average.”
###
The paper was published Thursday (Sept. 24) in Environmental Research Letters and is available at http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/10/9/094025.
AW: Comment:
It seems curious to me that if man-made climate change is so certain, why do some people feel the need to prove that a majority of their peers believe in it and that anyone who doesn’t is simply wrong?
I would wonder what a similar survey of scientists might have shown around 1912 when Alfred Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift. Would 90 to 97% of them say that the Earth’s crust was static? Probably so. It took another 40-50 years and new discovery in science before Wegener’s ideas became accepted as the facts as we know them today, that the Earth’s crust does in fact move in plates. But back then, scientists were so certain of their consensus, that they dismissed Wegener’s ideas:
Except for a few converts, and those like Cloos who couldn’t accept the concept but was clearly fascinated by it, the international geological community’s reaction to Wegener’s theory was militantly hostile. American geologist Frank Taylor had published a similar theory in 1910, but most of his colleagues had simply ignored it. Wegener’s more cogent and comprehensive work, however, was impossible to ignore and ignited a firestorm of rage and rancor. Moreover, most of the blistering attacks were aimed at Wegener himself, an outsider who seemed to be attacking the very foundations of geology.
Because of this abuse,Wegener could not get a professorship at any German university. Fortunately, the University of Graz in Austria was more tolerant of controversy, and in 1924 it appointed him professor of meteorology and geophysics.
In 1926 Wegener was invited to an international symposium in New York called to discuss his theory. Though he found some supporters, many speakers were sarcastic to the point of insult. Wegener said little. He just sat smoking his pipe and listening. His attitude seems to have mirrored that of Galileo who, forced to recant Copernicus’ theory that the Earth moves around the sun, is said to have murmured, “Nevertheless, it moves!”
Source: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Wegener/wegener_5.php
Sound familiar? The point here is that a perceived consensus doesn’t necessarily indicate factual certainty for any idea, and consensus in science can be overturned easily with new information.
Note: this article was updated shortly after publication to include a a URL for the source of the Wegener story
My random thought…The study shows that “culture” influences the response. If I understand correctly the study was focused on ” scientists from more than 10 non-climate disciplines at Big Ten universities” and I think we all know what the “culture” is like in today’s universities. They need to conduct the same study with scientists located in the for profit industries.
Exactly
When you look at the Bjorn Lomborg issue at the University of Western Australia untenured academics would have to be very brave to actively dispute the consensus
To be fair,
I don’t think any early civilizations thought that the world was flat. I can’t say for certain, but from memory I believe most ancients thought that we either sat atop a hill or rode the back of a turtle?
After a quick search, according to Wikipedia , the flat Earth myth is one born from bigotry:
“Historical writers have identified a number of historical circumstances that contributed to the origin and widespread acceptance of the flat-earth myth. American historian Jeffrey Burton Russell traced the nineteenth-century origins of what he called the Flat Error to a group of anticlerical French scholars, particularly to Antoine-Jean Letronne and, indirectly, to his teachers Jean-Baptiste Gail and Edme Mentelle. Mentelle had described the Middle Ages as twelve ignorant centuries of “profound night”, a theme exemplified by the flat-earth myth in Letronne’s “On the Cosmological Opinions of the Church Fathers”.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth (doesn’t appear to be politically charged except for the occasional vandalism…)
I would alter the comic above to reflect notable scientists who have done irreparable harm to modern society. Such as Dr. Egas Moniz driving around the country giving out lobotomies from the back of his truck…
Ancient Near East cosmology did indeed envision a flat earth (either with four corners or circular), covered by a series of domes (the vault of heaven or firmament). The sun god daily traveled over the flat earth, then went under it or around outside the dome to return to the place of his rising.
From a high place, the devil was able to show Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth because the earth was flat.
Early Church Fathers argued that the earth is flat because the Bible clearly shows it to be so. Later the Church adopted the Ptolemaic system.
The pre-scientific Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples also believed that the earth was flat, a disc floating in a surrounding ocean. The pagan Northern European and ancient Indian cosmologies were similar.
Scholars disagree as to whether the earth was flat or egg-shaped in ancient Chinese thought.
There are also apparently references to a World Turtle bearing the earth on its back in both Chinese and Indian literature, but the earth which rests on the turtle’s back is flat.
Ancient astronomers had a simple proof: the earth’s shadow on the moon is always round. The only shape which casts such a shadow from any angle is a sphere.
Lady Gaiagaia,
“Early Church Fathers argued that the earth is flat because the Bible clearly shows it to be so.”
I can’t speak for “early Church Fathers”, but the Book does not clearly show any such thing, that I am aware of. I suspect you might be doing a bit of “reading into the text”. If a modern writer were to use the expression “from the four corners of the Earth”, one would naturally accept that as a euphemism, still used today occasionally, not act like they don’t know what it is implying, right?
The texts of the Book are chock full of such euphemisms, allegories, symbolism, metaphors, parables, etc, etc, and most are obviously not meant to be taken “literally”, God was not speaking to modern scientists, but to people for whom things like “the vault of heaven” were everyday observable realities . . and statements like “He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.”, spoken by Job in what is generally thought by scholars to be the earlies written book in the Book, and this from Isaiah;
“It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:”
… suggest a certain Entity was slipping a bit of a “reality check” into the minds of humans when it comes to cosmology and such. Not only is the shape of the earth rather clearly implied, and it’s vastness in comparison to us, but the only recently accepted notion that the “heavens” are “stretching out” is there as well, it seems to me. And this notion of a “fabric of space” that is being stretched out occurs at several points I am aware of.
I can accept something like “it seems to me to show”, but saying it “clearly shows” is a bit of a stretch, I feel.
“Of 698 respondents, about 94 percent said they believe average global temperatures have “generally risen” compared with pre-1800 levels, and 92 percent said they believe “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.”
I would bet that you would get a higher percentage by taking a survey of WUWT readers
Next up? Lets ask “Can automobiles be dangerous?” And “Do you think there are more cars now than 100 years ago?”
When you get 90%+, then conclude that the question is settled and ban all cars.
Obviously… And I suspect intentionally… They are asking the wrong questions
doesn’t that make you wonder about the 10% who think there aren’t more cars than 100 years ago?
This is essentially the same “survey” as Doran & Zimmerman, and just as irrelevant.
Who doesn’t believe the 18th century was cooler? (LIA, anyone?) First flaw.
Second flaw is wording of the second question – scientists who work with statistics in any way view “significant” far differently than the average Joe. “Significant” in statistics an science more often than not refers to “measurable” or “having a measurable effect.” Those running the survey are taking a question which could have an extremely broad interpretation and putting their own narrow interpretation on the results, equating “significant” with the IPCC’s AGW definition, “the majority of…” If the question were worded as, “Do you believe that human activity is the primary cause of all warming since the 18th Century?” the answer wouldn’t be so definite, would it?
Did they really claim that the survey was of “non-climate scientists” despite inclusion of scientists from most of the disciplines which make up the broad spectrum known as “climate science?”
They knew what they were doing. When they asked about the influence of solar activity they asked if those polled agreed with the statement; “Variation in solar activity is responsible for the majority of the observed warming in the past century.”
Here they use the specific term “majority”. i.e. most of.
Hence, it would have been impossible to indicate that you believe that solar influence may have been “significant”.
When they asked about man’s influence they only request agreement that man’s influence is significant. i.e. that man’s influence is not insignificant, I suppose. Depending on how significance is defined in this instance. (But it isn’t defined).
I can’t see how our influence can be insignificant – there are 7.3 billion of us. All doing stuff!!!
IMO human activity is indeed insignificant on GASTA, if such a measurement be possible. We do definitely have an impact on local climatic parameters, however.
Compare the temperature of Las Vegas in 1905 with now.
I suppose that this is a “survey” of sorts.
It is a survey of the opinions of people who decided to respond to another crap survey.
Those people were a minority of those initially polled.
Unfortunately the survey reveals quite clearly through its choice of questions that it is designed to produce a result that gives the impression that there is a “consensus” regarding science related to the theory of global warming. It would be almost impossible for a reasonable skeptic to express their position within the confines of the questionnaire design.
Hence, there are only two types of people who would readily participate – supporters of the survey and its creators and its clear objective – i.e. supporters of AGW alarmism and then maybe some people who were unable to perceive that the survey is a trick.
Another group of people may well exist who are not AGW alarmists and/or are not interested in the stupid survey and/or think that the creators of the stupid survey should shove the stupid survey up where the sun is not a significance influence on mean temperature.
This leaves us to wonder what views may be held by the non-respondents.
Now remember that the majority of those polled were non-respondents. Almost 2/3rds of those polled. “we surveyed a sample of 1868 scientists and received 698 responses (37.4% response rate)”.
So, let’s look at some of the other questions asked and see how representative the respondents are of generally held views on other matters. For example, according to the survey only 0.63% of respondents described their political views as “very conservative” and only another 4.60% as conservative, at all.
So, there you have it. Let’s forget elections. There is a “consensus” that conservatives are wrong.
94.77% of scientists do not hold conservative views. It’s damn near a consensus.
So, how many of the respondents hold libertarian views?
The response to statement “the government interferes far too much in our everyday lives” should tell us.
A libertarian would strongly agree.
2.95% of those polled strongly agreed. So less than 97.05% of respondents are libertarian.
So, libertarians and conservatives are proved wrong finally – BY SCIENCE.
That’s it folks, all pack up and go home. The show is over.
Except that you may possibly be asking – where were all the other people with the other views?
The views that we all know that many people actually DO have in real life.
Maybe hiding somewhere in and among those 1170 people who did not reply.
i.e the vast majority of those polled.
Of course, there are other serious problems.
Addressing them all would be too tedious a task for a blog thread.
Yet another lacklustre piece of propaganda masquerading as science. Somewhere between cargo-cult and voodoo. Actually pathetic. But the media and politicians will doubtlessly lap it all up.
It only has to fool stupid people to achieve its intended aim.
Whoops!! I meant to observe that less than 2.95% of respondents are libertarian. i.e. that a 97.05% “consensus” does NOT hold libertarian views. (And therefore libertarians are simply proved WRONG.)
I’m sure that it was obvious that that was what I intended to say!!
While you’re at it, in the interest of truth in climate science, I suggest this editorial adjustment;
” … or think that the creators of the stupid survey should shove the stupid survey up where the sun is not a significance [short term] influence on mean temperature.*
It seems highly probable to me that the place you refer to there would not exist but for the big ball of fire in the sky you mentioned. Further study is surely needed to confirm my theory, but until the “scientific community” in general grows a pair, so to speak, and pulls their collective heads out of those warm places in question, I fear that might have to wait a dark age or two.
Seriously, scientists, humanity needs you to freak out in a big way, I feel. These goons on high are not going to stop “impersonating” you for public consumption, and unless you “act out” in large numbers (as some have already begun to do) I fear there is no stopping them from “advancing” us . . to about 1984.
This “study” opens the door for you to speak up, regardless of discipline, it seems to me. Step through it, I suggest . . or forever hold your peace.
Thanks for this correction.
It did occur to me, of course.
But I abandoned scientific precision for the sake of comedic effect.
At least that is more honest than abandoning scientific honesty for the sake of self-promotion and the acquisition of financial security, status or in some cases great riches.
It is very sad to witness the shenanigans represented by this schlock masquerading as science.
It’s actually far cleverer than the work of Diederik Stapel. Stapel was unmasked as having concocted his work in social sciences. These fools have not technically broken any rules.
Doubtless their results are “genuine”.
Genuine and also meaningless and also misrepresented in the conclusions.
They have also failed to discuss the various glaring flaws in their own work.
We can assume that they were quite well aware of the bias introduced by the self-selection of the polled group and so, in failing to consider the potentially critical implications of this bias in the conclusion they are guilty of deception by omission.
Suffice to say – wool has doubtless been pulled over eyes, again.
And notably, that was quite clearly the intention from the very beginning.
You’re certainly welcome, indefatigablefrog . . but one reason I addressed your comment as i did is because I felt you missed an opportunity for a bit more humor, by not including the parenthetical; (short term), to be perfectly honest. Gives it a nice appropriate ring of scientifical jargonese, it seemed to me.
” …wool has doubtless been pulled over eyes, again.”
I doubt that, in the sense of fooling many scientists and academics and such . . (and the general public are pretty much out of the loop at this point, in terms of influence on how this will all play out, as far as I can tell) My sense is that each shoddy attempt to “seal the deal” on scientific consensus for the CAWG clan, actually leads another wave of people who grasp the nature of such surveys and “studies” to get more suspicious now.
Sites like this one, and all the people who have been sounding the fake science/consensus alarm in general, have been far more effective than the mass media masters like to let on, it seems to me, or they wouldn’t be running these dopey (and therefor potentially bean-spilling) micro scams every few months. I sure as hell wouldn’t put something like this “survey” in front of reasonably intelligent/educated people if I thought I already had them “in the bag” so to speak . . Would you?
Fight on I say, and use this slimy BS as more ammunition.
Of 698 respondents, about 94 percent said they believe average global temperatures have “generally risen” compared with pre-1800 levels, and 92 percent said they believe “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.”
Completely meaningless results. That temperature has “generally risen” since the LIA isn’t really debated. That human activity is a “significant” contributing factor means what exactly? 5%? 50%? 99%? It’s completely meaningless without clear quantification.
This is sophistry, not science
First they dismiss scientist who are skeptics because they are not “climate scientist” and now they embrace them.
Did I miss another “adjustment”?
“Climate literature is very compelling and convincing,” she said. “Scientists are not fabricating their data.”
–Linda Prokopy
Why throw in that last part? The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
I have to wonder by what means she knows it? Has she done an audit of climate data? Or does she know scientists are not fabricating their data because they say so? Is science a matter that has to be accepted on faith now, once a vote of consensus has been taken?
This jumped out at me, too. What is in-filling, homogenising, adjusting (for time of day, site movements, bucket vs bouy, etc) if not fabricating, regardless of the justification for doing so?
What about this post by Greg Laden?http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/09/18/once-again-the-fauxpause-is-killed-by-actual-research/
Is the pause really not a pause?
The pause is real, as shown by the less “adjusted” satellite and balloon data.
The “actual research” isn’t either.
I just get batted around all the time. I keep trying to be open to “both sides” and often end up agreeing with the skeptics. But I’m not a scientist – a skeptic and an atheist – but I have no real basis for evaluating either claims at times.
Every time I scratch the surface of their claims I find a debunking. It’s kind of terrifying. But the level of certainty and the number of angles they take can be overwhelming at times.
Sigh. Thanks for your response. I think a lot of people feel like me.
The current plateau in global temps commonly and unscientifically called “the pause” has been grudgingly acknowledged by “team” members Trenberth (“it’s a travesty) and the UK Met office, as well as by less operantly motivated people looking at satellite observations at RSS, UAH, and by many others as well. Because of the so-called “pause,” it’s likely the IPCC’s AR5 abandoned the statement of an estimate of climate sensitivity, which it had confidently espoused in AR4.
Of course, you’re free to trust whichever “experts” you like.
I actually “trust” the POV expressed here and elsewhere in the truly skeptical community on AGW. I guess all I was saying is that I realize the limits of my own knowledge. I have a difficult time evaluating the validity of the claims and counter-claims, despite expending serious effort trying to do so.
I’m not here vying for Greg Laden but when he publishes something like this, it’s used by AGW proponents to “debunk” the “crazies”. This is actually a great example to pull apart, if you wouldn’t mind.
I remember when the datasets were changed by – was it NOAA and was it buoy data, back in like June? You see, I don’t really remember, I just remember a sense of outrage at how baldly the data was being manipulated. But I didn’t know if this paper cited that data.
I also heard it said that the “increase” this year was only 1/100th of a degree – it just goes on and on like this.
Also Laden is making an argument in defense of AGW modeling, essentially claiming that temp records actually are not outside the error bands of the models. I seem to recall other presentations and articles claiming the other was so, but you see, I don’t know which model is being referred to and why it’s better or worse than others. I don’t keep track that well and even when I try to i get lost. I’m not stupid, fyi, it’s just that the science and analytic techniques and the measurements and the statistics and math required to evaluate the claims being made are beyond my understanding. It’s a highly specialized analysis.
I’ve been reading about AGW on sites like this – from varying points of view – for 12+ years, and I’m still confused. It’s getting weirder now because the “truth” of AGW is taken as a social good and reality in more and more of the circles I exist in. Circles filled with curious, smart people. And remember, what I’m essentially doing is picking someone I like to listen to, like say Richard Lindze. Sigh, my point is that despite being dedicated to being a skeptic and listening to a lot of different points of view, I’m still unsure.
I just watched a documentary on the antarctic that claimed the sea lanes there opened up for 90 days more a year now due to AGW. I hear constantly that AGW is causing this or that to melt, etc. I hear many real scientists claim it with certainty and dismiss the AGW skeptical movement.
Given my lack of technical skills, how can I ignore the “social proof” all around me? I recognize the limits of my own reasoning and am in a quandry over it.
I know, this probably sounds like a whine but it’s not. I’m legitimately trying to communicate a meta level problem in this “debate” – it’s highly technical and specialized. It truly requires “experts” to properly analyze and hypothesize about it.
And yes, the AR5 was a remarkable document for skeptics, and really, the most shocking part was the summary for policymakers and the blanket contention of 90% confidence of their predictions and analysis when many other aspects of the report seemed to undermine their hypothesis, not confirm it.
Perhaps this comment is a waste of time. I guess if I was trying to be constructive I would suggest how to get this debate into the mainstream media more regularly. But for now, I hear no skeptical commentary presented in the mainstream media – none. It’s a complete blackout.
I do know this. Just about every smart person I know thinks AGW is a real problem. In a field where I’m admittedly out of my depth, how can I possibly ever know if I’m succumbing to biases born on large part by my ignorance?
The questionnaire is obviously contrived given the fact that no self-respecting scientist would participate in answering something that is clearly politically charged.
In a highly politically-charged environment that is largely isolated from real-world consequences and significantly funded by those who support the Preferred Political Narrative, the vast majority of those willing to speak up publicly support the Preferred Political Narrative. *Shocking.*
And it’s even the “weak form” narrative, that there’s *some* warming and *some* of it is an anthropogenic effect, also espoused by many skeptics (though the amount is considered non-dangerous or even barely measurable or immeasurable).
Mind you, in the MFM and on Social Media this will be reported as supporting Strong Form, because that’s what their job is.
You know, everyone’s life would be substantially easier if not for the *torrent* of “spin” shoveled up on farms and delivered to us daily.
You know, the more I think about it, the more intellectually insulting this is. It’s like every possible bias is built in, then biased language is slathered on top, *knowing* that only the two-sentence summary will be picked up by a biased press corps.
It’s basically lying and laughing about it.
A serious, not politically motivated survey would ask what share of mean global temperature change since the end of the Little Ice Age (pick a year) can be attributed to human activity in general and to GHGs in particular. Options might be: 1) cooling, 2) no warming, 3) negligible warming (insignificant), 4) less than 25%, 5) 26 to 49% and 6) over half.
I’d also ask if GASTA is measurable and calculable from surface stations and the oceans.
“human-caused climate change”
It is very vague questions, because what is meant by climate and climate change? The components of the climate always change, so how to define climate change in a single figure. How to add together the changes in tempetarure annual or in summer in winter and so on, rain, sunshine, clouds, storm, snow, growing days, frostdays, good days, bad days, to a single measure of climate, so that you can say it has changed.
It was so much easier when it was called global warming. A single figure you could relate to.
CO2 is only one portion of human caused climate change.
Yogi Berra died today. He was 90.
This quote by him seems appropriate relative to engineering vs pure science.
“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”
Yogi Berra
RIP
“While our study shows that a large majority of scientists believe in human-caused climate change, it also shows that their beliefs are influenced by the same types of things that influence the beliefs of regular people: cultural values, political ideologies and personal identity,” In particular, they are influenced by their grants and pay packets which depend on ‘correct’ answers.
Previously we’ve been told to ignore the opinions of non-“climate scientists” because they aren’t “climate scientists”. What’s suddenly changed?
Previously we’ve been told to ignore the opinions of non-“climate scientists” because they aren’t “climate scientists”. What’s suddenly changed?
actually was: ignore the opinions of non-“climate scientists” [when they disagree with AGW] because they aren’t “climate scientists” [who agree with wealth redistribution].
So, What’s suddenly changed? Nothing has changed. They are largely citing those who believe in the AGW religion.
What exactly is a climate scientist? I am pretty sure that I am one but i’m not sure I want to claim the title.
Give me a definition and I will decide if I am one.
I don’t work for the government or academia or an environmental group. I receive no grant money and work in the private sector. Does that disqualify me?
The terminology needs updating again. “Climate change” was a dastardly misnomer.
The accurate term is “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climatic Alteration”—CACA. This would good for the Climatastrophists, since no one dares deny that CACA happens.
Scientists never registered and voted on the matter. Science is not a democracy. Scientific theories are not validated through opinion poles. The laws of science are not some sort of legislation. The whole thing is rather foolish . It is politics and not science. The AGW conjecture is full of errors and no opinion pole is going to make up for them. The reality is that there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate.
The reality is that the vast majority of scientists disagree with your ‘opinion’.
Now warrenlb is speaking for the “vast majority” of scientists.
But as usual, his opinion is “half vast”.
Not my opinion. It’s the fact outlined in the posted article you can’t read.
Poor boy didn’t even get the joke.
more than 90 percent believe that average global temperatures are higher than pre-1800s levels and that human activity has significantly contributed to the rise.
Yeah? And?
I agree with all that, myself. Call me Mr. 97%. And I am the alarmist’s worst enemy.
I don’t agree with significantly. What does that mean? That ten percent of whatever warming has occurred since sometime in the 19th century has been caused by humans? Twenty-five percent? Thirty-three percent? Fifty percent? More?
IMO it’s less than ten percent, but IPCC says without basis that it’s over 50%.
If “significant” means “not statistically insignificant”, then we might be talking low single digits, as in perhaps 4% caused by humans.
The above is a trick question . There are really two separate questions here . Most people including skeptics would agree that temperatures have been rising, and would even agree that mankind has had an effect. But they would disagree that humans have “significantly” affected the rise because there is no such evidence . Many alarmists even use the term ” primarily” which is even more wrong due to lack of evidence.
“Of 698 respondents, about 94 percent said they believe average global temperatures have “generally risen” compared with pre-1800 levels,”
This statement has never been contested by most if not all skeptics . The disagreement is over the claim that man is primarily responsible for this back ground warming of about 0.75 C per century.
The post-LIA warming is much less than 0.75 degrees C per century. As I commented above, in December 1995, the “observed” warming since 1860 was estimated at 0.55 degree C (Lean, et al, Geophysical Research Letters).
That’s a warming rate of 0.407 degree C per century, but even 20 years ago, there had already been unwarranted “adjustments” to the “record”.
Since the planet has not warmed at all for over 18 years, the rate must have slowed. Let’s be generous and assume that from December 1995 to now, the surface has gained 0.05, for a total of 0.60 degrees C since 1860 (the presumed warming occurring in 1996 and part of 1997). That works out to a rate of 0.387 degrees C per century.
Which is almost exactly the same as cumulative adjustments made by GHCN.
I don’t care any more. My monthly stipend from the Koch brothers didn’t show up, so I believe in AGW now.
That’s right. All the warming is “man-made”, as in invented by paid flunkies.
But maybe I too would be wise to join you in the Collective and get a monthly pittance.
Climate scientist? I still can’t figure out what a climate scientist is? The best guess is some who programs climate models. All others are of different disciplines
Well one definition is ‘ a climate scientist is a person whose views support the CAGW theory regardless of training or expertise in any scientific area ‘. That is why railway engineers and failed politicians have been called climate scientist .
But it is a good point , in fact there is no agreed definition and no idea at all about the number of people who are scientists of any sort, which is another indication how much BS the infamous 97% claim really is , for if you do not know the whole number you cannot know the percentage a sub-group represents of the whole regardless of its size .
Here’s something I posted 3+ years ago. It’s still relevant, alas. I should make one addition: Participants in such a lengthy poll should be given a few hundred bucks for their time. This will have the benefit of getting a higher participation rate. Compensation should be upped, if necessary, to get that rate over 2/3.
——–
The opinions of these experts are not something we are bound to accept at face value, without knowing about their opinions on other climate-related controversies that we laymen are better able to form opinions on. From that, we can judge whether this 97% is likely to be competent and objective in its consensus on abstruse controversies.
So the original pollsters should be urged, loudly and repeatedly, to conduct a follow-up poll of the 77 containing questions such as those below. (Nearly all of these questions could be subdivided.) In addition, they should commit to conducting additional follow-up every four years. These will give snapshot of contemporary expert opinion on a range of topics that will be very helpful to forensic sociologists in the future. Ultimately, these surveys will become the most-cited articles in the scientific literature. (Evil grin.)
My versions are crude first drafts. A polished version should contain well-expressed quotes from four or five commenters all along the opinion-spectrum on some topic (perhaps with two or three quotes for each “point” on the specrum) and the respondent should be asked which set of opinions most closely reflects his own. He should be allowed to vote for an in-between position as well. And he should be allowed to skip questions.
1. Climategate. Do you think it was a tempest in a teapot, something mildly worrying, very worrying, or a peak under the rock of climatology? (I haven’t spelled out the questions that follow to this extent.)
2. The Hockey Stick. To what extent do you think the original study has been debunked?
3. To what extent do you think its conclusions are still true regardless?
4. Extinctions. How many are likely under a business as usual scenario by 2050? By 2100? Etc.
5. Extreme weather. Under a business as usual scenario, what opinion do you have about an increase or decrease in (tornados, hurricanes, droughts, floods, earthquakes, hail, snow, etc.)
6. Sea level. Under a business as usual scenario, what opinion do you have about an increase or decrease in it?
7. Global ice extent. Under a business as usual scenario, what opinion do you have about an increase or decrease in it?
8. Arctic sea ice. Ditto.
9. Land ice on Greenland and Antarctica. Ditto.
10. Methane release from permafrost. How worrisome a problem under business as usual?
11. How closely will global temperature anomalies match the IPCC’s scenarios over the next 5 / 10 / 20 years?
12. The “missing” tropical hotspot. How much of a problem is this?
13. The “missing” heat. How much of a problem is this?
14. The IPCC and its reports. How credible? (This question could be broken down into many smaller questions.)
15. The IAC’s criticisms of the IPCC. How justified?
16. Renewables. How soon do you think they will be cost-competitive with fossil fuel (assuming all costs are accounted for)?
17. How soon would they be cost-competitive if fossil fuel “subsidies” were removed?
18. Should move to renewables now even if CO2 weren’t a problem?
19. Biofuel and ethanol. Worth continuing?
20. Nuclear power. What do you think about moving to it?
21. Hydropower. Should there be more or less of it?
22. Cold fusion. Should it be funded?
23. Amory Lovins. Your opinion?
24. The Third World. If they won’t agree to match the pace of the West’s emission reductions, should we reduce our emissions sharply anyway?
25. If they do agree to match our reductions, how well do you think they will actually perform?
26. Climate contrarians. What do you think of climatologists who hold contrarian views?
27. What do you think on non-climatologist scientists who hold contrarian views?
28. What do you think of laymen who hold contrarian views?
29. “The time for debate is over—the time for action has begun.” (Gore, approximately.) Do you agree?
30. Debates. What sort of debate would you think would be fair/worthwhile, if any?
31. Peer review. Is it fair, or is there a bias against contrarian views?
32. Funding. Is it fair, or is there a bias against contrarian views?
33. Does climatology need more funding, and if so, how much? And for what purposes?
34. Media. How fairly do you think the mass media have handled the global warming topic? (This question could be subdivided by types of media, country of media, level of media, etc.)
35. “Silent Spring.” Your opinion?
36. Cap and Trade. What’s your opinion?
37. Global financial crisis. How much of a problem will this be for funding a switch to renewables?
38. Popular backlash against increased fuel & power bills. How much of a problem might this become?
39. Agenda 21. Your opinion?
40. The EU. Your opinion?
I’ll probably think of twenty more by tomorrow. These are all “off the top of my head,” typing as fast as I could. Please repost freely. This sort of challenge is the only effective counterpoint we can make to the 97% meme.
41. Contrarian criticism. What have you read of it?
42. (A long list of books pro and con on climate and the envioronment.) “Please check all that you have read.”
43. What funding have you received over the past ten years?
44. Archiving and open access to data and software programs. Your opinion?
45. What do you think of Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”?
46. List what presidential candidates you voted for in the last ten elections.
How is any of that a counterpoint to gas spectroscopy?
If you measured surface temps with a gas spectrometer, it wouldn’t be, but you don’t.
If you can calculate that less energy will leave, and can measure that the same is coming in, you can fairly well understand that the system will warm.
Do you think there is a problem with the law regarding the conservation of energy?
As a small adjustment to your questions – let’s include the concept of acceleration of change.
For example in relation to sea level:
Do you think that sea level is, on average, rising?
At what rate do you believe the sea level is rising, on average. Answers in mm/year?
Do you consider the current rate of sea level rise to be of any concern?
If you have answered that sea level is currently rising, then is it rising at an accelerating rate?
If yes, then is this acceleration caused by anthropogenic influence? Partly or in whole?
Maybe, if we provide the known answers after the survey has been completed, then in addition to learning something about what the experts think – we may also be able to teach the experts something about what is now known about the climate.
If any can show a refutation of Fourier 1825, Tyndall 1856, or Arrhenius 1896, let us know. It’s only been 100+ years, maybe one of them will be refuted next year.
As for: “It seems curious to me that if man-made climate change is so certain, why do some people feel the need to prove that a majority of their peers believe in it and that anyone who doesn’t is simply wrong?”
Umm, looked in a mirror lately? You, and people like you, are the reason. People can believe you, whose web site makes statements directly contradicted by your research, or they can believe that the majority of researchers over the last 200 years have not been entirely wrong.
Arrhenius, like IPCC after him, included in his calculations latitudinal effects and feedback from presumed changes in water vapor, but he omitted clouds, convection of heat upwards in the atmosphere and other essential factors, leading to erroneous conclusions and exaggerated estimates of warming.
Yup, a real trend-setter!
So, no, you can’t refute Arrhenius.
BTW, how do you figure convection up to the tropopause conducts energy up past the stratosphere?
And why do you think convection did not exist prior to our increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere?
“presumed changes in water vapor”
Presumed? Quick question: Which has a higher absolute humidity, cold winter air, or warm summer air? You seem unaware of basic chemistry, and yet you hold your opinion of science higher than the vast majority of researchers.
You might also want to come to grips with the reality that increasing humidity has been observed.
“We use satellite measurements to highlight a distinct radiative signature of upper tropospheric moistening over the period 1982 to 2004. The observed moistening is accurately captured by climate model simulations and lends further credence to model projections of future global warming.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/310/5749/841.short
Why would I want to refute him? Scarcely anyone here wants to do that. Most skeptics consider the GHE valid. Did you really believe otherwise?
Why would you think that I think that convection didn’t exist before? The issue is that there are major negative feedbacks on the GHE that IPCC ignores.
The issue with the GHE is that it is negligible, not that it doesn’t exist. Why is that distinction hard for you to grasp?
OK, in 1896 Arrhenius said that digging fossil fuel out of the ground and burning it would warm the earth, and you say you have no reason to refute him, but you think the majority of scientists are wrong when they say that is what we are seeing today.
I don’t think we are having a rational discussion.
Chris G
September 24, 2015 at 8:24 pm
Clearly, the models have way overstated the positive feedback effect from water vapor. In the ten years since your citation was published, GASTA has actually fallen, as observed by satellites and balloons.
So, clearly, the old paper you linked has been shown false.
Care to show the research for that assertion?
Meanwhile,
“We show observational evidence for a stratospheric water vapor feedback—a warmer climate increases stratospheric water vapor, and because stratospheric water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, this leads to further warming. ”
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/45/18087.short
It’s not an assertion, but an observation. Don’t know how you missed all the news about the so-called “pause”, better considered a plateau, since from flat, temperatures could go either up or down.
The satellites and balloons clearly show that the earth stopped warming in the late 1990s. So did the “surface record”, despite its being manipulated, until the latest, totally unjustified “adjustments”.
Chris G
September 24, 2015 at 8:33 pm
Clearly, we are seeing no such thing today.
With steadily rising CO2 since WWII, we have seen global cooling from 1945 to 1977, then 20 years of slight warming until 1996, followed by flat to cooling temperatures since then. So the man-made GHE “worked” for only 20 of the past 50 years, purely by accident. Where is this global warming of which you speak?
Callendar in 1938, like Arrhenius, imagined that increasing CO2 was warming the planet. Because he practiced the scientific method, Callendar admitted that, after the extreme winter of 1961/62, he was wrong. Only after the global cooling scare of the ’70s was the already falsified hypothesis of man-made global warming revived. But this time it was supposed to be bad, rather than good, as for Arrhenius and Callendar.
The warming of the 1920s to ’40s was natural, just like the warming of the 1970s to ’90s. CO2 had little to nothing to do with it.
But even if the man-made GHE should at some future date become detectable, it will be a good thing, just as Arrhenius and Callendar believed.
Chris G says:
If any can show a refutation of Fourier 1825, Tyndall 1856, or Arrhenius 1896, let us know.
As usual, Chris gets it backward. Those making the conjecture that human CO2 emissions will cause runaway global warming (or any global warming, for that matter) have the onus — not skeptics.
Skeptics are laughing at the complete inability of any of them to produce an empirical, testable, replicable measurement quantifying AGW. The alarmist crowd is convinced it’s a big problem. But they can’t even measure it after “200 years” of searching:
People can believe you, whose web site makes statements directly contradicted by your research, or they can believe that the majority of researchers over the last 200 years have not been entirely wrong.
We’re not asking to be believed, and that’s just the appeal to authority fallacy. The alarmist cult has the onus of demonstrating that measurable AGW exists. They have failed for 200 years, and that can only be because of two possible reasons:
Either AGW doesn’t exist, or it is too tiny to measure. Take your pick. I think it’s the second reason myself. If AGW is too minuscule to measure, then it is a complete non-problem and no more public money should be wasted on the AGW scare.
We don’t have to refute Fourier, Tyndall or Arrhenius. That’s just deflection. All we have to do is ask: where are the measurements? There aren’t any. Thus, “dangerous AGW” is a false alarm, based mainly on assertions.
Let’s see, on one side, you have 200 years of measurements of the physical world, and on the other, you have your wishful thinking. No, if you want to counter physical measurements, you have to bring physical measurements, not wishful thinking.
“where are the measurements? There aren’t any.”
You mean, there aren’t any except for every spectroscopic analysis over the last 150 years, direct satellite measurements,
http://www.geo.cornell.edu/geology/classes/Geo101/graphics/Nimbus_energy_out.jpg
and the 10 years of watching the greenhouse effect increase in exactly the wavelengths only affected by CO2.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/nature14240.html
What, you think CO2 molecules absorb and emit IR only above those two stations and everywhere else in the universe they do not?
Clearly, to me, anyway, DB referred to measurements of man-made global warming, for which evidence is in short supply, to say the most. That’s a separate issue from the existence of a so-called GHE, of which most here accept the validity. In fact those who push hardest against it, the self-styled “Sky Dragon Slayers”, are banned.
The issue is whether the effect on climate of man-made CO2 is important (or even measurable) and beneficial, as Arrhenius thought, or deleterious, or negligible on temperature and beneficial to plants, as most here are convinced.
Put another way, is ECS 3.0 degrees C, as IPCC would have it, virtually without evidence, or closer to 1.0 degree, as observations indicate?
Clearly, you did not understand that the effect of man’s CO2 emissions have been directly measured.
The effect on global mean temperature of CO2 from human sources has not ever been measured. Had it been, science would know ECS with great precision. IPCC’s present, lowered range is 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C per doubling. It’s probably more like -0.5 to 1.5 degrees because of the net negative feedbacks ignored by IPCC.
You get the best statistical post processing fit (MOS) to the climate models by multiplying forecast times 0.4 = observed.
In other words, the climate models have forecast more than twice the observed warming. If the models had no skill and CO2 was not a factor in the warming, then the coefficient would be near zero.
The sample size of forecast vs observed is so small that randomness and luck (good or bad) is a serious concern. But, as a climatologist who works in quantitative forecasting and verification, I have two tentative conclusions…
(1) CO2 is a factor in the warming. The models forecast warming. CO2 is the prime forcing in the models. The atmosphere has warmed.
(2) The models have over-forecast the warming by a factor of greater than two. This doesn’t mean the models are worthless. It just suggests that their assumptions of the unknowns are likely flawed or their is a feedback problem.
For those old enough to remember, the old LFM model was the state of the art weather forecasting model in the late 70s to about 1985. It always over-forecast rain. Forecasters would laugh and cut it in half. The MOS forecasts would statistically cut it in half. The model wasn’t useless. It just had bias. Raw model output always does. That’s why raw model data must be statistically post-processed to link it to reality. This is difficult to do with the small sample size of climate forecasts.
But until the models are substantially changed… the forecast for me is …
Temp forecast = Climate Model Forecast * 0.4
This puts us around 1.2 deg/century
Is there a problem with conservation of energy?
Chris,
Even if there is a positive feedback from water vapor, it clearly is cancelled out by the negative feedbacks ignored by the IPCC.
Were that not the case, then the world would not have cooled under rapidly rising CO2 for the 32 years after the end of WWII, nor would it have stayed the same or cooled for the going on 19 (or more) past years.
If ECS, as seems likely, based upon a plethora of recent studies, is less than 2.0 degrees per doubling, then there is nothing to worry about. If man-made GW is negligible and more CO2 is beneficial, what is the problem?
It just occurred to me that your prior comment about convection indicates that you might not understand how negative feedbacks work. I sometimes make the mistake of supposing that others understand climatic phenomena.
Convection is not a fixed quantity. It will increase as the difference in heat between a warmer layer and a cooler layer increases. Thus, convection will increase between a part of the atmosphere warmed by increased GHEs and a cooler part. This is a negative feedback in the climate system, just as are clouds in certain layers, damping out whatever effect more H2O in the air might have.
Like Arrhenius, the IPCC and modelers ignore or understate such negative feedback effects. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the IPCC’s predictions and the GCMs have failed so miserably to reflect observed reality for going on 20 years or more.
Day to Day Temperature Difference
Surface data from NCDC’s Global Summary of Days data, this is ~72 million daily readings,
from all of the stations with >360 daily samples per year.
Data source:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/
Code:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gsod-rpts/
This is a chart of the annual average of day to day surface station change in min temp.
(Tmin day-1)-(Tmin d-0)=Daily Min Temp Anomaly= MnDiff = Difference
For charts with MxDiff it is equal = (Tmax day-1)-(Tmax d-0)=Daily Max Temp Anomaly= MxDiff
MnDiff is also the same as
(Tmax day-1) – (Tmin day-1) = Rising
(Tmax day-1) – (Tmin day-0) = Falling
Rising-Falling = MnDiff
Chris,
If people believe the earth’s surface temps rose over the decades of the 80’s and 90’s, why exactly ought they to believe the CO2 in the atmosphere would NOT rise for a while, AS A RESULT OF THAT WARMING? Ice core samples seem to pretty clearly indicate that pattern occurred throughout the “record”, do they not?
This looks a lot like the tomfoolery Mr. Gore pulled in his infamous “Inconvenient Truth” video, to me, with a “satellite data” veneer pasted over “the top”, so to speak.
I’m no “climate scientist” but I can understand that if warming inevitably causes increased CO2, and increased CO2 inevitably causes further warming, we wouldn’t be here to discuss this “crisis” . . we would have been baked to a crisp long ago. That’s a guaranteed recipe for hell on earth, it seems to me. Logically speaking, CO2 cannot be “driving” this bus, I say.
Oh. But its different now. /sarc. There are taxes to be collected andd grants to be issued only if there is a potential crisis.
Climate change is not some theoretical problem that can be solved or a law of physics that is black and white. It is a real world problem with zillions of variables and many unknowns and a very limited sample of forecast verification.
I basically agree with the two questions asked in this ridiculous survey. Yes, the Earth is warmer. Yes, humans probably are contributing, maybe significantly.
The “catastrophic “part is where I have a serious problem. That requires judgment and a tenth of a degree warming per decade simply doesn’t scare me. If we can’t adapt to that then we are doomed to the scrap heap of evolution anyway. As for saving the earth, the earth will be fine long after we are gone. The idea is to “save the humans” and at a tenth of a degree per decade, I don’t think we need saving.