I don’t have a major social media presence. I’ve never even filled out my Twitter profile. One of the the people I try to occasionally engage is journalist and writer Andrew Revkin @Revkin.
I believe Andrew is honest and attempts to be objective but is trapped in a cognitive bubble and can’t even imagine the credibility flaws in the ideologically compromised institutions, in which he puts his blind faith. He is unable to perceive the real epistemological crisis occurring. I haven’t been particularly effective at reaching him as I tend to be Moshesque ala metaphors and brusqueness.
We recently had this exchange.
I started to reach Andrew using a cartoon from @CrustaceanSngls.
The reaction from Andrew was quite encouraging. I hoped he would connect the dots.
Then who burst onto the scene but activist Mini-Mann, Andrew Dessler. He very sanctimoniously poo-pooed this heretic questioning of expertise.
I don’t believe Andrew was expecting this sort of reply.
Another Twitter user jumped in.
There’s lots of Andrew Dessler’s embarrassments at the above link.
Andrew replied as did I, but I did not wish a long drawn out thread. I generally don’t.
So, to sum it up, in 1995, Dessler made a prediction. In 2011, the weather briefly aligned with his prediction. In my opinion he did a premature end zone dance and felt on top of the world. For the last ten years, again in my opinion, he likely is getting more and more bitter about Nature suggesting, leaning to, proving his predictions foolish.
And check out CrustaceanSingles.com
I am ahead of the curve, I know 21.5% of 21st century climate/weather/crisis.
I understand that Dessler, Mann and Hayhoe are among a small good that nominate each other for various climate research awards. I predict that this behavior will continue. I predict that they don’t nominate Dr. Curry.
My century started in MMXXI, so I know only 20.5% of 21st century climate/weather/crises. 🙂
Mine started in MCMLIV but I don’t remember much from back then.
(And much of what I do remember since then they keep telling me didn’t happen.)
I’m WAY ahead of the curve. I don’t have a Twitter account.
Oops! Temperature collection stations near Republican cities have been determined to be unreliable and therefore require upward adjustment of temperature data values. Although we can no longer state that we knew, pre adjustment, what temperatures were, we can state with absolute certainty that things are far more dire than previously thought.
Dessler publicly stated that if observations differed from models the observations must be wrong.
Exactly, that’s science today.
Not to mention Santer et.als 2021 paper “Using Climate Model Simulations to Constrain Observations”. The et.als include RSS personnel Mears & Wentz. RoySpencers reply on the UAH constraints quoting their 2018 paper “Examination of space-based bulk atmospheric
temperatures used in climate research” aligning UAH trends with radiosonde data and the fact that Santer et.als 2021 paper did not cite Christy & Spencers et.al 2018 paper says it all!
Can you provide a link?
It was several years ago in a discussion. I thought I saved it somewhere but couldn’t find it on a quick look. Maybe Science of doom, real climate, or And then there’s physics. Saw someone call him out on Curry’s website and found the comment to confirm it. Sorry I can’t locate it right now.
I know Liar Mann said that. I can find no source for that from Dessler.
It was in a comment thread that I confirmed but don’t remember exactly where because it was too many years ago.
You already know what the weather of the 21st century is?
I could be wrong but isn’t something like that exactly what people like Dessler are claiming to know?
No, they know what the climate will do. The weather, that’s something else.
He himself used the word weather.
And when one is talking about long periods of weather (over 30 years), that is by definition talking about climate.
“No, they know what the climate will do.”
Incorrect.
They only imagine they do.
And they have overly vivid imaginations, are delusion fools, and never question how it is they know anything about what they believe in.
IOW…they are the last people anyone should simply trust based on say-so.
I have seen extrapolations up to 2300.
The integrated assessment models used to derive the ridiculous social cost of carbon go out 300 years.
Strong expert consensus is almost always right.
Phlogeston anyone?
I did not know that phlogeston was the principle agent in fermentation….
My favorite consensus success story is about the guy traveling the country for a few years, sticking knitting needles up peoples noses and doing a slow stir/mix of a part of their brain as his novel approach to mental health … he was very well received.
The consensus community gave him a Nobel Prize.
I’d rather have a bottle in front of me.
I’m not going to argue with this proposition. As a general concept is probably some truth to it. However, in addition to the obvious comment, “almost always” is not remotely the same as “always”, it is useful to distinguish between areas of inquiry. Some areas of science, more settled than others, and despite claims (mostly by the media), climate science is not one of these areas. Expert consensus says that perpetual motion machines are impossible, yet hardly a year goes by without someone claiming to have invented one. This is an area where I feel comfortable accepting the expert consensus and dismissing the claim on its face. Many propositions in physics and even more in mathematics have reached a level of consensus that the likelihood of them being overturned is vanishingly small, but these are areas in which one can exhaustively experiment in the number of “moving parts” is typically small and manageable. Climate science is one of the most complicated areas of inquiry short of TOE, and it is virtually guaranteed that many propositions will be overturned or materially revised in the next few decades.
After a not so short search I find that TOE is probably “Theory Of Evolution”
Is there some reason that people these days use undefined acronyms? Do they think it makes them look smart? Dunno, it’s damned annoying to have stop and figure out WTF it is that they are trying to say.
What does WTF mean?
Wish I could upvote that 1000x
I put WTF in there on purpose just to see what the comment would be. I get really tired of people reducing everything to an acronym. I wonder how many readers skipped over TOE and didn’t know what it meant and didn’t look it up. It’s not like it’s nearly common knowledge like WTF.
Theory of Everything is what it has most often referred to.
The Google search coughed up evolution first, but yes “Theory Of Everything” fits much better. Too bad it wasn’t spelled out.
BTW I immediately spotted your intentional irony re WTF.
OMG, that was funny
Steve, I also get a little perplexed by the acronym overload.
The issue of ubiquitous TLA’s* in the dot-com era cause major consternation and quickly evolved into the ETLA** wars.
*Three Letter Acronyms.
**Extended Three Letter Acronyms.
Tim,
Wait until you try to learn how to fly an airplane:
Google search: “List of aviation acronyms“
Or medicaid
https://www.allacronyms.com/medicaid/abbreviations
“Strong expert consensus” can be radically prejudiced when big money rides on the “correct” answers. Climate science would be a backwater if not for the manufactured crisis. Science and venality are not mutually exclusive.
One question is whether the likelihood of consensus being right is still is strong in an era when any post-grad can claim megabucks from the taxpayer to sit in front of a computer screen and make it all up.
One IPCC apparatchik (can’t remember which one) admitted that the “evidence” for climate change wasn’t based on real-world observations but on “the models”.
Stephen, you almost certainly accept the impossibility of perpetual motion machines NOT because there is a scientific consensus of their impossibility, absent all other information, but because of the logic behind your belief in relation to the most fundamental knowledge you have about how matter and energy operate, based on your extensive daily experience and that of almost everyone else you’ve ever heard from on the question, not just a relatively few “scientists.”
“Strong expert consensus is almost always right”
Would have to be some of the most foolish and dangerous words that could be assembled into a sentence.
I had no trouble teaching climate change to my students. I told both sides of the story (something our feckless media should do but doesn’t) and allowed them to draw their own conclusions.
Be circumspect. You are in danger of being cancelled.
They missed their chance. I am about to start my 7th glorious year of retirement.
Then you got out at the right time, just a few years before “cancel culture” really started taking off.
Considering the “experts” involved with the environment have fairly consistently made manifestly silly predictions over the past fifty years, Dessler should be more humble. The compilations of predictions made for Earth Day are classic.
A well-established and oft used tactic employed by leftists worldwide is –
“never explain, never admit error, never apologize”
Yep – and here is a list of all those silly and busted predictions they made https://extinctionclock.org/
The experts are almost always right.
The experts said miasma theory was right. The experts said plate tectonics was wrong. The experts said the sun revolves around the earth. Shall I continue? Saying “the experts are almost always right” has two logical fallacies: argumentum ad populum and appeal to authority. It doesn’t matter if 7 billion say something is true, that does not make it true. And with just 3 examples I easily proved that “experts” are not always right.
His statement, through his bias & conceit, is missing the fact that he not omnipresent throughout history. Historically, the correct assessment eventually worked its way out of the argument and the mire. People like Dessler do not have the capacity to understand that he is part of the mire … and that sometime in the future the consensus will likely be correct.
Until then, he should stop advocating harmful policies, based on his unfounded beliefs.
Dessler: ‘strong expert consensus is almost always right’
This statement admits a couple of possibilities.
Proof of #2: there was once strong expert consensus that
-the Sun revolved around the Earth, cause we could watch do so every day
-fire originated from phlogiston
-cholera was caused by miasma
-light propagated in a luminiferous aether
-and soon, that CO2 caused most global warming because Mann erased the MWP and LIA in his hockey stick handle while fabricating it’s blade.
Unfortunately for Dessler’s expert climate consensus there are some inconveniently dissonant facts:
Climate models run provably hot
Sea level rise is not accelerating
Arctic sea ice has not disappeared
Polar bears are thriving
Renewables are expensive, intermittent, and lack grid inertia
China and India don’t care about Dessler and his consensus
Sad, really, isn’t it. NOT!
We could add to #2 Lord Kelvin’s erroneous estimate of the age of Earth, which his peers were reluctant to challenge because of Lord Kelvin’s authority. Thus, for at least awhile, there was ‘consensus’ on the Earth’s age.
“Mann erased the MWP and LIA in his hockey stick handle while fabricating it’s blade.”
And when he was finished, the blade immediately bent to horizontally for 18yrs!
The mark of Mann turned into the mark of Zorro!
Ptolomy had a model that proved the Sun and all the Planets orbited the earth at the center. It worked well, could predict future events and was considered “Scientific Consensus” for over 1500 years. If you disagreed with that model strongly enough, the consensus believers would k1ll you. Too bad it was fundamentally wrong, epi-cycles do not exist.
But that’s always the end result for disbelievers. People who cite consensus as truth will always k1ll those who disagree eventually. It’s the final solution to not admitting you’re wrong.
Nobody was killed for it. Copernicus’s system was equally flawed, and that was the final version that had many more epicycles.
A better example is the accepted history that there was a paradigm shit from having the Earth as the centre to the Sun. The real paradigm shift was not using circles. revelations not based on new evidence. Just ignoring politics.
Ptolemy’s epicycles ‘worked’ to shore up heliocentric and to ‘explain’ the apparent retrograde motion of Mars. Newton’s physics would have shown epicycles to be impossible.
Today’s climate models are based on precisely the same mode of creation. They have incomplete data and a preordained CO2 Control Knob theory (shame on you NASA for coining this Luddite term) that doesn’t fit the data. The fix to shoehorn climate data to the theory are clisci epicycles, lacking the ingenuity of Ptolemy’s 150 AD model of the solar system, made with no knowledge of modern physics. At least Ptolemy took the observations at face value
Rud,
I only got four sentences in so far, but I am already laughing so hard I need to rest up before I read the rest!
TY. It is my new Alinsky rule 5 technique at work—abject ridicule.
I am right there with you on that!
Rud,
I’ve always wanted to bring this up somewhere, and since you mentioned the luminiferous aether, I thought this might be as good a point as any, and would be interested if you had any thoughts or comment.
When discussing global warming, the greenhouse effect and the role of CO2, quite often the discussion include references to Tyndall and his early experiments. However, an interesting history-of-science tidbit that I’ve never seen pointed out is that he tried to explain his observations/results in accordance with the currently accepted theory of his time of the luminiferous aether.
One quote from his 1861 paper:
This appears to be a case of both cutting edge (for his time) experimental results being explained by the (ultimately wrong) “strong expert consensus” of his time.
Would love to read any thoughts you might have on this.
Consensus arguments are irrelevant because there is no consensus, nothing even close. The term “consensus” refers to everyone in a group agreeing. Look it up. It takes EVERYONE. There are lots of experts that are skeptical of AGW so there is no consensus, period.
Lastly “Consensus” is not science, when are these moron going to figure that one out!
Agreed, David W
The point is relevant – consensus means agreement round. That has never existed. They mean the majority position but there was no vote and no proposition was framed fairly and debated openly.
If I say the majority of scientists in some field agree with some proposition that is not a consensus. That is a bare or large majority.
The Japanese believe strongly in consensus management. They debate and discuss for hours on end. Drives westerners mad. When they reach consensus, everyone supports the decision and works towards it.
There is absolutely no consensus on the cause, magnitude, even the direction, of climate change. The ice cap is growing in both Greenland and Antarctica. There are almost record high temperatures on the West Coast of the USA. There is record cold in the central US, Australia, New Zealand and Siberia. What’s going on? When it is fully understood we can start to claim there is a consensus.
This statement needs revision: “Strong expert consensus is almost always right, and people who dispute it are almost always wrong. There are exceptions but those are rare.”
I would add the following:
“Those rare exceptions are always expensive and demonstrative that science should always be questioned; data should always be public. Otherwise, science sticks to positions like Aristotle’s model of the solar system for any number of centuries and puts thinkers like Galileo on trial. And some, because they are so much brighter than the rest of us, think that gain of function research should be financed, with little or no public debate. Many experts don’t survive cross examination. That is why they shy away from it.”
“Expert consensus is almost always right”
Maybe, maybe not, but I suppose he says ‘almost’ because of the climate scientists.
I’m always in consensus with me, no queston 😀
“…as we suffer through the hellish summer of 2011…..”
1. The Vital Signs of our Temperamental Atmosphere
7. Heat waves and Drought: Legacy of a Texas Summer
8. Snow, Cold, and Ice: Winter’s Beauty and Treachery
10. Doing Something about the Weather
4 chapters from Bomar, 1995 Texas Weather, University of Texas Press
Can’t find anything about consensus or preaching, chapter 10 on mitigation. Weather and climate change all over the book, smart enough to know best strategy is how to increase chances of survival. 50s drought still the worst recorded, was there also, and even after reading this one– https://journals.tdl.org/twj/index.php/twj/article/view/6463/6066
Probably similar ones based on earlier historical accounts.
Dessler also once suggested that Pielke Sr resign from the AGU, over his disagreement with their position on climate change. Very scientific! And as Ross McKittrick pointed out, there is a complete list of scientific institutions that have surveyed their memberships to establish their views on CAGW. I have taken the opportunity to reproduce this list…
Want to see it again?
Consensus science is for weak, lazy minds.
And grifters looking for grant money.
And ideologues trying to push their political agenda.
Oxymoron alert!
If it’s consensus, it’s not science.
It’s only 2021. The 21st cc. ain’t over until the fat lady sings or, possibly, singes.
I think she’ll shiver before she singes. 😉
“I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.”
-Micheal Crichton
Nobody invokes “consensus” if a child asks how we know the Earth is round.
Why bother doing any more science? Just accept the current ‘strong expert consensus’, because it’s ‘almost always right’.
Gee, Charles, you are dryer than a Texas drought. Bowing out by yielding to his superior wit was also a wickedly kind touch! He’s a rich target but you left him standing.
IIRC, Revkin’s ire was raised by climategate but world view can be a strong barrier. M. Moore’s outrage over renewables dirty secrets was the same but both, ever so close, never asked the next questions. They are honest but somehow not able to follow thread further (psychological denial?).
I had no choice by the official rules of the Internet and Twitter.
I think maybe you might want to watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid again, Charles?
Or at least, this particular scene:
https://youtu.be/w9KBOhPXhds
This is a back alley knife fight at Midnight in gangland.
Or at the very least a bare knuckle brawl.
A great film, I love the “we got to jump off the cliff scene” that and “I have an idea” Role titles.
The consensus view among all the recognized, published experts was that gain of function research on animal viruses at a bunch of level 4 biolabs scattered around the world was adequately controlled and supervised and offered benefits far greater than the risks.
Heck, that probably is still the consensus view today. I haven’t seen any indication anybody is even interested in discussing whether we should reconsider that opinion. I wonder why?
To be fair the last 18 months have been wonderful,so I see no reason to doubt our brilliant leaders and experts. Sarc,
I know one thing is it is very certain sometime in the future earth will have glaciers again, I also know at this point and time we cannot stop that from happening. Yet our so call betters want us to change our life style because they think sometime in the near future it might get 6 degree C warmer! Something the earth has done many time before but now its and extensional threat. As Ron White put is you can’t fix stupid.
On your first point, Earth has glaciers now, and I can go to the top floor and see snow fields in the mountains.
You can lead a jackass to water, but he will still be a damn jackass.
I.e. you can’t make it think.
I’ve had a brief email exchange with Andrew and came away encouraged. To be sure, he is in the warmist camp, but seems open to new information. I tend to be overly optimistic about issues like this but there may be hope.
Perhaps, perhaps not. I am in the NOT category. Here is why.
NASA featured his 2010(b) paper wherein he ‘proved’ positive cloud feedback by comparing all sky to clear sky, fitting an OLS positive slope. Only problem was, r^2 was 0.02. Almost perfect random scatter, yet it got published! McIntyre was not kind to either Dessler or the publishing journal.
I suspect you two guys may be referring to different Andrews.
Yes?
Stephen seems like he was referring to Revkin, and Rud referring to Dessler?
You are probably right. My bad.
In the Climategate emails, it appears Revkin was regarded as someone they couldn’t trust, and to be wary of him. He refused to play their game. Sad that he never delved further into the Climate Scam. Too scary I guess. He could have been the next Woodward or Bernstein.
So far, no one here who has commented has pointed out a glaringly obvious truth: There is no consensus, except a fake one.
And to the degree there have been assertions of one, they have generally been regarding a weak statement, at best…once one drills down deep enough to get to exactly what question there is even supposedly a consensus on.
Consensus does not mean “majority” in this context.
And it does not mean “substantial majority” either, or anything like that.
It means there is essentially zero disagreement of any merit.
It means, to a close approximation, the same thing as unanimity.
But they do not use the word unanimity because then everyone would immediately realize they were just making it up.
There is no consensus, whatsoever.
If anyone says there is, ask them exactly who is comprising this consensus.
Is it all scientists?
All climate scientists?
What exactly is a climate scientist?
Who is not one?
Who took a poll?
When was it taken?
How many were polled?
Exactly what was the question that was asked during this nonexistent fake poll of a nonexistent fake consensus?
(OK, maybe just ask exactly what was asked…specifically!)
Who was not asked?
What about all of the skeptical scientists?
Is there anything like the poll skeptics took, and got a huge number of actual signatures on a specific question, and did so in a very short span of time?
Global Warming Petition Project
The answer to this last question is no, the warmistas have never ever taken such a tally, or collected signatures of named people regarding a specific question.
EVER!
Just like they never engage in debates anymore, or even entertain critical commentary or inconsistencies.
They never correct past errors, or acknowledge failed predictions.
They never ever speak out against those in the media, or amongst themselves, who exaggerate, engage in panic mongering, or even when people in academia or the media just flat out make stuff up!
There is no consensus, and we concede infinitely too much when we let crap like that become part of a conversation we engage in, without ever even disputing or taking exception to the precepts implicit in the very statements we are disputing!
Skeptics need to do better, IMO, on a number of fronts:
-We need to make warmistas prove what they say even has a basis in reality.
-We need to keep them honest about exactly what it is they are asserting, regarding such questions as:
-whether or not we are talking about climate change, or global warming?
-catastrophic global warming or just warming in general?
-notions such as the present time being the warmest period ever, the rate of warming being unprecedented, the legitimacy of many of the data sets…
…to name but a few.
Some other real and pertinent questions are regarding such things as, why anyone should suppose without evidence that a small amount of warming is dangerous, given we live on a half frozen planet in the midst of an ice age, why are alarmists so ignorant of basic facts of earth history, the true frequency and trends in various weather phenomena, and the long history of failure re a huge number of specific predictions, etc?
I wrote more than I intended to at first, so let me summarize:
There is no consensus!
In case I was not clear, let me reiterate: There is no consensus.
Whatsoever!
What there is, is a bunch of loudmouthed jerks, shameless liars, greedy rent-seekers, frightened doomsday cultists, and an immense corruption of science in furtherance of the political views of those making the claims.
Great comment. We perhaps concede too much. OTOH, I also have problems with skeptics who concede nothing, like claiming the GHE does not exist. My recent posts on that, and ECS, and some of the vehement replies illustrate that problem.
I drilled into some of the ‘consensus’ papers when researching Blowing Smoke, but dropped it as an essay topic because they were all so obviously flawed, and there was so much other stuff to attack that was also very flawed but less obviously so. Essay Shell Games did a twofer plus on ‘ocean acidification’, and is just one example of what eventually made the final ebook cut.
Thank you Rud, and I do appreciate the kind words.
It is easy to understand why we must all choose which battles we wish to engage in, that is for sure.
For one thing, as you alluded, the blizzard of lies is so dense it is not possible to take them all on at once, or even for anyone to keep all of them in mind at the same time.
It is rather paradoxical, is it not, that it can be more difficult to debunk a dense web of multiple overlapping and interdependent lies, that to effectively challenge a single mistaken notion? After all, in the first case there are many strings one can pull on.
I would not want anyone to take my comment above as a criticism, but instead as more of a reminder. And I need to remind myself with such trains of thought as much as I feel compelled to share the reminder with others.
I am interested in reading through your ebook essays, now that you mention it. I am not sure I know where to find it though.
iBooks, Amazon Kindle, B&N whatever, and several other ebook global platforms. Cheapest is Amazon Kindle. And you can download for free the Kindle reader onto an iPad or other reader platforms. I prefer iBooks for annotation functionality (I can flag all my mistakes). Ran out of physical space for more real paper books about two decades ago in two homes. eBooks were a lifesaver as a reader, not just as a writer.
I like them too.
I have a Kindle Paperwhite and a Kindle Fire.
In addition to ease of reading due to the light weight, always saving your page, ability to size text, read in bright sun or in the dark…ibooks are cheaper, most have a free sample, and there are various flat rate offers…the best thing is, you can buy them any time 24/7/365, and be reading minutes later.
“eBooks were a lifesaver as a reader”
I agree. I’ve gone so far as to buy an ebook even though I have it as a book. I took the book and put it on the shelf and read it on my iPad.
I prefer the iPad Kindle App for reading, versus the Kindle Paperwhite.
The iPad is a lot nicer, but it is also pretty darn heavy.
And battery life?
Oy!
For me it depends a lot on where I am and what I am doing.
The Kindle Fire is kind of a happy medium between Paperwhite and iPad.
For most of what I wind up doing with it, being able to hold it in one hand comfortably is what tips the scale.
My iPad is an older one though….maybe they have gotten lighter?
Well said, Nicolas. I agree entirely and have been saying pretty much the same thing for over 20 years. Hell, even the term being used, “climate change” has no fixed meaning. it’s an appeal to ambiguity … equivocation. Science is meant to have both precision and accuracy, climate change has neither. How can there be any sort of dialogue (or consensus) when everyone has their own understanding of the terms? This entire mess has been specifically orchestrated to avoid facts, evidence and real science based on observation and experiment. People now believe that models can pass for experiment and their output is data.
Even if carried out scrupulously the empirical data collection can never solve the problem of attribution IMO.
All that can be determined is whether the effect of added CO2 is on balance dangerous enough to try the near-impossible of limiting emissions and so far the reliable empirical evidence suggests it isn’t.
It certainly can’t. Accumulating data is just the start. Before anything else is done they must show a causative relationship between increased CO2 and rising temperatures. So far that has not happened.
What we do have is a world that is now growing more plants and that climates appear to be more benign … better for all life. Few (if any) life forms favour the cold.
It is a political equivocation that was applied when “global warming” failed to perform as predicted by these models. And yes, the term is completely meaningless.
The warmists and AGW true believers try to keep the language ambiguous, in order to keep the populace off balance … so they can alter the message whenever needed.
Is there anything like the poll skeptics took, and got a huge number of actual signatures on a specific question, and did so in a very short span of time?
A short space of time? The Oregon Petition was started in 1998!
Why should anyone care about what dentists, doctors, electrical engineers, physicians and veterinarians think about climate change? The only qualification needed to sign the petition was a Bachelor of Science degree or higher. In fact only 0.5% of the signatories had a degree specifically in climatology or atmospheric studies. Even if you include the disciplines they describe as ‘directly related to the physical environment of the Earth’ you can only get to 12%, fewer than the proportion with a Medical or Biology qualification.
And there are millions of B.Scs out there. According to figures from the US Department of Education, approximately 10.6 million science graduates have gained qualifications consistent with the polling criteria in the timeframe that would make them eligible. So that’s a massive hit rate of around 0.3%.
And when you are soliciting opinion it is hardly best practice to include a cover letter and faked-up review article only supporting one side of the argument. That alone disqualifies the Petition as a serious survey of opinion.
As the newsletter of The Skeptics Society concluded ” through his Global Warming Petition Project, Arthur Robinson has solicited the opinions of the wrong group of people in the wrong way and drawn the wrong conclusions about any possible consensus among relevant and qualified scientists regarding the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. His petition is unqualified to deliver answers about a consensus in which the public is interested. He has a right to conduct any kind of petition drive he wishes, but he is not ethically entitled to misrepresent his petition as a fair reflection of relevant scientific opinion. He has confused his political with his scientific aims and misled the public in the process.”
See also the ‘Pants on Fire’ rating from Politifact. (other debunkings are available)
Has Politifact analyzed the various consensus claims? I can’t find it on their website.
You got a lot of details wrong.
The current iteration of the petition is much more recent than you suggest:
“The majority of the current listed signatories signed or re-signed the petition after October 2007. The original review article that accompanied the petition effort in 1998-1999 was replaced in October 2007 with a new review incorporating the research literature up to that date.”
And there is good reason for who was allowed to sign on: People like ManBearPig and Obama stating the big fat lie that 97% of scientists blah blah blah…
And stating this after making all sorts of exaggerated claims, which of course implies that nearly every scientist in the world is onboard with all of these exaggerations and made up crap.
Even now many warmistas cite the various scientific organizations as supporting fake consensus.
But none of those organizations poll their members, and none of them consist of only “climate scientists” whatever the term even means.
Many people cited and referred to as “climate scientists” have no credentials or training in any science whatsoever.
So your criticism is another epic fail, from start to finish.
Just another snowflake in the blizzard of bullsh!t.
“So that’s a massive hit rate of around 0.3%.”
And yet it is over 31,000 more than any such list of signatures gathered by warmistas…EVER!
How many “climate scientists” have given public support to Michael Mann?
Even Michael Mann does not have degree in either climatology or atmospheric studies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann
Our schools have failed us at many levels!
I would say there is effectively a consensus, but that the climate cultists never state the actual consensus whenever they mention its existence.
Based on the data from several studies showing at least 97% of climate scientists agree that:
Humans are adding at least a tiny bit of warming to natural variation.
That is the limit of the consensus, and it is doubtful that Dessler would admit to it.
Ted:
IIRC the AMS did poll their members back in ~2014: about 60% thought > 50% of the
warming since 1950 was due to mankind, and ~30% thought the warming might be a serious problem [I could be mis-remembering this…]. But clearly not near 97%.
People cling to a consensus like one would to a life preserver, especially if your income
[or grants, tenure, fame] depends upon it.
Recent medically related ideas that had a consensus that turned out to be wrong: cell phone cancer, dietary fat, linear threshold for radiation,margarine, stomach ulcer etiology, repressed memories, bone marrow transplant for breast cancer, knee arthroscopy for meniscus tears, kyphoplasty, hormonal replacement therapy… the list can be much longer. All of these had
some degree of peer-reviewed literature backing them. Yet, …oops!
The point is all “experts” need humility. But apparently in the climate alarmist world this is quite hard. I guess when you are “saving the planet” the normal scientific method does not apply.
Ted,
You have evidently not been reading here for long, or you would know that every single one of those consensus studies you refer to, which somehow all came up with the same number, 97%, are pure made up nonsense, contrived hogwash, unadulterated malarkey, or some similar brand of bullshit.
I suggest you start here if you wish to catch up:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/12/23/oreskes-harvard-and-the-destruction-of-scientific-revolutions/
And then continue your remedial study with anything from this very long list:
Watts Up With That? – The world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change
Texas is having one of the wettest coolest Summers in living memory. I know that just weather, but then so was Dessler’s 2011 Texas Permadrought.
and the Precip
Twitter is useless sanctimonious drivel being shoveled from one side of the driveway to the otherside, only to be shoveled back. I canceled my account. Useful content does not pack into 240 characters, or whatever they allow now.
I never signed up to Twitter. When they first started up they set a limit of 140 characters for replies, and I couldn’t even get warmed up in 140 characters, so I didn’t see any point in my joining. And I’m glad I did. I probably wouldn’t have lasted long on Twitter anyway. They would have banned me quick.
Perpetual Texas drought:
Good one! Yes, we’ve had plenty of rain in our area. We consider ourselves lucky if we get good rain this late in the summer.
This from the UN:
“Almost two-thirds of over 1.2 million people surveyed worldwide say that climate change is a global emergency, urging greater action to address the crisis, results from a new UN climate survey revealed on Wednesday.”
Although this doesn’t say so, it seems the question relates to carbon base fuels, CO2, and radiative forcing.
There is a 97% probability that this global emergency consensus is wrong.
All those sub-clauses make that quite a proposition to attract a two thirds agreement. I wonder what the alternatives were?
Is this two-thirds a measure of the effectiveness of MSM propaganda?
even broken clocks show correct time twice a day…
Emperor Marcus Aurelius “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
It seems that things haven’t changed much in two millennia.
When one understands that the Church of Warming/Climate is just a denomination of the main religion of Secular Socialism, whose deity is the government, then it is apparent that government scientists are little different than the educated clergy of yore when less than 10% of the peasants could read. The clergy provided the “science” of the day of the king’s right to rule by divine providence. The Church then got to share is the plunder of the peasants and the crown avoided the messy use of the sword as the peasants voluntarily gave up their liberty and property. Similarly, there is little difference between Joel Osteen and Al Gore.
From the article: “So, to sum it up, in 1995, Dessler made a prediction. In 2011, the weather briefly aligned with his prediction. In my opinion he did a premature end zone dance and felt on top of the world. For the last ten years, again in my opinion, he likely is getting more and more bitter about Nature suggesting, leaning to, proving his predictions foolish.”
I have to say that the summer of 2011 was one of the hottest I have experienced in Oklahoma. It was a severe heat wave for sure.
But, we haven’t had anything like that since, so Dessler thinking we were going to see more and more of that has been wrong for the last ten years.
I think the older you are the less you believe the sort of claptrap Dessler spouts. I’ve lived in Michigan all my life and 2012 was a very hot year. But 1988 was also very hot, and I remember sometime in the 1960s it was extremely hot. If you predict hot weather you will be correct once in a while.
My impression of Desser is that he is an anxious, neurotic, mess, hooked on the spotlight, sort of like Michael Mann. Didn’t he predict that climate change would drive humans underground by 2100, or something like that?
If so, then not credible, period.
You know all their behaviour can be described by cognitive dissonance,.including the arrival of self appointed mind guards to get the waverers back in line.
Here are my posts on the arrogant and often-to-wrong Andrew Dessler:
https://www.masterresource.org/?s=Andrew+Dessler
Malthusianism has always been the consensus–and see what Julian Simon did to the consensus?
Enron was also consensus–voted as America’s most innovative company for many years running. And Enron was banking on the climate consensus too, another story.
I guarantee that if it’s a politically based or charged claim then the consensus is wrong.
Consensus is just another term for religious belief.
Without data and accurate models, your consensus amounts to an opinion.
Dr. Eugene Parker predicted the existence of a solar wind. This position was ridiculed by most astrophysicists of his day.
A few years later the first mission to Venus proved that the solar wind existed.