Guest post by David Middleton
Is Seth Borenstein a journalist or a political activist? This should matter to the Associated Press, but it clearly doesn’t.
When I opened up the Real Clear Energy webpage this morning, I found the usual mix of articles relevant to energy (~20%) and environmental nonsense (~80%), including a particularly ignorant rant from Seth Borenstein. When did energy and climate science become conflated? If climate science is actually science, shouldn’t it be on the Real Clear Science webpage?
Anyway, back to Seth Borenstein’s amazingly ignorant rant…
WHY IT MATTERS: Climate Change
By SETH BORENSTEIN
Aug. 29, 2016 2:30 PM EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) — WASHINGTON (AP) — THE ISSUE: It’s as if Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump live on two entirely different Earths: one warming, one not.
Clinton says climate change “threatens us all,” while Trump tweets that global warming is “mythical” and repeatedly refers to it as a “hoax.” Measurements and scientists say Clinton’s Earth is much closer to reality.
As heat-trapping gases in the air intensify and hot temperature records shatter, global warming is taking a toll on Americans’everyday life : their gardens, air, water, seasons, insurance rates and more.
[…]
WHY IT MATTERS
Dozens of measurements show Earth is warming. And it’s worsening. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists and nearly every professional organization of scientists have said climate change is real, man-made and a problem.
[…]
Hold on there a minute Seth… Dozens of measurements show that Earth has warmed since the mid-1800’s and all of the non-Hockey Stick climate reconstructions show that this warming began around 1600 AD (plus or minus a couple of decades). However, there is no basis to claim that “it’s worsening.” The data demonstrate that the rate of warming has actually slowed down…
While “every professional organization of scientists have said climate change is real” (even the AAPG)… None say that it is exclusively “man-made” and most say that computer models predict that it could become “a problem.” Maybe it’s a verb conjugation issue… Warmed becomes “warming”, could be becomes “is.” Whatever the conjugation, this is noting but argumentum ad verecundiam.
Borenstein: The last 15 months in a row have set records globally for heat, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Here are the 15 hottest months in the UAH 6.0 satellite temperature record:
1) 2016.08 0.832
2) 1998.25 0.743
3) 2016.17 0.734
4) 2016.25 0.715
5) 1998.08 0.653
6) 1998.33 0.643
7) 1998.42 0.575
8) 2016.33 0.545
9) 2016 0.541
10) 1998.58 0.516
11) 2010.17 0.514
12) 1998.5 0.511
13) 2010 0.502
14) 1998 0.479
15) 1998.17 0.475
Only 5 of the 15 hottest months “on record” fall within the “last 15 months in a row.” 8 of the hottest months on record occurred 18 years ago.
Borenstein: The world is on pace to break the record for hottest year, a record broken in 2010, 2014 and 2015. The five hottest years recorded have all been from 2005 on and it is about 1.8 degrees warmer than a century ago.
The world appears a lot less likely “on pace to break the record for hottest year, a record (not) broken in 2010, 2014 and 2015.
The 1998 record appears to be intact and might just survive the monster El Niño of 2015-16.
Borenstein: But it’s more than temperatures. Arctic sea ice keeps flirting with record low amounts.
*Arctic* sea ice keep “flirting with record low amounts” while Antarctic sea ice keeps “flirting” with record high amounts. (My Marine Science professor used to castigate anyone who used the word “amounts” when discussing quantities.)
The sea ice record only dates back to 1979 and the flirtations with record lows are barely exceeding 2 standard deviations (AKA natural variability).
Furthermore, the Arctic has been ice-free during the summer throughout much of the Holocene.
Borenstein: Hot water has been killing coral as never before seen. Scientists have connected man-made climate change to extreme weather, including deadly heat waves, droughts and flood-inducing downpours.
Unsubstantiated, unquantified drivel.
Borenstein: They even have connected it as one of several factors in the Syrian drought and civil war that led to a massive refugee crisis.
The region has been drying out since the Medieval Warm Period.
Borenstein: Climate change is causing the seas to rise, which threatens coastlines. Sea level has risen a foot in the waters around New York City in the past century, worsening flooding from Superstorm Sandy.
Here is that 1 foot of sea level rise plotted at the same scale as the Statue of Liberty…
Sea level, as measured by tidal gauges, is currently doing exactly what it is has been doing since at least 1850…
Regarding Frankenstorm Sandy, the 1 foot of sea level rise is totally insignificant relative to the normal tidal ranges and worse storm surges hit the region long before Seth Borenstein started propagandizing for the Warmunists.
Borenstein: And it is making people sicker with worsened allergies and asthma, heat deaths, diseases spread by ticks and mosquitoes, dirtier air and more contaminated water and food, a federal report said in April.
More unsubstantiated, unquantifiable, unverifiable drivel.
Borenstein: Changing the world’s economy from burning fossil fuel, which causes global warming, has a huge price tag. So does not doing anything. The world’s average income will shrivel 23 percent by the year 2100 if carbon dioxide pollution continues at the current pace, according to a 2015 study out of Stanford and the University of California Berkeley.
Even more unsubstantiated, unquantifiable, unverifiable drivel.
The price tag of decarbonization is in the range of $20 trillion (just for the U.S.) to avert a 10% chance “of an utterly catastrophic finale to humanity’s atmospheric experiment.”
Two Harvard economists, after trawling through voluminous, authoritative research, said last year that the odds of an utterly catastrophic finale to humanity’s atmospheric experiment is about 10 percent. That’s a conclusion that can focus minds pretty quickly—and perhaps turn the expenditure of trillions of dollars over three decades into only a tough, but manageable, problem.
[…]
Jacobson researches how states (PDF) and countries can achieve 100 percent renewable energy systems—even more ambitious than the cuts President Barack Obama wants by 2050 and which informed Heal’s study. What Jacobson calls a mistake in his colleague’s paper concerns the overall estimate, which accounts only for reductions from electricity generation, transmission, and storage.
But electricity makes up only 30 percent of U.S. carbon emissions. To account for the other two-thirds of energy use—transportation, industry, and residential and commercial use—that total should be much higher, Jacobson said.
By his measure, that would leave an economy-wide, 100 percent renewable price range of between $5.3 trillion and $22 trillion by 2050, closer to Jacobson’s own central estimate of about $14.6 trillion, he said.
Once Jacobson expanded Heal’s estimate so that it covered 100 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from all key sectors, their approaches stood about $8 trillion apart.
Heal did estimate that electrifying American transportation—cars, trucks, trains—would require approximately $620 billion in additional generation capacity. Beyond that, he didn’t go into non-electricity costs because the numbers would be smaller (billions, not trillions). “These costs will be small relative to the massive numbers associated with energy production and storage,” he said.
[…]
My back-of-the-envelope calculations put the price tag closer to $40 trillion, just for U.S. electricity generation… Whatever the number, it’s in the trillions and it will avert a 10% chance of catastrophe. That’s idiotic – Particularly since the 10% chance is based on computer models using the RCP 8.5 scenario… Models that have failed 95% of the time.
Borenstein: Just the Obama administration’s efforts to cut carbon pollution from 1,000 power plants projects to cost about $8 billion a year, but save several times more than in reduced health problems.
Apart from the very real $8 billion per year, more unsubstantiated, unquantifiable, unverifiable drivel.
Borenstein: The world’s largest general scientific society warns of “abrupt, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible changes with highly damaging impacts.”
Argumentum ad verecundiam, based on projections from computer models that have failed 95% of the time. “Same as it ever was”…
Featured image borrowed from Climate Depot.
All of Griff‘s hand waving about Arctic sea ice decline since The Little Ice Age merits a big- So What?
Griff is a paid concern troll.
Must be funded by Big Government. Perhaps a RICO suit is in order
Ho! If I wanted to be paid, I’d get a gig with the Heartland Institute….
https://news.vice.com/article/the-fossil-fuel-industry-paid-this-scientist-to-deny-human-caused-climate-change
So someone who actually works for a living is evil, having been “deeply funded by industry interests” with $1.2M, but not those by the hundreds of billions of dollars deeply funding government propaganda.
“hundreds of billions of dollars deeply funding government propaganda.:
It’s not remotely close to that for scientific research.
Does it? Why?
There isn’t any reason to account for it except global warming and it is definitely, provably now at a much lower level than in over a century, decreasing at a fast rate, not part of a natural cycle, not recovering, etc.
Its a great big smoking gun clue to what’s going on…
Which is what? The ice returned 800 years ago after being melted. Now it is melting, BFD. Where’s the clue?
And what is the cause of the melting? Saying the words “the end of the LIA is the cause” is NOT an explanation.
Choosing Heartland over government is another very bad choice. Not very good at lifestyle decisions, Griff ?
Perhaps he needed a strong piece for his application to:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/08/27/job-of-the-week-new-york-times-climate-editor/
Seth Wrongenstein.
Well, as they say, if it bleeds, it leads.
Real hacks know you have to occasionally add a real fact or two just in case you are called on your BS and you can at least point out that you got SOME stuff right.
In the case of climate alarmism though, knowing that Generation Scared won’t question anything (and to their credit, have never been taught the skills to do so), you just reel off every scary pessimistic speck of “science”, no matter how speculative, unverifiable or realistic.
Double-checking? They don’t have time for…oh look, its Pokémon!
That’s what happens when Everyone Gets a Trophy and All the Children are Above Average! Generation Special Snowflake!
It’s about time somebody called attention to Borenstein’s incessant proselytizing.
The guy is either an incompetent regurgitator of press releases or not very bright. The one thing he isn’t is unbiased and non-partisan. He violates every tenet of what journalism claims to be about.
Unfortunately, there actually are people who swallow his bilge.
What makes you think those two things are mutually exclusive?
You make a good point.
Stopped reading fantasy stories written by Seth some time ago. He is one of the few writers that can get “and” and “the” wrong in a story.
“think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines”
Yes.
“Is Seth Borenstein a journalist or a political activist? ”
No, he is a Gaiantologist.
For those who want to play for blood…..I”m your Huckleberry
If a guy with some tins of food, dogs, and a sled covered all of the Arctic for sea ice measurements as accurate as today to combine them all as a pile of Mann-style dumb numbers, I would have to ask–does a dozen dogs, sled and couple cases of food and a tent cost $450 million? Since I presume not, and the two are claimed to be equally adequate to combine these two data sets, why are we using satellites? Find the grandson of that guy and give him a contract for $10 k.
Borenstein is the worst
A lot of the wire service reporting is hmmmm, shallow. They just don’t look beyond the skim that their sources spoon-feed them. They don’t have/take time to do much digging, weighing the various factors and coming up with a reasoned analysis. And even when they do dig a little, they usually look more for corroboration of “what everyone knows” in their circle of sources rather than info that contradicts or leads to a different POV.
But occasionally they do a little better. It shows through in many subject areas: climate, weather, biochemistry, economics. And individual reporters admit to their limitations from time to time…though usually with little inclination or effort to change. Their impressions are sticky.
David:
You say ….
“and all of the non-Hockey Stick climate reconstructions show that this warming began around 1600 AD (plus or minus a couple of decades). ”
I am not aware of there being any “non hockey-stick” reconstructions that show anything of the sort.
That would require there to be instrumental observation at that time. The earliest I know of is the CET that begins in 1659, and even that had infilling from non-instrumental means along with observations made from inside un-heated rooms.
Off the top of my head… Moberg, Lungqvist, Esper and most of the Greenland ice cores.
Borenstein has been an idiot for years. 3.5 years ago he still hadn’t learned that ice melts at 0 C and snow cannot form above that temperature.
Whac-a-moling Seth Borenstein at AP over his erroneous extreme weather claims
Posted on February 19, 2013
Comments on Yesterday’s paean to Global Warming
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/19/whac-a-moling-seth-borenstein-at-ap-over-his-erroneous-extreme-weather-claims/
Recently I saw a link (it might have been in a comment somewhere in this blog) about David Melgueiro, a Portuguese navigator who it is claimed navigated the North East Passage in the years 1660-1662. If those claims are true they imply that the amount of ice in the Arctic must have been unusually low then. Here is that link and another one about David Melgueiro.
http://ecotretas.blogspot.co.uk/p/david-melgueiro-english.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Melgueiro
Over the years I have attempted, with a notable lack of success, to introduce the notion from economics of Opportunity Costs to the continuing blathering about climate. To perhaps oversimplify, Opportunity Costs are the costs of all the real and meaningful things we cannot invest in because we have squandered our limited assets on unproductive follies. The most pointed story I have come across that really illustrates the kind of potential “catastrophe” we may be facing due to the unconscionable waste of these fruitless but ruinously expensive efforts to line the pockets of all the crony fascists, I refuse to call them capitalists, comes from the tale of how Warren Buffett came to own the company that became the titular brand of his massive financial empire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway
In the early Sixties Buffett made some speculative investments in BH stock even though its core textile business was declining. When BH’s corporate leadership tried to buy him off he felt that they were trying to cheat him and he got mad and decided to buy the company and fire the then CEO, which he did. Dealing with the declining fortunes of the textile business delayed his entering into the business model that lead to his eventual fortune.
“In 2010, Buffett claimed that purchasing Berkshire Hathaway was the biggest investment mistake he had ever made, and claimed that it had denied him compounded investment returns of about $200 billion over the subsequent 45 years.[9] Buffett claimed that had he invested that money directly in insurance businesses instead of buying out Berkshire Hathaway (due to what he perceived as a slight by an individual), those investments would have paid off several hundredfold.”
I haven’t been able to find the price he paid to acquire BH, but I doubt it was more than $100 million. This climate boondoggle looks to be running up a tab in the tens of trillions in the present to be compounded, not over 45 years, but over 85 years, which by Mr. Buffett”s estimate indicates that by the time we get to the turn of the next century humanity will be facing a shortfall in global wealth of Quadrillions of dollars due solely to all these “green” efforts which have proved to be green only for the pockets of politicians and there cronies.
There was a recent article showing that over the past 30 years 80% of Americans are experiencing better weather (less stressful, less extreme). So much for “already suffering”. Borenstein is using “future present tense”: models say it is going to happen therefore it is already happening.
Their misconjugation of verbs is very consistent with their Mannian miscorrelation of low frequency proxy and high frequency instrumental data. /sarc
Climate propaganda by AP, BBC, ABC, and other National services is old hat. They obviously fixate on a current event spinning it into the larger narrative. Whatever happened to the increased tornadoes and hurricanes predicted for the US? Malarkey.
Meanwhile in the real world government sponsered Tesla is struggling to bail in government sponsered Solar City. These entities are not the same as dam and highway building by taxpayers. They are the White Sea Canal of our time.
I’m not familiar with Borenstein but it occurs to me that someone could put together a pro-warmist article using ONLY those warmist tropes that have been thoroughly exploded, and get it accepted even by supposedly science-savvy authorities. That would be by way of being a prank, though, and this guy sounds serious.
Only today I heard someone refer to “Saving the Planet”, even though the old global meltdown version of climate change hysteria went out of fashion twenty years ago. Nowadays it’s rising sea levels and the spread of Ebola, and the planet is going to be fine. Yet that phrase lives on, like a sort of vermiform appendix. I’ve also noticed the spread of the use of the word “Eco” as an adjective, often in situations where it clearly has nothing to do with the environment and just means something like “doubleplusgood”.
The whole Climate Change meme seems to be disintegrating into a mess of catchphrases.
I have to say that if I were wanting to further debate in a sensible manner right now, I would convene a public discussion about one central question:
‘What general range of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere do we believe will allow life on earth to flourish most effectively in the future?’
That question removes blame games, it removes fixations about particular targets, it doesn’t claim that carbon dioxide is evil and most of all it doesn’t contend that it’s the only thing that is important.
It allows experts, the public alike to discuss what the world might look like at different carbon dioxide concentrations (in fact the question to be asked is just what difference there actually will be between 250 and 750ppm of carbon dioxide) and affords the chance to discuss what the world looked like in the past when carbon dioxide levels were in the thousands of ppm….
The current debate looks to me like farmers fighting nature to grow food.
The best farmers always work with nature to grow food.
Perhaps debates should focus on working with the natural world, rather than trying to fight it, eh??
Griff: “There isn’t any reason to account for it except global warming…”
Ahhh! The fallacious “Argument from Ignorance”! IOW, “what else can it be”?
Thanks, Griff, for exposing your “reasoning”.
I’m surprised Seth didn’t drop by for a flogging.
Borenstein: Hot water has been killing coral as never before seen. Scientists have connected man-made climate change to extreme weather, including deadly heat waves, droughts and flood-inducing downpours.
Daivd Middleton said:”Unsubstantiated, unquantified drivel.”
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00097.1
Substantiated. Quantified.
Chris, having read the linked piece, I feel your comment’s last words need more exposition.
eg: Substantiated that this is Quantified drivel. (fify)
Note that they show their model against the observations of 1910-1939, but not the period of interest. Note also that this is a models all the way down study. There is no section showing statistics indicating greater incidence of “deadly heatwaves, droughts and flood-inducing downpours.”
John_C – fair enough. I was trying to post a link to a paper that was a subset of the overall BAMS supplement, but it kept pointing to the entire doc. Here is a story about the Australian heat wave of 2013. 5 different groups studied the data, and all concluded that carbon emissions were a major factor in that heat wave: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/australias-2013-heatwave-due-to-climate-change-researchers-conclude-20140930-10o1sj.html
Where?
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353164/Screenshot_2016-09-03-13-08-15_zpsc0bxngk3.png
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353166/Screenshot_2016-09-03-13-08-31_zps8rmym1xs.png
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353165/Screenshot_2016-09-03-13-07-28_zpso09rdltb.png
This is simply more unsubstantiated, unquantified, unverifiable drivel…
Based on what? A model.
Saying, “We can’t think of anything else,” isn’t science.
Out of hundreds, if not thousands, of heat waves over the past century, this remarkable employment of GIGO has pinned one heatwave on AGW…
From NOAA’s US Climate Extremes Index, Extremes in Maximum Temperature…
2012 83.10%
1934 62.00%
1912 53.60%
2006 49.50%
1999 46.40%
1921 45.70%
2014 43.80%
1954 42.50%
1939 40.50%
1958 40.30%
Of the 10 worst heat wave years since 1910, 6 occurred before 1960. 2 of the 3 years in which >50% of the contiguous US experienced extremes in maximum temperature occurred before 1935.
Of course you have to use models – it’s complete and utter drivel to think there is any other way. Say the earth warmed by 5C during a single year. You still need to build a model that looks at other possible causes- orbital changes, insolation changes etc. What, do you think the cause just writes itself on the sky?
Let’s look at this a different way. What would convince you that AGW is real?
AGW is real; there’s just no evidence that it is significant. Otherwise, the models would have demonstrated predictive skill.
If natural variability and climate sensitivity were well-understood, the models would be predictive of subsequent observations. The models have not been even close to predictive.
Therefore, any conclusions drawn from derivative models are unsubstantiated, unquantified, unverifiable drivel… GIGO.
The models match the measured results quite well, actually. http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~kdc3/papers/robust2015/background.html
Abject nonsense…
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353167/Screenshot_2016-09-05-05-50-52_zpsy8hq03uw.png
Reality (heavy black curve) totally diverges (red arrow annotated with “divergence) from the model (heavy red curve) during its predictive mode (to the right of the yellow band). In any scientific field, apart from academic and government climate science, this is called a falsified hypothesis.
The models consistently underestimate natural variability and/or overestimate climate sensitivity to greenhouse forcing. Therefore all claims that the models conclusively demonstrate that AGW must have caused unexpected observations are unsubstantiated, unquantified, unverifiable drivel. If the purveyors of these conclusions are cognizant of the lack of predictive skill in their models, they are engaging in fraudulent behavior.
The models demonstrate no predictive skill. When you construct a model that matches the past reasonably well , but totally fails to predict subsequent observations, it has no predictive skill… it is wrong… it is GIGO… and all conclusions drawn from derivatives of that model are unsubstantiated, unquantified, unverifiable drivel.
This bit is possibly the mother-of-all unsubstantiated, unquantified, unverifiable drivel…
This is downright Ptolemaic in its idiocy.
Climage models have never demonstrated predictive skill.
1988 = EPIC FAIL
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Hansen4.png
1995 = EPIC FAIL
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353046/SAR_zps3478fdbe.png
2001 = EPIC FAIL
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353046/TAR_zpsf2a49c18.png
2007 = EPIC FAIL
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353046/AR4_zps4c4ad9ff.png
2011 = EPIC FAIL
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Kaufman-1.png
2013 = EPIC FAIL
http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~ed/bloguploads/models_diff_masks_2012.png
“Abject nonsense” – lol. What specifically is causing the warming, if not anthropogenic? Oh, wait, I know – natural causes. That’s the scientifically and intellectually vacuous grab bag used to describe all changes – whether it be increased flooding, droughts, temperature increases or the melting of the Arctic.
I’m still waiting for your answer on what would convince you that AGW is real.
Argumentum ad ignortaum and burden of proof fallacies.
Science doesn’t work this way.
This is argument from ignorance:
This is a scientific hypothesis:
Since you can’t run a controlled experiment on the atmosphere, the only way to test the hypothesis is to construct a model and test it through observations. So far, the observations have falsified this hypothesis, irrespective of the number used to fill in the blank.
The failure of the models (and hypothesis) conclusively prove that either the natural variability is much greater than assumed, the climate sensitivity to greenhouse forcing is much less than assumed or both.
The burden of proof is on the advocates of the hypothesis.
Furthermore they actually have to conclusively demonstrate that the climate has behaved in an anomalous manner since the mid-20th century relative to the rest of the Holocene. The nearly identical nature if the early and late 20th century warming periods falsified any notion of an anomaly.
The advocates of the AGW hypothesis have proven their case to the satisfaction of the vast majority of practicing climatologists, the world’s scientific organizations, governments, and the Fortune 1000. It may not be to your satisfaction, or others on WUWT, or some climatologists. But science doesn’t move forward based on requiring every single scientist or concerned amateur scientist to buy in. It just doesn’t.
I’m still waiting for your answer as to what would convince you that substantial warming due to AGW is occurring.
Argumentum ad verecundiam and populum fallacies.
Furthermore, 0.5% is not a vast majority.
Nor is 52%.
It has never been demonstrated that more than half to two-thirds of relevant atmospheric scientists endorse the notion that humans have been the primary driver of recent climate changes. The obsession with fabricating a 97% is one of many reasons to discout alarmist nonsense.
In order to convince me, they would have to demonstrate that the warming of the late 20th century was anomalous and that their quantified hypothesis had predictive skill. They can only accomplish the former through fraudulent hockey stick reconstructions and have never accomplished the latter.
They basically have to get the science right and stop relying on failed models, fraudulent reconstructions and logical fallacies. If they did all that, they would demonstrate that AGW is insignificant and most of them would be out of work.
Back in 2000 or so, I started to buy into this scam… They had demonstrated a strong correlation between CO2 and temperature in Antarctic ice cores and Mann’s first hockey stick appeared convincing. Then it was demonstrated that CO2 lagged behind temperature in the ice cores and that Mann’s hockey stick was wrong, if not fraudulent.
So let me see here. 66.73% of papers take no position. Here is an example of one: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2010.02241.x/abstract It discusses the impact of warming waters of the Fraser River in BC on salmon mortality. Because it says “climate warming” and not AGW, it would be put into your 66,73% bucket. You, in your math, take that as a “no” vote, or, at a minimum, as a “not yes” vote. That is a false conclusion, we don’t know the author’s opinion, yet you are counting it is a “definitely not yes”, which is wrong.
That is the reason that the author did not include those papers. If a political survey was done on who folks wanted for President, and 20% said Trump, 20% said Clinton, and 60% did not fill out a position, it would be incorrect to say that 80% do not want Trump. But that is exactly what you are doing, and it is incorrect.
That’s not even close to what I’m saying.
Cook et al., 2013 excluded the 66.7% of papers which took no position. An accurate political analogy would be:
0.5% of poll respondents explicitly state they will vote for Clinton.
32% of poll respondents imply that they might vote for Clinton.
66.7% express no opinion.
0.5% of poll respondents explicitly state they will vote for Trump.
Cook et. al,. would conclude from the above that Clinton has the support of 88% of the electorate.
Setting aside the fact that science is not a democratic process, Cook et al., 2013 is not a survey of scientific opinion. It is a survey of the Skeptical Science bloggers’ opinions of the abstracts of papers.
Their definition of “implied endorsement” would include several of my posts on WUWT. They provided this example of an implied endorsement:
Carbon sequestration in soil, lime muds, trees, seawater, marine calcifers and a whole lot of other things have always been important for mitigating a wide range of natural processes. I have no doubt that I have implicitly endorsed the so-called consensus based on this example.
The second largest endorsement group was categorized as “implicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimize.” Pardon my obtuseness, but how in the heck can one explicitly endorse the notion that “most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic” without quantification? This is the exmple Cook provided:
Wow! I contributed to Romney for President… Yet most of his campaign warchest didn’t come from me. By this subjective standard, I have probably explicitly endorsed AGW a few times.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/18/anatomy-of-a-collapsing-climate-paradigm/
However, the consensus nonsense is still an argumentum ad populum fallacy. There could be a 100% consensus and it wouldn’t fix their failed hypothesis.
“That’s not even close to what I’m saying.”
Yes, it is. Above your first graphic, you say “Furthermore, 0.5% is not a vast majority.” You’ve done exactly what I said you did. You took only those who explicitly endorsed AGW as being the percentage of all scientists who explicitly endorse AGW.
“Cook et. al,. would conclude from the above that Clinton has the support of 88% of the electorate.”
Nope, that is not what they did. From Cook’s 2013 paper: “Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” Your statement is incorrect, Cook et al did not do what you said they did. The specifically qualified it as to those who took a position on AGW.
If we take out those who don’t take an opinion, we have .5% + 7.7% + 24.4% that endorse AGW, and .5% + .1% + .1% that minimize or reject AGW. That’s 32.9% compared to .7% – gee, no consensus there. If you want a specific poll, that’s fine, then use a direct survey on the topic: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/
Of climatologists who are actively publishing, the figure is still 97%.
Setting aside the fact that we have now digressed into logical fallacyland… The so-called consensus is that more than half of the warming since 1950 is due to human activities. The only way you can endorse a quantified statement is with an explicit quantified endorsement.
Of the nearly 12,000 papers surveyed by Cook et al., only 64 explicitly endorsed and quantified the consensus. More papers rejected or minimized AGW (78) than explicitly endorsed and quantified it.
Cook et al., made a specific assertion and then excluded papers that expressed no opinion on their assertion and then subjectively claimed that others endorsed their specific assertion. When, in fact, less than 1% of the papers expressly endorsed their specific assertion. See Legates et al., 2013.
Regarding the second part of your latest logical fallacy, the CNN article is referring to Doran and Kendall Zimmerman, 2009. This survey sample was limited to academic and government Earth Scientists. It excluded all Earth Scientists working in private sector businesses. The two key questions were:
I would answer “risen” to #1 and my answer to #2 would depend on the meaning of “human activity is a significant contributing factor.” If I realized it was a “push poll,” I would answer “no.”
Interestingly, economic geologists and meteorologists were the most likely to answer “no” to question #2…
The authors derisively dismissed the opinions of geologists and meteorologists…
No discipline has a better understanding the “nuances” than meteorologists and no discipline has a better understanding of the “scientific basis of long-term climate processes” than geologists.
One of the most frequent refrains is the assertion that “climate scientists” endorse the so-called consensus more than other disciplines and that the level of endorsement is proportional to the volume of publications by those climate scientists. Well… No schist, Sherlock! I would bet a good bottle of wine that the most voluminous publishers on UFO’s are disproportionately more likely to endorse Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a documentary. A cursory search for “abiogenic hydrocarbons” in AAPG’s Datapages could lead me to conclude that there is a higher level of endorsement of abiogenic oil formation among those who publish on the subject than among non-publishing petroleum geologists.
And… no level of consensus fixes their failed hypothesis.
“Of the nearly 12,000 papers surveyed by Cook et al., only 64 explicitly endorsed and quantified the consensus.”
So what? Do papers on cancer treatments start out by saying “just to be clear, we think cancer is bad for you”? Of course not. The paper on water temperatures in the Fraser river is a perfect example. “Mean summer water temperatures in the Fraser River (British Columbia, Canada) have increased by ∼1.5 °C since the 1950s. In recent years, record high river temperatures during spawning migrations of Fraser River sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) have been associated with high mortality events, raising concerns about long-term viability of the numerous natal stocks faced with climate warming.”
The topic of the paper is not “is AGW occurring, and what is the contribution of AGW to total warming” – so why would you expect the authors to mention that?
“No discipline has a better understanding the “nuances” than meteorologists and no discipline has a better understanding of the “scientific basis of long-term climate processes” than geologists.”
A person with a BS in meteorology has a better understanding of the nuances of atmospheric sciences than a PhD in atmospheric sciences – that is what you are saying. And your evidence for that is?
Geologists study long term climate processes as they impact the earth’s crust and elements. So what? That has nothing to do with the equations and principles that define the atmosphere. Here’s a geology track – no classes on atmospheric sciences whatsoever. https://geo.ku.edu/general-geology-track
As we drift deeper into your logical fallacyland and analyze your argumentum ad populum fallacy…
So what? It is a bald-faced lie to say that 97% of climate scientists or peer-reviwed papers endorse the so-called consensus. Cook’s own data prove this. This bald-faced lie is the basis of this much more damaging bald-faced lie:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353060/Maobama97_zps6ex3olxp.png
Firstly, the source of Doran & Kendall-Zimmerman’s survey sample was the American Geological Institute’s directory. From this, they only selected Earth Scientists in academia and government. So, very few of the meteorologists and geologists surveyed lacked PhD’s.
The evidence is …
And this…
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Sedimentary geology is a combination of paleogeography and paleoclimatology. Depositional environments are determined by paleogeography and paleoclimatology. Geologists, particularly sedimentary geologists working Cenozoic basins domnated by glacio-eustatic processes have a far better understanding of the long-term processes of climate change than any other scientific discipline… Particularly since models derived from “the equations and principles that define the atmosphere” have totally failed to demonstrate any predictive skill.
As a sedimentary geologist who took courses in meteorology, oceanography, astronomy, soil science, physical geography (what climatology was in the 1970’s) while getting my BS, I actually know the meaning of the course titles in the KU geology curriculum.
You can’t understand stratigraphy and sedimentation without understanding the nature of depostional processes and environments. The only way to understand past depostional processes and environments is to study modern active depostional processes and environments. This understanding is why the AAPG can confidently state that:
Personally, I think the AAPG’s dissent is far too courteous.
Recent surveys of the American Meteorological Society suggest that half to two-thirds of atmospheric scientists think that human activities have been the primary driver of climate change over the last 50-150 years. You would think that would be sufficient for the Warmunists. It isn’t because they need near-unanimity to push for the destruction of capitalism.
However, all that said. Science is not a democratic process. There could be a 100% rock-solid consensus, the AAPG could even jump on the bandwagon and AGW would still be a failed hypothesis because it has totally failed to demonstrate predictive skill.
Regarding the 97%, as I noted, Cook qualified it to be those whose papers took a position. That is factual. So yes, for someone to short-hand it to leave the last part out is not accurate. On the other hand, what you did with your math was wrong – saying .5% implies that 99.5% do not believe that AGW is real and substantially contributing to warming. As I noted, it is preposterous to expect climatologists to start out every paper with “just to be clear, we think that AGW is real and that the temperature impacts are significant”.
With regards to your comments on geologists, the level of knowledge about sedimentary processes is not in dispute. But how exactly does that knowledge relate to the non-linear differential equations used to model the atmosphere? It’s a different knowledge base entirely. I have a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering, with a specialty on control systems. Even though I took undergrad courses in Power Systems, I would not consider myself remotely capable of understanding the complex models used in modeling and designing power plants and grids.
Regarding your charts, why are you using satellite and balloon data only? Tsk tsk, there is a wealth of ground based data, and since we are concerned about temperatures at ground level, that should be used. What is your proof that satellite measurements are an accurate indicator of surface temperatures?
Chris–why use balloon and satellite data? UHI and Thomas Karl.
Outside of the paper, Cook et al., never state that their 97% is of less than 33% of the papers they reviewed. Nor do they acknowledge that 99% of the 97% is subjective. They and others routinely state that 97% of climate scientists and/or 97% of peer-reviewed papers endorse the so-called consensus. The 0.5% (or 0.3% as Legates el al., demonstrated) is exactly correct. Less than 1% of the 12,000 papers explicitly endorse and quantify the consensus.
This is a bald-faced lie from the authors of the paper:
There are actual surveys of actual atmospheric scientists. These surveys indicate that half to two-thirds of atmospheric scientists think that humans are the primary driver of climate changes over the most recent 50-150 years. Why has a cottage industry sprung up to fabricate a 97% consensus? Because 50-67% is not a consensus. Nor does the so-called consensus position state that AGW is extreme, requiring urgent, drastic action. The so-called consensus merely states than human activities, primarily greenhouse gas emissions, are the cause of more than half of the warming since 1950. The real data support 50-67% agreement with this claim, even though the data only support a human culpability in 25-33% of the warming. The actual data support a climate sensitivity of 0.5 to 1.8 °C per doubling of atmospheric CO2; yet the so-called consensus claims that the sensitivity is about 3 °C, possibly greater than 6 °C and can’t be less than 1.5 °C.
Why is there a need to exaggerate the consensus, the warming, the human culpability and the climate sensitivity? Whenever someone demonstrates a pattern of exaggerating the attributes of a prospect, my fraud alarm starts ringing very loudly.
There is only one reason to explain the pattern of exaggeration (well, maybe two reasons):
The only other logical explanation is that grant money, government funding and a lot of climate “science” jobs would vanish if climate change ceased to be an existential threat and the truth was revealed: Greenhouse gas emissions are a manageable problem and can be addressed in an orderly fashion over the next 100 years.
The QED is the fact that these people reject the only economically viable means of rapidly reducing carbon emissions in an economic manner: N2N (natural gas to nuclear).
I don’t have to rely on my minor in math or relive DifEq nightmares to see that the temperature data always drop out of the bottom of the 95% confidence band of the models within a few years of entering predictive mode.
As a geoscientist, I deal with models all of the time. Way back in the 1970’s people noticed than oil and gas accumulations in the Gulf of Mexico were often associated with seismic “bright spots” (amplitude anomalies, hydrocarbon indicators (HCI)). It was determined that there was a physical basis for this relationship. Models were built to determine what sorts of oil and gas reservoirs should exhibit which sorts of amplitude anomalies. These models have been tested thousands of times. While, far from prefect, HCI’s have vastly improved the geological success rate. HCI’s with the proper attributes rarely turn out to be dry holes… Although they don’t guarantee economic discoveries.
In the case of climate “science.” They have drawn a correlation between CO2 and temperatures. They have identified a physical basis for the relationship. Then they constructed a model and proceeded to drill dry holes 95% of the time… Yet refuse to modify the model. They just keep drilling dry holes and claim that the observations are flawed.
Geoscientists in the oil & gas industry routinely have to integrate sparse high resolution data (well logs) with broad low resolution data (seismic surveys). We have to constantly be aware of the resolution limits of our data. We know that low resolution reconstructions of climate data cannot be used to declare that recent changes are anomalous because the reconstructions generally cannot resolve decadal to centennial scale fluctuations.
As a geoscientist, I see sea level from this perspective:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/170mya1_zps8bb5607b.png
I see global temperatures from this perspective:
And I see atmospheric CO2 from this perspective:
The only graph which exclusively used satellite and balloon data was Dr. John Christy’s. The rest were surface data sets or averages of surface and satellite data. In the case of Hansen et al., 1988, I used GISTEMP (his data set, the one that demonstrates the most warming.) The temperature data match the scenario in which atmospheric CO2 stopped rising by the year 2000.
That said, the satellite data are the closest thing to an actual global temperature measurement and they don’t drastically differ from the surface data.
The key point is that the temperature observations consistently track model scenarios in which carbon emissions have stabilized or have been drastically reduced.