News release from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
July 10, 2019
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) petitioned NASA to remove from its website the claim that 97 percent of climate scientists agree humans are responsible for global warming. The petition, filed under the Information Quality Act (IQA), points out the major flaws in the studies cited by NASA to substantiate its claim. It requests the agency remove the claim from its website and stop circulating it in agency materials.
While NASA asserts the “97 percent” claim is supported by a number of studies, CEI contends that claim has major flaws that have been documented by critics. These include:
- Incorrectly categorizing scientists who take “no-position” as endorsing the view that humans are responsible for climate change.
- Failing to include relevant sources without explanation.
- Failing to match the terms used as the basis for a study to the claim actually made by NASA.
“The claim that 97% of climate scientists believe humans are the primary cause of global warming is simply false,” said CEI attorney Devin Watkins. “That figure was created only by ignoring many climate scientists’ views, including those of undecided scientists. It is time that NASA correct the record and present unbiased figures to the public.”
Under guidance released by Office of Management and Budget in April, NASA has 120 days to respond to CEI’s request for correction and its response must include a “point-by-point response to any data quality arguments” raised in the request.
You can read the full Request for Correction here.
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NASA also claims that these are peer reviewed studies. The Doran study was published in EOS which is not a peer reviewed journal. It is a summation of M.S. thesis.
The problem stems from NASA mixing up their climate research documents and putting them in the wrong drawers in the seventies. Those marked ‘Earth’ and ‘Moon’ weather predictions. Someone called Chuck or Scooter put them in the wrong drawers, and now this….
The definition of a climate scientist used by the acolytes is someone who believes that humans are responsible for most if not all of the warming seen over the last 200 years, and that this warming will get much, much worse unless we give them billions of dollars to study the issue.
I didn’t realize NASA was officially pushing the “97 percent” Lie. It’s even worse than we thought.
I’m glad to see their feet are being held to the fire.
Instead of 97 percent, I believe the real number was somewhere close to three (3) percent, with regard to one study anyway.
Hey! Here’s an idea! Why don’t we do a new, honest survey of scientists and see where the percentage falls. By honest, I mean one not controlled by the Alarmists.
Because if the sceptics do a survey the warmists will automatically discredit it as funded by the fossil fuel industry and no one will get a chance to contradict this. Besides, how do we choose who to ask?
And then there is this analysis by Robin Guenier.
http://data.parliament.uk/written evidence/WRITTEN EVIDENCE.svc/evidence HTML/4191
Bad link
Try this one
http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/WrittenEvidence.svc/EvidenceHtml/4191
Bad spacing on my part. Duh.
This works:
Go to WUTU Aug. 25 2015 by Anthony Watts “If Only Lewandowski, Cook, Nucatelli, Hayhoe etc ……
See link @ur momisugly siamiam 16 from the top @ur momisugly 8:47.
Thanks for the heads up HS.
Do more! Tell them to put up a retracion in a central location. Copy this to the Whitehouse secretariat responsible. Neither Oreskes or Cook are climate clicientists. One is a historian the other a cartoonist. Make them issue a press release. Get Trump to twitter this.
100% of climate scientists agree that they will be screwed when the truth comes out.
If it was quality control of tiles on the outside of the space shuttle, they wouldn’t be so loose with the figures.
Que Media Matters and all the other Smear merchants under David Brock. I’m sure CEI will be out of business in short order.
Bruce Cobb
Good one on repeating a lie often enough and it becomes a truth.
Financial wizards in Wall Street “bundle” lots of debt issues that are rated below investment grade.
Put enough of this “junk” into another instrument and then they call it “investment grade”.
It was discovered as nonsense in the 2008 Crash.
They’ve been doing something similar lately.
The NASA statement is just plain wrong.
Let’s assume the ipcc position on this is correct that greater than 50% of the warming from 1950 is due to human causes high likelihood. So the warming from 1950 is about 0.5c. Let’s say man caused 0.3c and 0.2c is natural of that warming.
The NASA statement uses the past century. So that’s from 1920. The period from 1920 to 1950 saw about 0.3c warming. So from 1920 to present you could say natural 0.5c warming and 0.3c warming due to man.
The statement is false period
What’s interesting about how they categorized these scientists that supposedly are in the 97% is that this same technique for deriving that number, if applied to this atmospheric scientist’s/operational meteorologist’s discussions as a climate realist/skeptic would include me in that 97% number of climate scientists.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/27864/
Hugh? you might think.
Well, I believe probably half, maybe even more of the beneficial warming came from the physics of greenhouse gas warming that resulted from the entirely beneficial increase in CO2.
That clearly puts me in the 97% using the standards of the sources.
We could make an analogy using rain and farmers.
This Spring, too much rain caused severe planting delays of our corn and soybean crops in the Cornbelt. Rain for a couple of months in the planting delayed locations was bad news. It could be stated by manipulating the interpretation/meaning/intent, using these specific circumstances, that 97% of farmers believe that rain is bad without qualifiers…………just that 97% of farmers all agreed, almost universally as the experts on growing crops that rain is bad and then spin that to tell us that when rain shows up in the weather forecast, even when there’s a drought, that farmers expect their crops to face adversity.
I am curious. What do people think the actual percentage is of climate scientists who think
that humans are causing global warming through increased CO2 emissions? My own highly
unscientific survey would suggest that the number is significantly higher than 97%. Even the
number who would accept that humans are responsible for the majority of recent warming would
be higher than 97%. Even this website publishes substantially more blog-posts about articles
claiming humans are causing global warming than ones about articles claiming the opposite.
There is a BIG difference between contributing towards Global Warming versus causing Global Warming.
Hi Andrew,
There is a difference but even taking the second question as “are human activities causing
global warming” what percentage of climate scientists do you think would answer “yes”.
I suspect that the percentage would be easily over 90% and almost certainly over 97%.
As 100% of scientists agree they don’t know how clouds work, I suspect the honest answer would be “We don’t know”.
I suspect that the percentage would be easily over 90% and almost certainly over 97%.
I suspect the percentage of doctors who believed blood letting was capable of curing what ailed George Washington on December 12, 1779 was “easily over 90% and almost certainly over 97%.”
Unfortunately, their faith in the procedure killed him:
http://blog.yalebooks.com/2015/02/28/bloodletting-and-the-death-of-george-washington-relevance-to-cancer-patients-today/
Here’s another excellent argument outlining why consensus is never a legitimate standard of truth and should be carefully disregarded as such when we do science:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/12/23/oreskes-harvard-and-the-destruction-of-scientific-revolutions/
NASA is no longer about science or engineering…they can’t even seem to build a working rocket anymore. It’s all about diversity, and inclusion, and many other politically correct ideas that have NOTHING to do with competence.
If you want to get something done correctly and efficiently, hire a for-profit company to do it and get the HELL out of their way – stop the politics, stop the changing requirements, and stop the complete nonsense. Let THEM hire competent engineers and scientists (that the government cannot seem to hire anymore).
First – I do not like the use of “97%” to quantify AGW consensus. Attaching a number to it only fuels contention rather than focusing on the fact that a large majority of climate scientists agree.
CEI: “In short, 4,014 papers (3896 + 78 + 40 = 4014), expressed or implied a position on AGW….But this total did not include the 66.4% of all papers that did not take a position (4a). ”
Why would anyone include in the statistics papers that did not take a position? That makes no sense, as the CEI paper states further on. Then they say, “The data does not include all climate scientists,
only those that were willing to respond and who explicitly stated they had a position on the issue. As such, this paper does not support NASA’s claim.” Um, why? Because NASA’s stats do not represent every climate scientist in the world? It’s called sampling.
The main weakness I see is that the Cook et al. study is supposed to assess consensus for the idea that “human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW.” Since there were a large number of papers that don’t either explicitly or implicitly suggest that “most” of the current GW is anthropogenic, even if they suggest that humans have an influence, that “most” cannot be determined based on the methods. OTOH, the results certainly don’t reject it, and it seems unlikely that many authors would self-rate their papers in the first 3 categories if they thought humans had a minimal impact.
One interesting facet of the findings is that consensus grew over the study period from 1991 to 2011. It is now 8 years later, and I see no reason to believe that this trend has reversed.
The CEI only in passing discusses the Cook et al. 2016 response to Tol, which, along with several criticisms, points out that ” the level of consensus correlates with expertise in climate science.” Seems to me this is a valid point, one that is largely treated as irrelevant in papers and petitions alleging to reject the fact that there is a consensus among climate scientists. Expertise in climate science should be respected as much as it is in fields like mechanical engineering or economic geology.
I know many would assert that the field has been corrupted by money/politics/power/groupthink/liberalism/(on and on), but when discussing science it makes sense to do so scientifically, and I have seen no good evidence supporting such assertions. So, I’m skeptical, as any good skeptic should be when confronted with assumptions.
CEI: “A correction, informing the public that this prior statement did not have a proper basis
in fact and should not be relied upon, would also help relieve the problems caused by its prior
distribution.” This is not a correction, but a retraction. I wonder what correction would satisfy the CEI? What problems are they talking about, exactly?
I think that rather than giving a number to the level of consensus, which could be debated forever, NASA should adopt a stance like that at the beginning of the abstract from Cook et al., 2016: “The consensus that humans are causing recent global warming is shared by 90%–100% of publishing
climate scientists” – this statement is vague enough that most people should be able to live with it, whether they agree with the majority or not. It doesn’t even say how much is anthropogenic. It is also well-supported by research.
P.S. I just got done reading all the questions and graphs of the responses in Bray and von Storch, 2007. It was quite fascinating, both for the answers given, and for the fact that some of the statements could be interpreted in multiple ways – particularly the one that is commonly used to assess consensus (“Climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.” Climate change in general, or climate change since a given year?) . It would be interesting to see how scientists would answer the questions now, 16 years later.
Silber, it’s called sampling, you say. No it’s not, sampling takes into account all opinions not just the ones you want. Would you believe an opinion poll on say, bringing back the death penalty in the UK, if the pollsters only asked the question of those who identified as “far right”?
P.P.S. “Because the Oreskes study excluded abstracts that did not take a position, it is subject to many of
the same problems in the Cook study. It says nothing about the vast majority of scientists who do
not take a position on the issue.”
Just because an abstract does not reveal an author’s endorsement or rejection does not mean the author has no position.
Cook et al. 2016 lists not just studies of abstract ratings, but several direct surveys that support a consensus.
I think the references cited by NASA is a mediocre subset to choose.
Just because an abstract does not reveal an author’s endorsement or rejection does not mean the author has no position.
Then if your goal is specifically to ascertain an author’s position, don’t use abstracts in your set of evidence.
From the WUWT article: “Incorrectly categorizing scientists who take “no-position” as endorsing the view that humans are responsible for climate change.”
Where is this the case?
Looking at this another way, if 3% of climate scientists continue to disagree with the con census despite the ire and vitriol aimed against them, then they must have some pretty solid reasoning behind them. Their stand should encourage any genuine thinking scientist to ask themselves if perhaps the 3% have something that should be seriously examined. Of course, you would need to be genuinely interested in scientific enquiry to go this route
The 97% is nothing but speculation. Scientists never registered and voted on the validity of the AGW conjecture. But even if they had the results would have been meaningless. Science is not a democracy. The laws of science are not some sort of legislation. Scientific theories are not validated by a voting process. NASA should stop publish meaningless and incorrect arguments.
From the original study claiming 97.4% (75 out of 77) confirm man made global warming, it is critical that the question be understood. They asked if, from what they have read do they believe that the planet has warmed since ~1850 and is man partly responsible. I want to know who the 2 idiots were that said no.
From the original study claiming 97.4% (75 out of 77) confirm man made global warming . . .
You must not have read the study, since your comment indicates you’re ignorance of its intent.
The original studies confirms nothing regarding “man made global warming.” It cannot. It wasn’t a study regarding the truth or falsehood of AGW.
Rather, the study merely makes the useless claim that a percentage of scientists “believe” the theory. “Useless” because belief isn’t confirmation, else my belief that Christ is Lord makes it true. “Useless” because if consensus were truth, bloodletting would still be the cure for all that ails you.
I want to know who the 2 idiots were that said no.
Those would be the only two who couldn’t be called “morons” for believing something without evidence, as you appear to do.
My post and yours are basically the same which apparently you failed to comprehend. The difference was the extremely low class level of argument and ad hominems. Have a sparkling day.
Wow, CEI, the first non-profit organisation without an agenda. Must be true.
Odd that you should criticize an action of a non-profit based on whether that action fit their overall mission. For what other reason would the organization exist?
Isn’t your comment therefore rather ill thought out, badly reasoned, and consequently useless toward advancing anyone’s intellectual betterment?
Anyone ever asked how many climate scientists there are?