I don’t like to use the word “fraud”, and I can’t recall if I’ve ever used it in a title. In this case it is warranted. Brandon Shollenberger writes of a new book, The Climate Wars:
How the Consensus is Enforced, that proves without a doubt that John Cook and his “Skeptical Science” team are nothing but a gang of “say anything” activists, and that the much repeated “97% consensus” is indeed nothing more than a manufactured outcome.
He writes via email:
I recently “hacked” Skeptical Science again to find CONFIDENTIAL material. By which I mean I download some PDF files from publicly accessible locations and found out one of them was a manuscript submitted for publication, which as a submitted manuscript was supposed to be kept CONFIDENTIAL. Instead, it was posted in a location anyone could access.
The paper is rather remarkable in that it admits several of the criticisms of the (in)famous Cook et al consensus paper, such as saying:
During the rating process of C13, raters were presented only with the paper title and abstract to base their rating on. Tol (2015) queries what steps were taken to prevent raters from gathering additional information. While there was no practical way of preventing such an outcome, raters conducted further investigation by perusing the full paper on only a few occasions, usually to clarify ambiguous abstract language.
Which acknowledges the raters on the project cheated and looked at material they weren’t supposed to look at (but insisting it is okay because the raters only cheated a few times, trust us). Similarly, the paper acknowledges the raters were not independent of one another like Cook et al claimed, but rather:
Raters had access to a private discussion forum which was used to design the study, distribute rating guidelines and organise analysis and writing of the paper. As stated in C13: “some subjectivity is inherent in the abstract rating process. While criteria for determining ratings were defined prior to the rating period, some clarifications and amendments were required as specific situations presented themselves”. These “specific situations” were raised in the forum.
But even this admission is a deception as anyone who looks at the forum would know fully well the discussions between raters were not merely to seek clarifications and amendments, but included raters straight up asking one another how they would rate various papers.
There’s plenty more to be said about all this, and I wrote a post about this, but I wrote a more thorough discussion in a new eBook I just published. I’ve been meaning to publish an eBook on this topic for some time, but prior to this latest discovery, I couldn’t find a way to write it properly. Now I think I have.
A couple of excerpts from my reading of it are below.
The difference between how Skeptical Science behaves in private and how it behaves in public is both troubling and insightful. It is important not because being able to label people hypocrites is a big deal but because it reveals the lies and deceptions the group uses to promote its consensus message. For instance, we saw above the original plan was to describe their results on the consensus about global warming in the form of:
‘There’s an x% consensus supporting the AGW theory, and y% explicitly put the human
contribution at >50%’.
But they chose to abandon this plan and describe the results in the form:
Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that
humans are causing global warming.
After seeing their results and realizing how embarrassing it’d be for them to say:
‘There’s an x% consensus supporting the AGW theory, and y% explicitly put the human
contribution at >50%’.
But the reality is the Skeptical Science group intentionally misled people time and time again.
…
This also shows the falsity of the claim in the paper:
Each abstract was categorized by two independent, anonymized raters. The study participants were all members of the same Skeptical Science group, were often friends and they were actively talking to one another about how to categorize papers. There may be some semantic parsing which would make the claim these raters were “independent” true, but Cook and his colleagues must have known there’s no way anyone reading their paper would have guessed the
“independent” raters were talking to one another about how to rate things:
Similarly, while it may be true the raters were only presented certain information as part of the
rating system, Cook and his colleagues intentionally left out the fact the raters cheated and looked up
additional information.
That gave the readers an impression Cook and colleagues knew would be false.
Even if one feels their statements weren’t technically lies, they were clearly attempts to deceive people.
Perhaps the most remarkable example of this sort of deception, however, is the fact the paper claimed these raters were “independent.”
You can find the new eBook here:
At 99 cents, I think it is a bargain.
It is clear that the 97% of scientists figure is an exaggeration. The issue is how much of one. It is also clear to me you can buy a lot of scientist for 4.7 billion dollars year (the amount of Federal budget dollars allocated to pro AGW research). I believe the percentage of scientists doing pro AGW research and therefore appearing to BELIEVE AGW is a purchased percentage. Remember next to sex, money is the most power force in our modern society.
Everything these alarmists say is fully substantiated by their own opinion! (That’s from a placard on one of my shelves.) Their “science” is comprised of obfuscation, distraction, denial, and outright lies.
Yea good ol Steven Goddard was right after all beware if Sanders or clintoris wins this site will be closed down, we are entering dark times I hope to XXXX that CRuz wins its the only thing that will save America
Purchased Brandon Shollenberger’s series of three books at Amazon.
Thanks! I hope you enjoy them. The style of this latest book is quite a bit different than that of the other two, and they may be a bit more dry, but I think they convey a greater amount of information.
translation: Brandon does’n think he went off half-cocked and doesn’t remember wishing that readers of his material die in a fire (Anthony’s readers, yes; Brandon’s readers & cash cows, no).
I remember what I wrote in that post just fine. I stand by every word of it. If anybody actually had a response to the accusations and arguments I made in it, I’m sure they’d post it. Instead, we just get people whining that I wasn’t nice.
You can do that if you’d like, but personally, I’d rather try to be productive.
I’m not at all happy with Brandon’s choice of words, but in this case, getting the word out on this superseded my disgust with his labeling.
I’ve been called worse. Once some fool claimed I have sex with farm animals.
I note that the co-author Mark Richardson has left University of Reading and joined NASA’s JPL working on the ‘Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2’.
We may now have a satellite to be suspicious of.
No doubt about that. OCO-2 were supposed to publish map results. Haven’t, since apparently not what they wanted. Guest post here previously from somone who wrote a good enough mapping algorithm and thereby displayed some of the problems. CO2 not well mixed, and anomalous high over Africa. So much for AGW.
ristvan said:
OCO-2 were supposed to publish map results. Haven’t, since apparently not what they wanted.
That’s what I suspected would happen when it was first announced. That was after the Japanese satellite failure.
We can be sure that if the data supported their narrative, it would be plastered all over the climate journals. But we don’t hear about it; the crickets are too loud.
Yes they did. It’s just that they were focusing on a whole year’s data. the New Horizons folks have a much better commitment toward getting Pluto photos out to the public ASAP. (They’re still coming in.)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/04/oco-2-orbiting-carbon-observatory-2-the-mission-has-released-an-animation/
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco2/index.html
The scientific criticism of Cook’s study may be valid, but it won’t be effective. Cook’s ambition is not to sway or impress a scientific audience. Instead, his study was designed for the very purpose of being abridged, misrepresented, and abused for political gain. Right from the start, it was propaganda dressed up as science. It’s an extension of what he has long been doing on his SKS web site, where in each of his posts he always prefixes his side of the argument with the phrase: “What the science says.”
Cook is a gifted and effective propagandist, and this is how he became popular with the CAGW crowd. Judging by his sartorial preferences, he takes pride in his chosen profession.
Which is why upthread I suggested the 97% consensus antidote was irrefutable political sound bites, not more technical study deconstructions. Perhaps you could helpfully suggest some?
So far, more than 97% of all doomsday predictions have failed.
.”Scientists attack the SCIENCE …..Trolls attack the scientist !” (slightly edited for grammar)
Oh how I wish I could agree with that! But the evidence of decades of observing science in action puts lie to the assertion. One famous physicist said something like to be ahead of your time by too many years was to be labeled a crackpot rather than win a Nobel. (no time to look that quote up just now)
Human nature does not change just because a guy puts on his lab coat and enters the lab. In fact, I think the special language of academic attack may be even worse than the way Bubba down at the pub verbally attacks his mother-in-law. Bubba is very plain, open, and honest you see.
Science should be one thing, but is most often something entirely different.
Yes, and the whole “Science” (or is it sciences?) is an honor system.
And it’s BROKEN.
And it will be slightly more broken if people here insist that not following very stupid study protocol is not that bad, cause very stupid.
The eternal conflict of Ego and Id . . .
Dawn, 26C and raining, thank God for Climate Change! I just put the air on.
It is Cook’s methodology that is the primary fraud here by pretending to be objective. Imagine that I wanted to prove that “ancient aliens” existed. Under Cook’s methodology I would only consider papers with the words “ancient aliens” in the title, and I would only want the opinions of self described “ancient alien theorists”. You would have to expect that the percentage of believers would be extremely high.
It can’t be repeated often enough…
“There’s a 97% consensus supporting the AGW theory, and 1.6% put the human contribution at >50%.”
I agree wholeheartedly. I think it’s a perfect, simple explanation of why the Skeptical Science consensus message is bunk.
“There’s a 97% consensus supporting the AGW theory, and 1.6% put the human contribution at >50%.”
As written, this sentence doesn’t make sense. By definition, the human contribution to AGW is 100%. I presume the 1.6% saying the contribution is more than 50% is in reference to change in some metric (termperature?) over some period of time (since industrial revolution?) versus natural variability?
DH, I just tried to post a slight mod that got lost in (I suppose) old iPad OS space, which, had it survived, would have addressed your excellent comment. The thought was deep enough, the subject (IMO) important enough, to merit a possible much longer guest post to offer to AW. I will start that tomorrow and see where it leads. There are several threads to weave together that might sharpen the point of the skeptical spear against the warmunist mastadon.
davidmhoffer,
Indeed. However, as written in AR5, the attribution statement is:
More than half of the observed increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST) from 1951 to 2010 is very likely due to the observed anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations.
Cook et al (2015) define the “consensus position” on AGW thus …
We examined a large sample of the scientific literature on global CC, published over a 21 year period, in order to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW).
… which is compatible with the AR5 statement. Anyone who actually reads Cook (2015) and cares to honestly evaluate what it says will find this statement:
Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.
The close agreement between the two figures suggests that Shollenberger’s accusations of “cheating” on the part of those who rated the abstracts, and “deception” on the part of Cook et al. are unfounded and therefore lacking merit. It’s at least as dubious as pretending the IPCC attribution statement makes the logical error of assigning < 100% of anthropogenic forcings to AGW when it clearly does not.
Brandon Gates, rather than rely on vague innuendo, would you perhaps care to explain how anything I’ve said is wrong? People pointing out:
Should perhaps be written as:
Does nothing to suggest any of the points I’ve made are wrong. Neither does the fact you can find two values in the Cook et al paper which are approximately equal when both values are generated via the same dishonest conflation I highlighted. That Cook et al repeated a dishonest approach when analyzing a second set of data does not make their first use of it any less dishonest.
If you want to focus on the fact I literally quoted one of the authors of the paper, and that original quotation was somewhat imprecise, you can, but… I don’t know what you think that would accomplish. I think you might accomplish a lot more if you tried actually addressing the things I’ve said.
Brandon Schollenberger,
I already provided the relevant quote:
Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.
Emphasis added as you apparently missed it the first time.
On the planet I inhabit, when researchers explain their methods and categorizations in detail, I don’t consider it dishonest. Why should your own subjective categorization be any more valid than theirs? Since when is a difference of opinion an a priori example of malfeasance?
Already done, twice now. When were you planning to extend the IPCC and Cook et al the same courtesy?
Brandon Gates, I’m at a loss as to what point you think you’re making. I honestly have no idea what your response to the first quote in your comment is supposed to mean because it doesn’t seem to have any connection to reality. You bolded something and said I apparently missed it, yet… I didn’t. You do nothing to make it appear I did. You don’t do anything to explain how what you bolded has anything to do with anything I said. Then based on this, you say:
The reality is Cook et al didn’t do this. One of the central points I’ve made is the descriptions they gave of their methodology were false, as well as how they described the results generated by that methodology. I went so far as to demonstrate this by quoting the second author of the paper on how to describe their results, a quote you criticized me for posting… even though it was an author of the paper who I was quoting.
I honestly have no idea what you think you’re saying. If you think I have said something wrong, I suggest you quote what I said and explain how it is wrong with sufficient detail or reference for people to verify what you say. Until you do so, it will just continue to look like you haven’t even read what you’re criticizing.
[SNIP – come up with a better argument than “you are being obtuse”. Stop wasting everybody’s time – Anthony
Anthony,
You have a category for tagging posts “fraud”. Two articles of the five tagged “fraud” contain the word in the title:
—————
UK Conference of Science Journalists: ‘institutions unlikely to fairly investigate allegations of fraud made against their own’
Anthony Watts / July 1, 2012
Guest post by Douglas J. Keenan
The 2012 UK Conference of Science Journalists was held on June 25th. The programme is available on the UKCSJ web site. The conference is intended for science journalists, as its name says; I attended at the kind invitation of the President of the Association of British Science Writers, Connie St Louis.
I went to two of the sessions. The first was a session was entitled “What can journalists do to uncover scientific misconduct?”. The second was the plenary at the end. What follows is my perspective on those sessions.
—————
Euro Carbon Market Fraud – trade suspended
Anthony Watts / January 20, 2011
From the Telegraph: European carbon market suspended over fraud fears
The European carbon market has been thrown into turmoil after the scandal-hit scheme was suspended for a week over suspicions of fraud.
—————
I would say you’re not exactly shy about using the word, or allowing guest authors to use it. You’re certainly not shy about alleging that climate scientists are politically motivated to reach laughably wrong conclusions. And you are of course quite vocal when they respond to your vacuous accusations of “mendacity” with “denigration”.
In short, self-awareness does not appear to be one of your strong points. Your sudden aversion to using the word “fraud” is but another example of it.
BG says:
You’re certainly not shy about alleging that climate scientists are politically motivated to reach laughably wrong conclusions.
It waddles like a duck. It has feathers. It quacks like a duck.
It’s a duck.
And after posting hundreds of thousands of words expressing your true belief in dangerous manmade global warming, you could easily put together an article of your own, instead of criticizing what other writers say.
I know why you don’t: your true belief would get cut to ribbons in short order. Because when it comes right down to the nitty gritty, you have no solid measurements, facts, or evidence to support your belief. You just believe. That’s enough for you, but it’s not enough for skeptics of that particular scare. We need the facts and measurements that your side hasn’t been able to produce.
PS, whoops, ignore: “Quoting the Hydro International news blurb:” Text editor user error.
dbstealey,
Quoting the Hydro International news blurb:
Yeah, that’ll hold up in court.
In other news: if it flaps its arms furiously trying to fly, it might be an ostrich. OTOH, one actually begins to wonder if dodos are really extinct.
Brandon Gates
I’m unclear on how comprehensive WUWT’s category for tagging posts “fraud” is, and I don’t know how many posts WUWT has over the review period (>10,000?).
In some of the material you reference, WUWT appeared to use “fraud” in the title because the attached third party material used the term (i.e.:the term was not initiated by WUWT). Even so 2/10,000 = 0.02%.
However, finding 2 articles with fraud in the title definitely does not support your judgement & charge of “self-awareness does not appear to be one of [Anthony’s] strong points. Your sudden aversion to using the word “fraud” is but another example of it.”
Geez. We got some serious nit-picking going on.
[snip – you’re done with this, the point’s been made. there is no need to clutter up the thread with a multi-page comment -mod]
mod,
[snip. –mod]
[it was a huge amount of text for a comment – all decisions are final -mod]
Please take the time to read my comments. Especially http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/03/12/the-cook-97-consensus-paper-exposed-by-new-book-for-the-fraud-that-it-really-is/#comment-2164766
Sigh.
Anthony has often discouraged people from claiming fraud without good supporting evidence. Pretty decent for a “deranged sociopath,” wouldn’t you say?
[snip -mod]
Brandon,
We are all aware that this site shines a light in some very dark corners, so why do you try to make something of the practice? Are you defending “deliberate scientific malfeasance”, or arguing against its exposure? What?
Your denigration of our host is not surprising, in light of the company you keep over at that stalker/hate blog, neither is the fact that you come here feigning distaste for use of terms like “fraud”, for the same reason. We have a good picture of you already, but do keep filling in any blanks for new readers.
Your off- topic thread bombing diversion didn’t work this time, but your self- exposure (again) was almost worth your appearance.
Alan Robertson,
Splash one irony meter. I don’t have any distaste for the word “fraud” itself, and never feigned such. As even my subsequent (shorter) comments have been binned, it’s pretty clear that the length of the original comment in this subthread wasn’t so unwelcome as the content. I find this more than a little amusing.
I wouldn’t wish to diminish your ability to think for me better than I can for myself. By all means, carry on with your self-soothing fantasies.
The only way to win the debate is to be honest, and to be honest, you have to explain pseudoscientists are perverting climate science for political and economic gain. That’s fraud, so you have to use the word.
Brandon: In your Amazon summary you say, “….it shows the tactics dangers of consensus messaging, …” I think this should probably be “… it shows the tactics AND dangers of …”
Right you are. Thanks for catching that! I submitted an update to fix that error, It may take a few hours to go live though.
Seeing as though master-bates likes giving it ,From my readings of WUWT you seem to be one of few that want to scorn personal slanders/insults on someone trying to put a fair balanced point of view on this subject .
Sorry I can’t read your bog still trying to get through ” green eggs and ham” and can’t really afford laying out 99 cents on a personal opinion .
As is her wont, Ms HotWhopper [Miriam O’Brien -mod] has a raging critique that avoids engaging with the contents of Mr Shollenberger’s book, while deleting comments that might steer the discussion into more intellectual waters.
Astute readers are aware that denizens of that site are in attendance, this thread.
I thought her post was rather funny myself. I like how she claims I hacked into forums at one point. Where does she get this stuff from?
(Also, really, if I’m just a script kiddie repeatedly breaking into Skeptical Science, why don’t they stop me? I mean, getting beat repeatedly by a script kiddie would seem rather embarrassing.)
Surely since belief in AGW is part of the examination to be a climate scientist the percentage belief is irrelevant. It is like saying that the jury we selected from those tested on their belief of the defendant’s guilt and passed with the highest marks found him guilty so he had a fair trial.
Actually, people who have no opinion on whether or not something is true at all may still examine the potential effects it might have. For instance, a person might be interested in the potential effects global warming could have on the local ecological systems they are involved in. Such a person might study what effects a rise in temperature for their area would have on the various life in that area.
The remarkable thing is that would likely be rated as endorsing the “consensus” by the Skeptical Science crowd.
While its that given that all he as they all he can sell is BS , you have to admit Cook has sold his BS well.
And now its part of ‘the causes ‘ dogma you could prove it worthless 97 times and it would still make no difference, I bet some who defend it endlessly have never even read it for consider the issue around it .
While the personal front given its made a ‘little man ‘ big then the author can never back down , for like Mann his only choice is to go ‘all-in ‘ . So although much satisfaction may be gained in taking it apart , again, in reality the story has moved on , and has ever its not about the ‘science’ of facts . The fact this claim did not match the sniff test from day one , the chances of honestly getting 97% again are virtual zero , means nothing .
Like others you best you can hope for is for Cook to live long enough to see that work held up has the joke and example of poor science in actions, in effect their legacy will be a ‘how not too ‘
Cook’s co-authors discussed abstracts with each other and looked up full papers but these affect only a small fraction of their data. Their claim that they found a ‘97% consensus’ is word-play, and the fact that they keep propagating the figure puts their actions in the realm of fraud. The paper itself, however, I am not sure, represents fraud. Cook and his friends say 97% of those that took a position’ support a consensus but in their study abstracts were assigned positions by the volunteers. Even if the claim is made that people secretly supported a purported consensus which the authors divined by reading their abstracts, it stands to reason that all papers from the mitigation and impacts literature would do the same, and therefore James Powell’s classification method is more correct than Cook’s.
The real false claim is the one supporting the derivation of the 97% figure from the paper’s data. While there are some serious anomalies in the abstract classification data, the authors did not conspire to create fraudulent or false data.
Whether or not the authors conspired to create fraudulent or false data has nothing to do with anything I said in my e-mail or eBook. I believe I made it quite clear the fraud was in the Skeptical Science group intentionally misrepresenting both what they did and what their results were. I don’t know of anyone who has been discussing anything but that so I’m not sure what you might be responding to.
Title of post:
Cook 97 Consensus paper exposed by new book for the fraud that it really is.
“I believe I made it quite clear the fraud was in the Skeptical Science group intentionally misrepresenting…”
Title of post:
Cook 97 consensus *paper* exposed by new book for the fraud that it really is.
When “scientists ” must support the scary global warming industry as a condition of receiving grants and other funding they cease to be scientists . The scientific community openly acknowledges this pressure to perform like trained seals or their funding is cut . As a result there is no “scientific consensus ” and never was . Who’s payroll was Cook on ?
“John Cook is the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland. He created the website Skeptical Science.com, which won the 2011 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for the Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge. In 2015, John was elected as a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, who are selected for their ‘distinguished contributions to science and scepticism’. John co-authored the college textbook Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis and the book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand. He won an award for Best Australian Science Writing for 2014, published by UNSW.”
In these trials it states that Q.U was involved in taking measurements of the precipitation enhanced by ATLANT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXjbQV3alY I asked John Crook If he had any info on whether ATLANT was running in the trial area’s at the time of the 2010/11 QLD floods. The noise from the crickets was deafening ,not a word. I guess he to has been CONd Censless as well. Jay Anderson had no joy getting this paper included in the inquiry. http://www.floodcommission.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/file/0011/4223/Anderson_Jay.pdf When the system starts F***ing it’s own people over , it’s time for a new system . Where’s Robin Hood when we need him?
A lie is, by definition, an attempt to deceive people. Saying something like 97% of some category ignored the truth that is was 97% of 77 papers, not 97% of 3000+papers. So the 97% figure is a flat out lie.
Everybody involved in science, and any of the soft sciences in particular, should be required to read “How to Lie with Statistics” by David Huff(1954). It’s been reprinted many times because it is a clear, humourous, and concise description of how statistics are manipulated to misrepresent the facts. It’s readily available for as little as $4.
This book is currently Amazon’s number 1 best seller in Weather!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/14484/ref=sr_bs_1_14484_1
Congratulations Brandon.
It’s also Amazon’s current number 1 best seller in:
Environmental Science
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/digital-text/158678011/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_kstore_1_6_last
Climatology
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/16053231/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_b_2_4_last
One-Hour Science & Math Short Reads
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/digital-text/8624196011/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_kstore_3_4_last
Science is not a democracy. Theories are not validated by scientists voting on them. The laws of science are not some form of legislation. The existence of such a very non scientific study is evidence that SKS in not really a scientific site but rather a political site. Having to use the consensus argument is evidence that there is something very wrong with the AGW conjecture.
Therein lies the salient point of all the back and forth on this comment board. Once upon a time there was a “Consensus” that the world was flat and that the Sun revolved around the earth. 1000 years from now society will laugh at the census takers of the early 21st century who insisted that carbon is poison and CO2 is a pollutant caused by man and responsible for catastrophic global warming.
Thats the point, Copernicus was a scientist. The people who claimed the earth was not flat, and the sun did not revolve around the earth were the Scientists, just like the people today who say the planet is not cooling are the Scientists. The Scientists were right then so why would people in the future laugh at what the Scientists say now? The Scientists were not wrong.
Lou, lou, lou, you have your history twisted which is often the case when people put ideology over science i.e.facts.
Copernicus was a maverick, ostracized by the mainstream science community because he bucked conventional, read consensus, knowledge of the day. The 97% of scientists in the 1500’s believed the earth to be the center of the universe. Of course in the 1500’s we had far fewer universities churning out far fewer scientists, with far fewer specialties but that is a story for another day. My point is scientific facts rule, consensus is meaningless ideology. In the case of CAGW the mythological derived 3% are chasing the truth while the 97% are chasing political favor, read grant money.
From Space.com
.”The truth emerges It was not until the year 1543 when the great Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) had his lifelong work “De revolutionibus” published, that the secret of the odd retrograde loops were finally revealed. By demoting the Earth from its hallowed position at the center of the solar system and replacing it with the Sun, he was able to triumphantly explain the riddle of the apparent “backwards motion effect” of the planets – See more at: http://www.space.com/4613-cosmic-illusion-mars-move.html#sthash.tGxk4fn6.dpuf
Bill, you’ve written an engaging alternative view of history but you seem to have a basic misunderstanding of Copernicus and of his times. He was not a maverick who bucked the ‘consensus’, nor was he ostracized by any ‘mainstream science community’. He was a great mathematician who was invited by the clergy to figure out the problems w the Ptolemaic model and calendar. The Catholic Church had great influence in the overall acceptance of Ptolemy’s model woven in w the philosophies of the great philosophers of ancient times. The problems w Ptolemy’s model were well known at the time, and for many centuries before, by learned individuals of many different cultures. Even the Church knew which is why they invited him. Copernicus built upon the knowledge of those previous individuals and of his peers and used his own great knowledge of mathematics to demonstrate a new theory.
There was no ‘mainstream science community’ back then, the word scientist did not even evolve until the 19th century. The accepted European view was fostered greatly by the Churches geocentric system based on Ptolemy and the natural philosophers of the past. The Modern Science we now know was born with/around the time of Copernicus. The telescope was not invented until 60 years after Copernicus passed. The Modern Science we have today is much different than when it was considered Natural Philosophy.
Lou Maytrees said: “Thats the point, Copernicus was a scientist. The people who claimed the earth was not flat, and the sun did not revolve around the earth were the Scientists, just like the people today who say the planet is not cooling are the Scientists. The Scientists were right then so why would people in the future laugh at what the Scientists say now? The Scientists were not wrong.”
“Copernicus… was a polyglot and polymath who obtained a doctorate in canon law [religious ecclesiastical laws] and also practiced as a physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist.”
Point-Copernicus wasn’t just a “scientist”. And Copernicus is known for his belief that solar system was heliocentric, not geocentric. MOST scientists of his day believed in Aristotle’s “science” which was the opposite of Copernicus’s. Copernicus was a scientist who BUCKED the consensus among scientists of his time. SOME scientists today are doing the same thing-bucking the consensus regarding climate change. There are THOUSANDS of peer-reviewed papers published every year that buck the declarations of the AGW theory…written by scientists. Both sides cannot be right. At some point in the future, what is really true will be known, and people will chuckle at what “some scientists” used to think.
About the notion that Christianity is the source of the idea that the earth was flat….
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/history/1997Russell.html
“In my research, I looked to see how old the idea was that medieval Christians believed the earth was flat. I obviously did not find it among medieval Christians. Nor among anti-Catholic Protestant reformers. Nor in Copernicus or Galileo or their followers, who had to demonstrate the superiority of a heliocentric system, but not of a spherical earth. I was sure I would find it among the eighteenth-century philosophers, among all their vitriolic sneers at Christianity, but not a word.
I am still amazed at where it first appears. No one before the 1830s believed that medieval people thought that the earth was flat. The idea was established, almost contemporaneously, by a Frenchman and an American, between whom I have not been able to establish a connection, though they were both in Paris at the same time. One was Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848), an academic of strong antireligious prejudices who had studied both geography and patristics and who cleverly drew upon both to misrepresent the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth, in his On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers (1834).
The American was no other than our beloved storyteller Washington Irving (1783-1859), who loved to write historical fiction under the guise of history. “
Alphan, it was the power and influence of the Catholic Church of the times which upheld the geocentric model by incorporating Ptolemy and the Natural Philosophers. The Church carried much influence back then. But there were many learned scientific persons of Copernicus’ time and before who knew the problems associated with his (Ptolemy’s) model. So Copernicus was not really bucking anything, he was building on and using known sources who understood that something was not correct with Ptolemy.
And i’ll agree, i’m sure he was much more than ‘just a scientist’. The term was used in reply to
Bill.
“In 1543, the geocentric system met its first serious challenge with the publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), which posited that the Earth and the other planets instead revolved around the Sun. The geocentric system was still held for many years afterwards, as at the time the Copernican system did not offer better predictions than the geocentric system, and it posed problems for both natural philosophy and scripture. The Copernican system was no more accurate than Ptolemy’s system, because it still used circular orbits. This was not altered until Johannes Kepler postulated that they were elliptical (Kepler’s first law of planetary motion).”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model
So we see that the “consensus” about the movement of planets in our solar system took, literally, thousands of years to come anywhere close to being accurate, at least as we understand it today. NONE of these past thinkers/studiers/observers were completely correct in their individual theories, and once a general theory took hold then….just like today…. it took a long time for that theory to become abandoned worldwide.
20+ years ago, someone declared AGW theory a settled science, and human induced “climate change” as an observable and dangerous thing. But for the past 20+ years tens of thousands of observations and studies have proven otherwise. Some aspects of the theory ARE settled, but the Earth’s system is chaotic, coupled, and constantly in movement and we haven’t even figured out how to predict it’s outcome past a few days to any reliable degree. Like history has shown over and over again, what we know a century from now will be leaps and bounds from what we know today. And I have no doubt that many things we currently believe will be hilariously funny to the people of the future. Do you think we’ve reached the pinnacle of human understanding already?
http://www.languagemonitor.com/science/what-exactly-is-settled-science/
Aphan, thats an interesting wikipedia article. They note an Arab astronomer Ibn al-Shatir had, a century and a half before, written a book with models which were mathematically identical to Copernicus, he simply didn’t make the leap/connections Copernicus did. They also note that as early as the 10th Century, Muslim scholars had been writing many manuscripts seriously questioning Ptolemy.
Lou said-
“They note an Arab astronomer Ibn al-Shatir had, a century and a half before, written a book with models which were mathematically identical to Copernicus, he simply didn’t make the leap/connections Copernicus did. They also note that as early as the 10th Century, Muslim scholars had been writing many manuscripts seriously questioning Ptolemy.”
Yes, it says that. What is your point? Mine is that no one seriously questioned Ptolemy for almost 900 years! Do you think the Catholic Church or scholars in Europe simply didn’t know about Shatir’s work and would have taken the Muslim scholars seriously if they had just seen their theories?
Let’s say that the same scenario/human nature applies today that applied back then. Let’s assume that perhaps non AGW scientists are publishing work that directly opposes the supposed “consensus” but they will be ignored for another 300 years until “the powers that be” must face the truth and embrace something that flies in the face of what was accepted prior. Can we laugh at them then?
Aphan, the point is, as it says right in the Wikipedia Geocentric article you posted, learned individuals and philosophers were questioning Ptolemy at least 600 years before Copernicus figured it out. So how can you say ‘no one seriously questioned Ptolemy for 900 years’? Your article you posted says just the opposite, it was questioned right from the start.
And Copernicus’ theory was well received right from the start. It took other scientists to figure out the inconsistencies in it, Kepler was born less than 30 yrs after Copernicus died.
“Aphan, the point is, as it says right in the Wikipedia Geocentric article you posted, learned individuals and philosophers were questioning Ptolemy at least 600 years before Copernicus figured it out. So how can you say ‘no one seriously questioned Ptolemy for 900 years’? Your article you posted says just the opposite, it was questioned right from the start.”
Sorry, let me clarify. There weren’t any “serious contenders” for an alternative theory until Copernicus came along. Questioning a theory is different from proposing an alternative theory to replace it with. A lot of people today demand that skeptics come up with an alternative theory to replace AGW theory with. And many learned individuals are working on it and many skeptical scientists seriously question the AGW theory. (almost NONE support the CAGW predictions at all). Many, MANY scientists have published papers and studies that provide reasonable answers that can explain all of the warming we’ve have since 1950.
The whole point here is that it took 1000 years to take down Ptolemy’s theories, and they were WRONG all of that time. It won’t take that long to take down AGW theory, because the planet is NOT cooperating with their predictions, and the longer they are wrong, the less support that theory is getting.
YOUR whole argument in the beginning was that the “Scientists back then were right” and yet in reality, only a few WERE actually right. The “leading Scientific theory” for centuries was geocentric…and it was WRONG. Science is always growing, learning, discovering and advancing. It’s never “finished” or “settled”.
Are you sure Aphan? From what i’ve read most “skeptic” scientists only disagree on the actual percentage of the problem caused by human made CO2. They all agree that human made CO2 is part of the reason for the warming though.
Lou said:”Are you sure Aphan? From what i’ve read most “skeptic” scientists only disagree on the actual percentage of the problem caused by human made CO2. They all agree that human made CO2 is part of the reason for the warming though.”
“They all agree…”
Do they Lou? Have to talked to ALL of them? Have you read statements directly from ALL of them? Its obvious you haven’t READ all of them.
Have you spoken to the Scientists who published the studies on the following page-
http://www.c3headlines.com/climate-change-non-co2-causes/
Or these-
http://www.c3headlines.com/peer-reviewed-research-studies-climate-change-related-other.html
There are literally thousands of studies out there, all peer reviewed, that demonstrate other things that could be causing ALL of the current warming. I can give you plenty of links when you’re done with just those two.
Lou: “C’mon Aphan, Bill’s reply was to an earlier comment and he was equating ‘census takers’ w the scientists of today and the ‘consensus’. He was trying to use a belittling pun to equate the beliefs of the Dark & Middle Ages w the Modern Science we have today. It’s a false equivalency b/c it was scientists who figured out that the geocentric theory and beliefs (consensus) of earlier times were incorrect. So it was scientists who proved the earth is not the center of the galaxy, just as its scientists over the past couple of centuries who have figured out AGW.”
Did you know that up until 1950, the idea that climate could change rapidly…on its own (without any human influence) was a controversial idea?? By the 1970s the idea was that climate COULD change rapidly, on it’s own, but over the course of a century…by 1980…in 50 years or less! Then….1990’s…in a decade or less!
“Swings of temperature that in the 1950s scientists had believed would take tens of thousands of years, in the 1970s thousands of years, and in the 1980s hundreds of years, were now found to take only decades.
Ice core analysis by Dansgaard’s group, confirmed by the Americans’ parallel hole, showed rapid oscillations of temperature repeatedly at irregular intervals throughout the last glacial period. Greenland
had sometimes warmed a shocking 7 C within a span of less than 50 years. For one group of American scientists on the ice in Greenland, the “moment of truth” struck on a single day in midsummer 1992 as they
analyzed a cylinder of ice, recently emerged from the drill hole, that came from the last years of the Younger Dryas. They saw an obvious change in the ice, visible within three snow layers, that is, scarcely three
years! The team analyzing the ice was first excited, then sobered—their view of how climate could change had shifted irrevocably.”
https://www.aip.org/history/climate/pdf/Rapid.pdf
And this report- Abrupt Climate Change-Inevitable Surprises-National Academies Press-2002
“The climate record for the past 100,000 years clearly indicates that the climate system has undergone periodic–and often extreme–shifts, sometimes in as little as a decade or less.”
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10136/abrupt-climate-change-inevitable-surprises
Climate scientists STILL don’t understand the natural fluctuations of Earth’s climate fully….so how is it even possible for them to claim that they KNOW that humans are affecting it? There is ZERO empirical evidence that human CO2 has any impact on our climate. Correlation is not causation, even if it’s a perfect correlation between increasing CO2 and temperature increases. Anyone with statistical background and integrity can tell you that much.
You’re wasting your time here if you think statements about what “scientists” believe (without ANY proof that you could possibly know what scientists believe…like certification that you can read minds…) will have any impact on the regular posters here. ZIP. Appeals to authority are logical fallacies, and we eat those for breakfast around here.
Aphan, i clicked on your first two links, the first one – c3 seems to be a blog, not a scientist, and then the 2nd link i clicked on the first 4 articles. Didn’t go any further b/c they (the articles) were by A Watts, J Nova, c3, and M Morano. My bad but I was not aware that any of these people were scientists. So i saw no reason to go further.
I meant climate scientists like Roy Spencer or Judith Curry, who have accredited degrees in their fields.
Lou said-“Aphan, i clicked on your first two links, the first one – c3 seems to be a blog, not a scientist, and then the 2nd link i clicked on the first 4 articles. Didn’t go any further b/c they (the articles) were by A Watts, J Nova, c3, and M Morano. My bad but I was not aware that any of these people were scientists. So i saw no reason to go further.”
Ah, well I didn’t want to assume anything about your intelligence, computer literacy or the amount of energy you are willing to dedicate towards your research in prior comments. At least now I know. Live and learn, right?
On the first linked page, in the articles there are sections of words that are blue and highlighted. If you click on them, they lead to other sites in which peer reviewed papers have been posted or linked to that back up the articles that the author has posted about the topic at hand.
The second linked page is titled Peer Reviewed Research Studies, and has a brief explanation under it. At the bottom of that explanation it reads: (notes: updated on 6/25/2015; click on ‘#**’ for link to given study’s abstract) This means that if you click on the little symbols at the end of each linked title, rather than being taken to a site like WUWT, where THAT particular research paper is being discussed (and is ALWAYS linked to in the Opening Post)-you can SKIP that and go to directly to the papers authored by “real Scientists” that have accredited degrees in their fields.
You see, when I asked “Have you spoken to the Scientists who published the studies on the following”, I actually expected you to be able to FIND the studies being discussed on all those linked pages….and not assume (falsely) that I was too stupid to discern between an article by someone like Marc or Anthony, and the peer reviewed, published studies done by “accredited scientists” that are always directly linked to in those kinds of blog posts.
Lou said: “I meant climate scientists like Roy Spencer or Judith Curry, who have accredited degrees in their fields.”
Climate scientists like Roy Spencer and Judith Curry often have personal blogs. They often highlight and discuss “real scientific studies” done by other people on their blogs. Oddly enough, at times they discuss the same studies that Anthony or Marc have posted on their blog/aggregate sites. C3:Headlines is a climate related site which archives charts, reports, studies etc, and has interactive tools for users as well. Every chart or article links directly to the data referred to in the article or chart (remember those blue highlighted words are “clickable”) or is footnoted with a link directly to the source data-usually NASA, NOAA, GISS etc and what computer program was used to chart the data. If you need help discerning between expert opinions, informed opinions, mere discussions, and actual peer reviewed studies, I can ask my 14 year old son if he has the time to tutor you through it.
Many of the readers/commenters here at WUWT also have accredited degrees in scientific fields and discussions are often detailed and interesting.
NONE of the people who have come up with “consensus” studies are actual “climate scientists”…so why do you believe them over actual, real, climate scientists? NONE of the people who conducted “consensus” studies actually asked climate scientists to tell them exactly what they believe about global warming or climate change-both natural and possibly human caused. Pretending that you have “proven” that a consensus exists, without any evidence to prove that one does, is immoral, unscientific, and should be grounds for dismissal at the very least. But as long as there are people like you…who believe what they want to and can’t even find a study if it takes more than two clicks…the future looks bright.
Aphan, LOL, i feel your pain and the need to lash out. Its not easy is it? I’m not going to go into all you’ve written but you have misunderstood my meaning about links to blogs. c3 linking to HockeySchtick who links to an IOPScience and science paper about the ‘lag response in NAO and the 11 yr sunspot cycle’ does not in anyway disprove AGW, no matter what strange conclusions c3 makes based on it. Or clicking on one of his ‘source’ links for one of his graphs and it links to WUWT and an article by blathering Lord Monckton. Sorry you don’t get it son, but i’ve better things to do than following links to non scientists and their word salads and misinterpretations of others scientific papers.
I do like tho, that the first paper i linked to in c3 was by two Met Office Hadley Centre scientists who used ‘models’ to come to their conclusions. Oh the irony, it hurts.
But back to Dr Spencer and Judith Curry. Spencer in an interview at Science2.0 … “i will also say that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions must cause some warming, …”. And Curry wrote a commentary in the WSJ ‘The Global Warming Statistical Meltdown’ in which she speaks about her and Nic Lewis’ lower climate sensitivity models and GHG emissions paper. Scientists understand the science behind green house gases, bloggers w/agendas and non scientists don’t get it it seems.
Aphan, i think you’re falsely conflating the Natural Philosophers and Ptolemy with Modern Science and scientists of today. We have Modern Science now. Copernicus was the start of it, the Scientific Revolution. It was Modern Science which disproved mathematically the previously held beliefs of the Church and it is Modern Science which has given us the theory of AGW. Science today is much different than the faith based beliefs of the Dark and Middle Ages.
Lou-
Ptolemy was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet who lived 1300+ years before Copernicus was born. Thirteen hundred years of discovery and knowledge occurred between the two men.
Copernicus developed his theories around 1514, long before the Catholic Church even heard about them in 1533 and became interested in them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentariolus
It took pressure from his friends and pupils and associates to get him to publish them officially in 1543 because he was concerned about how they would be received by the public and others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_revolutionibus_orbium_coelestium
Since you are the one that pointed out the fact that “science” and the concept of a “scientific community” is a modern construct, why do all of your posts reflect the notion that the “people who claimed (back then)…..were Scientists” and that “The Scientists were right back then so…”? You even capitalize the word like it’s an official title. You undermine your own arguments that there was a specific body of men in past times that were known as “the Scientists” that were “right” about all things in the natural sciences. That simply isn’t reality..it is your own “engaging alternative view of history”.
Copernicus was a mathematician and an astronomer. So was Ptolemy, but he was also an astrologer. And Aristotle was a philosopher who dabbled in what he called “physics” that had a much broader range of study than it has today.
Alphan, i’d not seen the wikipedia Commentariolus but had read from another source that iirc Copernicus attended a 1514 Reform Council meeting on the calendar problems and had done his work from there. Also that another mathematician read his manuscript in the late 1530s and published a small synopsis which was greeted well. Copernicus who’d been reluctant to publish it then agreed to in 1542, which basically follows the wikipedia Revolutionibus article, but which i also don’t read as him being pressured into it as he had received good feedback about it.
And I think you are falsely conflating a few different replies of mine into one. My reply to Bill about the ‘laughing at the census takers’ was about it is ‘S’cientists who are doing the work, not census takers. i capitalized in that response to emphasize that particular point, of who exactly was doing the work, which is not census takers.
You then conflated that reply with a different post/or posts and then you’ve also taken words out of context, so i have no response to that kind of mixed up mashup.
Not sure what your last paragraph is about but yes, obviously, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Copernicus lived in different eras.
Here’s Bill’s original comment-
“Therein lies the salient point of all the back and forth on this comment board. Once upon a time there was a “Consensus” that the world was flat and that the Sun revolved around the earth. 1000 years from now society will laugh at the census takers of the early 21st century who insisted that carbon is poison and CO2 is a pollutant caused by man and responsible for catastrophic global warming.”
Bill is clearly stating several very specific things- that “1000 years from now society will laugh at the census takers of the early 21st century who insisted that carbon is poison and CO2 is a pollutant caused by man and responsible for catastrophic global warming”.
Just like we NOW laugh at the “(con)sensus takers” (not scientists) 1000 years ago that believed that the world was flat and that the Sun revolved around the earth, people 1000 years from now will laugh at the idea that in our day there was some kind of “consensus” that carbon is poison and that CO2 is a pollutant caused by man and responsible for catastrophic global warming.
YOU introduced the Scientists into this…not Bill.
“And I think you are falsely conflating a few different replies of mine into one. My reply to Bill about the ‘laughing at the census takers’ was about it is ‘S’cientists who are doing the work, not census takers. i capitalized in that response to emphasize that particular point, of who exactly was doing the work, which is not census takers.”
Actually, I think you tried to “conflate” what Bill actually said (quoted above) into something he didn’t even mention. Doing that does indeed cause “mixed up mashups” doesn’t it?
When we examine Cook et al 2013, we find that Cook could only demonstrate (with evidence) that 1.6 percent of the Scientist’s papers that he and his team analyzed “explicitly stated that man-made greenhouse gases caused at least 50 percent of global warming.” (that means that 98.4% of the papers did NOT actually state anything of the sort-an even greater “consensus” than what Cook shoveled out as one!)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/06/97-of-climate-scientists-agree-is-100-wrong/2/#fd7e1c626d60
So 98.4% of the Scientists publishing peer reviewed papers on global warming, climate change-you know…the people “who are actually DOING the work”, aren’t saying what people like Cook and Oreskes CLAIM they are saying.
Now, since NONE of the consensus studies have stated that “carbon (or CO2) are poison and that CO2 is a pollutant caused by man and responsible for catastrophic global warming”…if you would be so kind as to provide a list of the actual earth scientists who insist that carbon is poison , and that CO2 is a pollutant caused by man and responsible for catastrophic global warming I would LOVE to see it. (makes it easier to mock them in 1000 years)
Lou said-
“Copernicus who’d been reluctant to publish it then agreed to in 1542, which basically follows the wikipedia Revolutionibus article, but which i also don’t read as him being pressured into it as he had received good feedback about it.”
“Under strong pressure from Rheticus, and having seen that the first general reception of his work had not been unfavorable, Copernicus finally agreed” (how can you NOT read that as being pressured…?)
He’d received good feedback about it from his friends and associates all along…but he only published his entire work after a smaller portion of Chapter 2 of the Revolutionibus was published and received well first. You admitted that he’d been reluctant to publish it. But if he’d done the work under the employ, or at the behest of the Catholic Church (of whom he was not even a member) THEY would have been the determiners of whether or not it was published, not Copernicus.
C’mon Aphan, Bill’s reply was to an earlier comment and he was equating ‘census takers’ w the scientists of today and the ‘consensus’. He was trying to use a belittling pun to equate the beliefs of the Dark & Middle Ages w the Modern Science we have today. It’s a false equivalency b/c it was scientists who figured out that the geocentric theory and beliefs (consensus) of earlier times were incorrect. So it was scientists who proved the earth is not the center of the galaxy, just as its scientists over the past couple of centuries who have figured out AGW.
Aphan, Your generalization of CO2 as only a poison or pollutant? Simply look up the deaths at Lake Monoun or Lake Nyos in Cameroon. Of course it can be a poison or pollutant too.
We can agree or disagree about how pressured Copernicus was to publish, he still was not a maverick or ostracized by the scientific community of his time. He figured out a known problem w Ptolemy that many other intelligent people over the previous centuries had also worked on and tried to figure out.
Weren’t there other studies that show similar findings? if so, and they aren’t addressed in the book, then there isn’t any point to this book.