Hump Day Hilarity – The 97% climate expertise [warning graphic content]

Josh writes:

I had an idea with Brandon [Shollenberger] about discovering a secret stupid chart along the lines of the one he found.

Shollenberger writes:

I think I may have found the strangest chart I have ever seen. You can see it below, taken from the newly published paper on the supposed “consensus on the consensus” on global warming:

Now, I discussed this paper a bit yesterday, and there are probably a lot of things more important to discuss than this chart. Those other things aren’t as funny though. You see, this chart is complete nonsense. Look at the x-axis. See how it says “Expertise”? Tell me, what scale do you think that’s on?

You’re wrong. It doesn’t matter what your answer might have been; it’s wrong. It’s wrong because there is no scale for the x-axis on this chart.

Seriously. This is what the authors of the paper had to say about the chart:

Figure 1 uses Bayesian credible intervals to visualise the degree of confidence of each consensus estimate (largely a function of the sample size). The coloring refers to the density of the Bayesian posterior, with anything that isn’t gray representing the 99% credible interval around the estimated proportions (using a Jeffreys prior). Expertise for each consensus estimate was assigned qualitatively, using ordinal values from 1 to 5. Only consensus estimates obtained over the last 10 years are included.

See: http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2016/04/strangest-chart-ever-created/

That essay from Shollenberger is well worth a read as it shows how ridiculous the new paper from John Cook actually is. Following Cook’s lead, and in turn, working with Josh, we were able to bin the major players on the climate and consensus wars.

Here is the rationale for the binning from our “independent” raters:

Ehrlich and Stern don’t seem to have any particular direction, they throw a lot of alarmist mud at random times, hence “confused”. Stern earns a  lot more than Ehrlich so rates higher on the $10K units.

Nuccitelli and Allen seem unaffected by any facts, and drone on with the same message, just repackaged. Hence the “dim” bin.

McKibben is a nice guy, but has only minimal climate expertise, basically regurgitating news items and seeing the effects of every weather event as “proof” of global warming on his Twitter feed. He also thinks we can “change physics” so he gets binned in the “idiot” category. Mandia, who has meteorological expertise, would not be in this category at all, except that he self binned by becoming a climate superhero. Klein writes bestselling books, that she herself doesn’t quite understand, but assures us she’s “changing everything“, so fits in this category as a high-earner.

Lew and Oreskes, self binned, are permanently sealed in, with no escape from their own seepage in their self-made conspiracy theory theater. Oh, and your pets will die too.

Schmidt, has a category all his own, but often disappoints because his wish is to never debate a skeptic or answer a question from a skeptic.

Trenberth and Hansen do a lot of projection, seeing missing heat, coal death trains, and disappearing cities under sea level rise all due to climate model output.

Cook, caught lying on more than one occasion. Low earner.

Gleick, admits his own fraud, low earner, about to be even lower.

Gore, a high earner raking in millions, can’t even do high school science without faking results in post-production.

Mann, is an outlier. In keeping with McIntyre’s note about reporting both positive and negative results, we report the outlier here. Enough said.

Note: Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute was also on this list for plotting, but because at one time or another he has put himself in every bin, we had to discard him and his data as being “unbinnable”.