Update 3/24/2016
Since writing this post, I have reversed my position on the reliablilty of Cook (2013). The short version is that I no longer stand by its methods and don't have high confidence in its conclusions. The long version may be found here.Background
Much has already been written about Cook et al. (2013), Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, so a brief summary should suffice. Taken directly from the abstract, the salient findings are:AbstractMy bold added, because it's the source of much consternation. Unpacking those particular statistics gives this expanded tally:
We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors’ self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.
62.7% support AGW
35.5% no position
1.8% reject AGW
------
100.0% total
So one argument goes that only 62.7% of self-rated papers support the consensus position. Other commentators have gone further, noting that the data were actually assigned into 8 different categories, here excerpted from Table 2 of the paper:
(1) Explicit endorsement with quantificationHowever, in the body of the paper the authors write:
Explicitly states that humans are the primary cause
(2) Explicit endorsement without quantification
Explicitly states humans are causing global
(3) Implicit endorsement
Implies humans are causing global warming.
(4a) No position
Does not address or mention the cause of global warming
(4b) Uncertain
Expresses position that human’s role on recent global warming is uncertain/undefined
(5) Implicit rejection
Implies humans have had a minimal impact on global warming without saying so explicitly
(6) Explicit rejection without quantification
Explicitly minimizes or rejects that humans are causing global warming
(7) Explicit rejection with quantification
Explicitly states that humans are causing less than half of global warming
To simplify the analysis, ratings were consolidated into three groups: endorsements (including implicit and explicit; categories 1–3 in table 2), no position (category 4) and rejections (including implicit and explicit; categories 5–7).Somewhat confusingly, Table 3 which reports on these consolidated buckets contains a fourth category, "Uncertain on AGW", which I gather was done because the original category 4 (no position) warranted being split in two after the review process was already underway. That wrinkle aside, Table 3 does indeed report the results in the consolidated format described just above ...
... however, the body of the paper does not report at the level of the original seven, cum eight, more specific categories, thus leaving room for all sorts of mischief. The latest in a long line of such efforts is the topic of this post.
The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend
I stumbled on this latest iteration of the manufactured consensus controversy as I often do, reading a WUWT post:The Cook ‘97% consensus’ paper, exposed by new book for the fraud that it really isI don't know much about Shollenberger other than we have the same given name. I can't be arsed right now to properly research his background or prior writings, and as it's not relevant to what he has written in his book, I won't dwell on it much. Suffice it to say, my impressions from over the past two years are that he's a "lukewarmer" who does not dispute CO2's radiative effect on climate on physical principle, but holds the view that climate sensitivity to CO2 is lower than IPCC-published estimates of same. A cursory review of his comments on various "sceptical" blogs indicates that he's quick to brand the IPCC and its consensus supporters as liars. He really doesn't like the SkS crew, which was behind Cook et al. (2013), and his self-published book being promoted by Watts is not the first time he's been given space on WUWT to air out similar views.
Anthony Watts / 1 day ago March 12, 2016
I don’t like to use the word “fraud”, and I can’t recall if I’ve ever used it in a title. In this case it is warranted. Brandon Shollenberger writes of a new book, The Climate Wars: How the Consensus is Enforced, that proves without a doubt that John Cook and his “Skeptical Science” team are nothing but a gang of “say anything” activists, and that the much repeated “97% consensus” is indeed nothing more than a manufactured outcome.
Oddly, or perhaps not so much as I dig into it, there's some bad blood between he and Anthony for comments Shollenberger made about WUWT on his own blog (h/t WUWT comment MikeN March 12, 2016 at 10:40 am):
There are not words to express the level of contempt I feel for Anthony Watts and the things he has either done himself, actively encouraged others to do or tacitly encouraged by happily tolerating them even as he knew they were wrong and/or dishonest. At this point I can only say Watts is either a deranged sociopath with no sense of morality who derives sexual pleasure by spreading lies to the greatest number of people possible or is an idiot savant whose one field of mastery is deluding himself into believing whatever idiotic things he finds most convenient at any given moment.The final phrase, "whose one field of mastery is deluding himself into believing whatever idiotic things he finds most convenient at any given moment", is about the only thing I wholeheartedly agree with Shollenberger on. Having an orgasm spreading FUD I deem over the top -- if we MUST impute motive, I think the man just doesn't want to pay taxes on CO2 emissions.
Never one to let personal feelings get in the way of disseminating lies about "lies", Anthony himself weighs in on why he's promoting Shollenberger's new book:
Anthony WattsIn keeping with the theme, climate contrarianism does make for strange bedfellows at times. Any port in a storm, as they say.
March 12, 2016 at 7:31 pm
I’m not at all happy with Brandon’s choice of words, but in this case, getting the word out on this superseded my disgust with his labeling.
I’ve been called worse. Once some fool claimed I have sex with farm animals.
With the stage set, and my schadenfreude fed, I'll get on with it.
The Book
It's available as an e-book for the low price of $0.99 on Amazon. With some credit due, Shollenberger also hosts it for free on his own blog. So let's have a read. Top of pg. 4:Enforcement TacticsThere's also a consensus that the Earth orbits the Sun, that both are spherical bodies, that the Moon is NOT made of cheese (we know this because 12 human beings actually set foot on it and brought back, you know, actual rocks as evidence), that all these celestial bodies orbit each other as described by Newtonian laws of motion (later amended by Einstein who fine-tuned gravity's function in the mix). As well, it's long been established that humans did indeed evolve from common ape ancestors, that we're not the only species to have derived from prior forms due to Natural Selection and/or selective breeding.
There is a 97% consensus on global warming. If you don't agree, you will be mocked and ridiculed. If you disagree, you'll be labeled a conspiracy nut. If you try to find the data proving this consensus, you'll be labeled a criminal, threatened with lawsuits and told you're going to be reported to the police.
You will also be mocked and ridiculed for not agreeing with those long-established tenets of scientific knowledge. Lawsuits? Probably not, but much depends on how much a pain in the arse you make yourself.
Dredging around someone's web server looking for unprotected directories that a reasonable person would clearly understand was meant to contain private information is one way to be a large pain in the arse. Bottom of pg. 4:
[... ] take a look at the sort of things I happened to find when poking around in publicly accessible portions of Cook's websites. Here is an image of him, created by him or one of his Skeptical Science group members and posted to his website:Link in the original. Top of pg. 5 in the book shows one of the images, John Cook's face photoshopped into a vintage portrait of an Nazi SS officer, with the insignia replaced with various Skeptical Science logos. Skeptical Science. SS. Get it? Poking fun at their detractors who in seriousness compare the SkS team to murderously xenophobic nationalistic fascists.
There aren't enough irony meters in the world. It gets better. Going back to Shollenberger's Please Go Die in a Fire post on his own blog:
Anthony Watts, this is shameful. You’ve just promoted an article in which a man is smeared for things like, having had a divorce and supposedly being brain damaged That much might just be disreputable, but what reaches the levels of truly disgusting is promoting this article when it smears a person for his father having fought in the German army in WWII to make a Nazi smear.My bold, to emphasize the distinct lack of self-awareness. And yes, this is me at my most diplomatic, giving-the-benefit-of-the-doubt, self.
There’s far more to say, but given how dishonorable and disgusting this is, I don’t think there’s any point. Anyone who thinks this piece is acceptable, much less deserving of promotion and support, is a vile, wretched soul who shut up and go away. And that’s the nicest thing I can say about this obscene hit piece.
After a number of pages devoted to not-Nazis, musing about when hacking isn't and other irrelevancies, he gets to his central point:
They came up with their categories so they could examine both ideas. In fact, Nuccitell specifically said:I gather that Nuccitelli's comment was lifted from some of the files Shollenberger obtained from SkS servers. And from this, that the cardinal sin committed by Cook et al. (2013) is that they didn't stick with how Nuccitelli "originally" envisioned the results.
The way I see the final paper is that we’ll conclude ‘There’s an x% consensus supporting the AGW theory, and y% explicitly put the human contribution at >50%’.
If we plug in the numbers from their study into Nuccitelli's proposal for how to publish their conclusions, we get:
There’s a 97% consensus supporting the AGW theory, and 1.6% put the human contribution at >50%.
Seriously, that's it. He expects what researchers say in private when putting together a study to stand, set in concrete, until the thing is complete, peer-reviewed and published.
For shit's sake. We'd still be using stone hammers if that's how scientific enquiry actually worked, if that.
The balance of the book goes on to, yet again, rehash "flawed" methodology. Beating a dead horse might describe it if the horse were actually dead. More, this is another example of me (and others) dragging an almost dead horse to water and not being terribly surprised that it doesn't drink out of sheer stubborn stupidity.
A More Detailed Rebuttal
Shollenberger engaged me directly on the WUWT thread. And I responded (Shollenberger's text in bold):Brandon Gates March 13, 2016 at 4:29 pmIf you click on the comment link, you'll see what actually appeared:
Brandon Shollenberger,
The reality is Cook et al didn’t do this.
It wouldn't be the first time someone in this forum struggled to recognize reality.
One of the central points I’ve made is the descriptions they gave of their methodology were false, as well as how they described the results generated by that methodology.
I get it that you disagree with their methodology. That does not make it necessarily false.
I went so far as to demonstrate this by quoting the second author of the paper on how to describe their results, a quote you criticized me for posting… even though it was an author of the paper who I was quoting.
No, I didn't criticize you for quoting Nuccitelli's pre-publication comments:
There’s an x% consensus supporting the AGW theory, and y% explicitly put the human contribution at >50%.
I did err when I stated that you had not apparently read the actual classification used in the published paper:
Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
What I continue to dispute is that this constitutes being "misleading" or a deliberate "deception", especially since they explicitly described their methods in the body of the paper and supporting supplemental material, including how they binned their own abstract ratings and author surveys.
I honestly have no idea what you think you’re saying.
I honestly don't know how I could make it any more clear to you. I'm beginning to wonder whether your expressed confusion is deliberate.
If you think I have said something wrong, I suggest you quote what I said and explain how it is wrong with sufficient detail or reference for people to verify what you say.
Don't be obtuse. Here, again, is the crux of my argument to date:
Why should your own subjective categorization be any more valid than theirs? Since when is a difference of opinion an a priori example of malfeasance?
They are, of course, rhetorical questions. You are entirely free to answer them literally if you choose. At the very least, you might stop pretending that I haven't made an intelligble point in asking them.
Until you do so, it will just continue to look like you haven’t even read what you’re criticizing.
Irony.
Brandon Gates March 13, 2016 at 4:29 pmWhich brings me to a post-script ...
[SNIP – come up with a better argument than “you are being obtuse”. Stop wasting everybody’s time – Anthony
The WHUTTers Don't Like Being Poked With Their Own Schtick
I didn't even originally set out to address Shollenberger's horseradish, because Anthony's lede sentence gave me a serious case of the giggles:I don’t like to use the word “fraud”, and I can’t recall if I’ve ever used it in a title.My first post in the article still stands, and is very much in keeping with Shollenberger's "bbbbbbut you changed your mind!" theme:
Brandon Gates March 12, 2016 at 4:26 pmThe apologia was predictably inept. Here we have dbstealey being his usual logically impaired and content-free self:
Anthony,
I don’t like to use the word “fraud”, and I can’t recall if I’ve ever used it in a title.
You have a category for tagging posts “fraud”. Two articles of the five tagged “fraud” contain the word in the title:
—————
UK Conference of Science Journalists: ‘institutions unlikely to fairly investigate allegations of fraud made against their own’
Anthony Watts / July 1, 2012
Guest post by Douglas J. Keenan
The 2012 UK Conference of Science Journalists was held on June 25th. The programme is available on the UKCSJ web site. The conference is intended for science journalists, as its name says; I attended at the kind invitation of the President of the Association of British Science Writers, Connie St Louis.
I went to two of the sessions. The first was a session was entitled “What can journalists do to uncover scientific misconduct?”. The second was the plenary at the end. What follows is my perspective on those sessions.
—————
Euro Carbon Market Fraud – trade suspended
Anthony Watts / January 20, 2011
From the Telegraph: European carbon market suspended over fraud fears
The European carbon market has been thrown into turmoil after the scandal-hit scheme was suspended for a week over suspicions of fraud.
—————
I would say you’re not exactly shy about using the word, or allowing guest authors to use it. You’re certainly not shy about alleging that climate scientists are politically motivated to reach laughably wrong conclusions. And you are of course quite vocal when they respond to your vacuous accusations of “mendacity” with “denigration”.
In short, self-awareness does not appear to be one of your strong points. Your sudden aversion to using the word “fraud” is but another example of it.
dbstealey March 12, 2016 at 5:08 pmAnother one:
BG says:
You’re certainly not shy about alleging that climate scientists are politically motivated to reach laughably wrong conclusions.
It waddles like a duck. It has feathers. It quacks like a duck.
It’s a duck.
And after posting hundreds of thousands of words expressing your true belief in dangerous manmade global warming, you could easily put together an article of your own, instead of criticizing what other writers say.
I know why you don’t: your true belief would get cut to ribbons in short order. Because when it comes right down to the nitty gritty, you have no solid measurements, facts, or evidence to support your belief. You just believe. That’s enough for you, but it’s not enough for skeptics of that particular scare. We need the facts and measurements that your side hasn’t been able to produce.
Chip Javert March 12, 2016 at 6:26 pmSo I lowered the boom:
Brandon Gates
I’m unclear on how comprehensive WUWT’s category for tagging posts “fraud” is, and I don’t know how many posts WUWT has over the review period (>10,000?).
In some of the material you reference, WUWT appeared to use “fraud” in the title because the attached third party material used the term (i.e.:the term was not initiated by WUWT). Even so 2/10,000 = 0.02%.
However, finding 2 articles with fraud in the title definitely does not support your judgement & charge of “self-awareness does not appear to be one of [Anthony’s] strong points. Your sudden aversion to using the word “fraud” is but another example of it.”
Geez. We got some serious nit-picking going on.
Brandon Gates March 12, 2016 at 9:10 pmWellllllll .... I pointed out that Chip was complaining about sample size, justifying a bit of a longish post, and submitted a MUCH a shorter version:
[snip – you’re done with this, the point’s been made. there is no need to clutter up the thread with a multi-page comment -mod]
Brandon Gates March 12, 2016 at 9:40 pmNote that it initially made it through moderation intact, mod's bottom comment justifying the yuuuuge amount of text as the reason for nixing it. A second moderator subsequently killed the entire response.
mod,
[snip. –mod]
[it was a huge amount of text for a comment – all decisions are final -mod]
Uncharacteristically for me, words fail.
MOAR:
Ric Werme March 12, 2016 at 9:38 pmA pattern emerges. Side note, "deranged sociopath" is Shollenberger (from his Please Go Die in a Fire post on his own blog), not me. Ric may have confused us, it's happened before.
Please take the time to read my comments. Especially http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/03/12/the-cook-97-consensus-paper-exposed-by-new-book-for-the-fraud-that-it-really-is/#comment-2164766
Sigh.
Anthony has often discouraged people from claiming fraud without good supporting evidence. Pretty decent for a “deranged sociopath,” wouldn’t you say?
Brandon Gates March 12, 2016 at 10:00 pm
[snip -mod]
A final one, I promise:
Alan Robertson March 13, 2016 at 6:19 amVintage Robertson: building strawmen, playing dumb, guilt by association, broad-sweeping hand-waving assertion. My response made it through and actually still lives as of this writing (3/13/2016 10:20 PM PDT):
Brandon,
We are all aware that this site shines a light in some very dark corners, so why do you try to make something of the practice? Are you defending “deliberate scientific malfeasance”, or arguing against its exposure? What?
Your denigration of our host is not surprising, in light of the company you keep over at that stalker/hate blog, neither is the fact that you come here feigning distaste for use of terms like “fraud”, for the same reason. We have a good picture of you already, but do keep filling in any blanks for new readers.
Your off- topic thread bombing diversion didn’t work this time, but your self- exposure (again) was almost worth your appearance.
Brandon Gates March 13, 2016 at 4:59 pmI lied. There is one more. My first reply mentioning Shollenberger also still stands, and is probably worthy of mention for the context of his direct reply to me:
Alan Robertson,
Your denigration of our host is not surprising, in light of the company you keep over at that stalker/hate blog, neither is the fact that you come here feigning distaste for use of terms like “fraud”, for the same reason.
Splash one irony meter. I don’t have any distaste for the word “fraud” itself, and never feigned such. As even my subsequent (shorter) comments have been binned, it’s pretty clear that the length of the original comment in this subthread wasn’t so unwelcome as the content. I find this more than a little amusing.
We have a good picture of you already, but do keep filling in any blanks for new readers.
I wouldn’t wish to diminish your ability to think for me better than I can for myself. By all means, carry on with your self-soothing fantasies.
Brandon Gates March 12, 2016 at 5:05 pmLinks in the original. And it's Cook (2013), dammit, not 2015, a mistake I've made previously and need to stop doing.
davidmhoffer,
As written, this sentence doesn’t make sense. By definition, the human contribution to AGW is 100%.
Indeed. However, as written in AR5, the attribution statement is:
More than half of the observed increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST) from 1951 to 2010 is very likely due to the observed anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations.
Cook et al (2015) [sic] define the “consensus position” on AGW thus …
We examined a large sample of the scientific literature on global CC, published over a 21 year period, in order to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW).
… which is compatible with the AR5 statement. Anyone who actually reads Cook (2015) and cares to honestly evaluate what it says will find this statement:
Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.
The close agreement between the two figures suggests that Shollenberger’s accusations of “cheating” on the part of those who rated the abstracts, and “deception” on the part of Cook et al. are unfounded and therefore lacking merit. It’s at least as dubious as pretending the IPCC attribution statement makes the logical error of assigning < 100% of anthropogenic forcings to AGW when it clearly does not.
Alright, enough of this self-important bullshit. Main point is, next time one of these gibbering twits trots out a sob story about how they've been "censored" at a consensus AGW blog for raising "inconvenient 'facts'", I now have the perfect anecdotal antidote.
Happens to be a central point of contention in climate contrarian circles. Given that not every paper on climate is an attribution study, inferring level of endorsement from the abstract alone is necessarily subjective. Hence the, the second phase of the Cook et al. (2013) study; author self-rated level of endorsement. I get it you don’t agree with how they put together the final tally, but as they describe exactly what they did and the data are available for anyone to inspect and make their own assessment, claims of “cheating” and “deception” (your words) or “fraud” (Anthony’s) range from ringing hollow to being over the top respectively. In my personal estimation of course.
It was careless and is embarrassing that I misspelled your surname name and didn’t do so consistently. Thank you for pointing it out, I will correct it post haste.
You don’t dispute my characterization of Cook et al’s results is accurate. Namely, you don’t dispute that the “consensus” they found on the idea humans are the main cause of global warming is only 1.6%. You also don’t dispute that the authors depicted their results as saying the consensus on the idea humans are the main cause of global warming is 97%. You claim:
I’ll leave aside some more minor issues, like the fact the authors never published any data for 521 of their papers even as they claimed to have published all relevant data. While I think they are important in some ways, they do nothing to address the particular issue at hand. Namely, your only defense against me saying Cook et al actively deceived people is that they made it possible to see that they actively deceived people.
That a person describes what they did does not make what they did right. It doesn’t make it okay. It doesn’t even make it honest. I can engage in a deception and describe what I’m doing in a way that is both accurate and designed to make most people not realize what I’m doing. In fact, that’s how most deceptions work in studies. You tell people what you’re doing, but you do so in a way that hides why it is wrong.
But even if none of that were true, your argument is weird because you don’t dispute any of the points I made to demonstrate the deception. Namely, the authors of this paper knew fully well the consensus they found on the idea humans are the main cause of global warming is only 1.6% yet they depicted it as being 97%.
I don’t know why you choose to ignore that basic and key issue, but you cannot claim with any seriousness to rebut my book or views while ignoring the central issue they repeatedly focus on.
You don’t dispute my characterization of Cook et al’s results is accurate.
It would be inconsistent of me to do so. The results being “accurate” implies that the analysis is empirically objective, and I hold that it is not, as stated several time previously. The paper’s results prevail on how “AGW consensus” is defined, which I consider completely arbitrary in that it is subject to how you, me, anyone, cares to define it.
That a person describes what they did does not make what they did right. It doesn’t make it okay. It doesn’t even make it honest.
Again, here you imply that there is some universally objective definition of “AGW consensus”. From whence does it derive?
Namely, the authors of this paper knew fully well the consensus they found on the idea humans are the main cause of global warming is only 1.6% yet they depicted it as being 97%.
No, they did not depict that. Again, I refer you to the abstract, which you have already several times quoted:
In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus.
Table 2 of the paper defines 8 categories, and in the body of the paper the authors write:
To simplify the analysis, ratings were consolidated into three groups: endorsements (including implicit and explicit; categories 1–3 in table 2), no position (category 4) and rejections (including implicit and explicit; categories 5–7).
There’s the definition of the consolidated buckets used to compute the results given in the abstract. Your accusation that they “depicted” something else is false, as anyone who actually reads the paper should be able to plainly see.
If you don’t like their categories, or how they binned them, I consider you entirely within your rights to do disagree with their definition and methods of binning the results. So long as you’re clear on your own definitions and methods for tallying up the stats, I could not in clear conscience call you a liar for doing so even if I disagreed with your choices.
According to you, there is no singular definition for the consensus. Based on this, you say:
Now I have pointed out, many times, there can be different consensus positions to which different amounts of people subsecribe. The idea I imply there is only one position seems to require ignoring basically everything I’ve ever said, including things I’ve said on this very page.
Leaving that aside though, your repeated claims there is no objective consensus position, and that any tally of the value must inherently be subjective because of this, flies in the face of what the authors of this paper have repeatedly said. When I point out how the authors have described their results, you say:
While somehow managing to ignore the fact I have quoted the authors saying exactly what you say they don’t depict. I quoted the lead author himself in this post, and The book provides a quote from the full author list (along with a couple other people) which explicitly states Categories 1-3 endorse the position humans are responsible for most of global warming. I could provide many more quotes as well, but… apparently you’ll just ignore them.
Even the paper says what I pointed out. While you keep focusing on the abstract, the first paragraph of the paper states:
The authors of the paper define the consensus they get by binning categories 1-3 as being a 97% consensus humans are the main cause of global warming. Categories 2 and 3 were for papers which did not quantify the human contribution, and we have the authors’ own words saying they rated papers as fitting in categories 2 and 3 as long as those papers at least acknowledged the greenhouse effect.
Merely acknowledging the greenhouse effect does not endorse the idea humans are the main cause of global warming. Yet, that’s exactly how they depicted it. The authors have repeatedly claimed their results show something they know fully well their results do not show. It is dishonest, and it is fraud. You simply denying that it happened doesn’t change that.
Correct.
Thanks for clarifying that.
In my blog post, I focused on more than just the abstract. To wit, I listed all eight endorsement levels. The top three used in the consolidated “endorse AGW” bin are:
1 Explicit Endorsement with Quantification: paper explicitly states that humans are causing most of global warming.
2 Explicit Endorsement without Quantification: paper explicitly states humans are causing global warming or refers to anthropogenic global warming/climate change as a given fact.
3 Implicit Endorsement: paper implies humans are causing global warming. E.g., research assumes greenhouse gases cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause.
I take it your objection is that categories 2 and 3 don’t include the “most” qualifier in front of global warming.
It’s pretty clear to ME what “humans are causing global warming” means without the “most” qualifier.
By the same token, repeating that it’s dishonest and fraud over and over ad nauseam doesn’t make it so either. To prove fraud in court, I believe you need to establish intent to deceive. For that, I think you’ll need more than a photoshopped image of John Cook in doctored Schutzstaffel regalia and an argument that the survey instrument was inconsistently/ambiguously worded.
As you point out, there may be arguments and evidence I’ve overlooked which a jury would find more compelling. If you think you’ve got a solid case, you might consider starting a class action lawsuit. Funding for it would likely be easy to obtain if class members were duly impressed with your evidence.
Are you saying it’s clear to you “humans are causing global warming” does not mean the same thing as humans are the main cause of global warming/ If so, why not say. If not, why not say what it does mean to you.
No. The fact they explicitly defined their rating system to have categories for papers which endorse the idea of humans contributing to global warming then turned around and claimed any paper which fell in such categories (by binning them with the one category that did include quantification) endorsed the idea humans are the main cause of global warming is fraudulent.
The authors knew fully well if you only examine the number of abstracts that quantified the human component to global warming, the result was minuscule (1.6%). They chose not to disclose this. Instead, they binned the category quantifying the human component with the two that didn’t quantify the human component then claimed the resulting group all quantified the human component. You don’t seem to be willing to address this simple point in a clear or direct manner, which baffles me.
Please tell me you are joking. Calling something fraud doesn’t mean you think a lawsuit should be filed. I can’t even imagine what a member of the public would sue over for a scientist who lied about his results. In all the cases I can think of where a scientist did lie or commit other forms of fraud, the only people capable of taking legal action were the people responsible for his grants/funding and things like that. The general public has no standing to sue him.
No. I’m saying that I interpret both phrasings the same way. It may be inconsistent, ambiguous and sloppy to drop the qualifier “most”, but in common usage “humans are causing AGW” means to me that we’re doing most of it. I assert you’d have to have been living under a rock since 1988 to not understand that is the message.
Pretty inept “fraud”. The paper itself defines eight buckets, and explicitly says the final tally was based on consolidation of the first three bins. They made the classifications available at their most granular level for anyone to review them.
False. Here again is the actual text of the paper:
To simplify the analysis, ratings were consolidated into three groups: endorsements (including implicit and explicit; categories 1–3 in table 2), no position (category 4) and rejections (including implicit and explicit; categories 5–7).
Please point out where they explicitly say that all the papers in the category 1-3 bin “quantified the human component”. You cannot, because it is not there.
I addressed it directly in the lead section (“Background”) of my blog post. I don’t agree with your interpretations and accusations on this point, which is not the same thing as not addressing the point.
Fraud is a serious allegation. If you don’t think what Cook et al. did in the 2013 paper warrants a lawsuit, I think you weaken the word to the point that it has lost its meaning. Cry wolf too many times, and soon people will stop taking you seriously. I’ve been deaf in both eyes to thinly-evidenced, cavalier accusations of “fraud” against climate scientists and activists since the E. Anglia crew were cleared of any serious wrongdoing after the Climategate e-mails were illegally obtained and released to the public.
Then you lack imagination. I say this because I seriously doubt that you don’t recognize the policy ramifications of what the sum total of climate literature and IPCC assessment reports are telling us: the planet is warming, we’re doing it, and it’s in future generations’ best interest for the present generation to begin curtailing CO2 emissions by any reasonable means.
Laws change, sometimes as the result of what once would have been considered dubious cases brought to court.
On the other hand, I can see why you might not wish to establish such a precedent:
Real fraud requires a misrepresentation of objective fact about the product to induce the payment of money or property to the fraudster. That is what federal prosecutors accused the tobacco industry of doing — lying about the health risks of cigarettes, to induce consumers to buy them. (We represented one of the defendants in that long-running litigation.) What to do about global warming, by contrast, is not an issue for those who consume fossil fuels, but for legislators who may try to regulate it. First Amendment protections, however, must be at their apex when speech is directed to the state by constituents exercising their democratic rights to influence policy decisions.
Essentially arguing that corporations must be allowed to misrepresent medical research under the banner of 1st Amendment protections of free speech. An aside: one wonders how their client fared in the case the author’s firm represented … my recollection is that tobacco companies lost quite a few of the cases brought against them.
More to the point of citizens’ standing to sue where they previously would not have been granted it:
Allowing standing to review governmental decisions and to allow citizen suit enforcement is a good thing. Enhanced transparency and accountability leads to improved and more legitimate government decisions. Promoting citizen participation enhances the democratic process. In the context of climate change, improved quality control is essential because of the danger of sham credits, “hot air,” and the myriad of other ways that emission can be reduced on paper but not in fact. Because compliance requires the oversight of far flung projects almost too numerous to count, standing to challenge climate change decisions is vital. Laidlaw will allow all of us not only to complain, but do something about the weather.
Some swords are sharp on both edges. I think people who are convinced that paying taxes on CO2 emissions will utterly ruin the economy, and thence our modern way of life, are going to become increasingly willing to litigate. Not just against the government, but against the researchers who support the government’s case.
And remember, these days, corporations are people too.
I am definitely NOT kidding … I think the writing is already on the wall. I doubt many people who read your book and take it seriously will see your fraud allegation as I do — rhetorical hyperbole. It’s just a matter of time before someone (or some entity) puts their money where your mouth is in court and goes somewhere with it.
Update 3/18/2016
More comment's from Shollenberger's blog (numbering is incorrect, I don't know how to fix it):That’s a most interesting take on meaning, considering that a major question is how much of the observed warming is natural vs. anthropogenic. I submit that most persons consider that adding “most” in that context, makes a significant difference in meaning. Even Cook et al. did; witness the quotation given by Brandon S. above: “There’s an x% consensus supporting the AGW theory, and y% explicitly put the human contribution at >50%’.” The first half of the sentence (“x%”) concerns the proposition that “humans cause [some] global warming”, and the second half (“y%”) refers to “humans cause most of the global warming”.
Let me ask you a further question, since you consider the two forms (with and without “most”) equivalent. Do you think that those statements are also equivalent to “climate change is real, man-made and dangerous” ? Is that also common usage? Those of us living under a rock — I favor granite myself — want to know.
That’s… an interesting belief. According to this, Categories 1 and 2 must actually mean the same thing because they are identical save the issue of quantification. If all papers ratered in the non-quantified category must reflect endorsement of the idea humans are causing 50+% of the warming, then there is absolutely no difference between the two categories.
Nevermind we literally have the authors own words contradicting you, as they repeatedly stated they were rating papers as being in Category 2 or 3 despite the papers not saying humans are the main cause of global warming. So, you know, there’s that too. Which when it comes down to it, is all there is. Because if you were to admit what the authors themselves said about their ratings, you’d have no way to argue this paper’s results were presented honestly.
I have quoted the authors of this paper doing exactly that multiple times on this page. I believe the count is three different times that I’ve quoted them practically saying it, as well as one time where they explicitly stated it. That you choose to ignore what has been presented to you then claim I cannot present it to you does not actually mean it’s never been presented.
Quite frankly, this is idiotic. And I’m stopping here. Claiming the only time a person should use the word “fraud” is when they think a lawsuit should be filed is beyond ludicrous, but quite frankly, none of this matters. I’ve already clearly demonstrated the authors describe their 97% consensus as being that humans are the main cause of global warming. We’ve also seen they were fully aware of the fact their data did not support that, as when the issue of whether or not humans are the main factor is examined, the actual number is 1.6%.
Moreover, we can confirm the authors rated papers as endorsing the consensus merely as long as they acknowledged the greenhouse effect by examining the papers they rated as endorsing the consensus, the comments they made in their forum or even the comments they made on the papers as they rated them. All of these confirm papers rated as endorsing the consensus merely needed to say things like,
“Methane is a greenhouse gas.”
And that’s what matters. You can claim I must be living under a rock to not agree about how words are used with you, but the ratings used for this paper were quite clear. So too are the comments the raters made. They make it abundantly clear most papers rated as endorsing the consensus did not quantify the human component, meaning they did not support the claim there is a 97% consensus humans are the main cause of global warming.
As for your claim the authors didn’t describe their results that way, I quoted the paper itself showing they did, another paper by the lead author showing he did, as well as a document authored by all the authors of the paper which explicitly did. You haven’t disputed the validity of any of those quotes, so… if you want to ramble on about how all “fraud” must warrant a lawsuit to be fraud, you can, but… I’m not going to get dragged into something so stupid.
Indeed it is, but it’s not the ONLY question literature attempts to answer.
I agree. See again, not every paper attempts to do a quantified attribution.
Does the word [some] you introduced into the text necessarily indicate < 50%?
Ambiguity is a two-way street.
They’re not equivalent but that’s how I interpret them. IOW, it’s what I believe when people whom I think support the “AGW consensus” mean when they drop the “most” qualifier and say, “humans are causing global warming”.
No.
In my opinion, based on anecdotal observation, yes.
Not must. Strictly speaking, categories 2 and 3 are ambiguous as to whether “most” observed warming is anthropogenic. I am arguing that under common usage, I personally interpret “humans are causing global warming” to mean that our activities are the main driver.
Buh? It’s an explicit recognition that not all climate papers are attribution studies. Quantified vs. not quantified. “Absolute no difference” is not compatible with what the text describing those categories says.
Sorry, but I’ll go ahead and reserve the right to think for myself and form my own opinions. Thanks.
Then it should be easy to indicate which of your statements above supports it.
Ok.
I thought you said you were stopping. In the spirit of putting thoughts in others’ heads for them, you are implying that not all cases of fraud should be prosecuted. Quite the potential loophole.
You can keep saying you interpret it this way, but the authors of the paper directly contradict you. For instance, Andy Skuce rated the paper ,Is The Extent Of Glaciation Limited By Marine Gas-hydrates (GRL) as falling in Category 3, quoting this portion of the abstract to explain his decision:
That obviously does not quantify any human component. In fact, it doesn’t even directly state there is a human component. Then you have papers like Brick And Mortar Treatment By Cream Emulsion For Improved Water Repellence And Thermal Insulation, which Andy Skuce rated as neutral because “Borderline implicit perhaps but no mention of AGW or carbon emissions.” Dana Nuccitelli rated it as Category 3 because, “reduced energy consumption addressing GW = implicit.” John Cook was the tie-breaker, setting the paper as endorsing the consensus saying, “Mitigation + GW = implicit.”
None of those remarks include a single word suggesting the paper indicated humans are the driving force of global warming. The paper itself doesn’t even have anything to do with global warming, merely tacking it on at the end of its abstract:
There are literally hundreds of examples like this. There are also a multitude of comments from when the project was being designed which confirm the Skeptical Science “consensus” is not that humans are the main cause of global warming. I’ve quoted examples of these on many occasions, including in this book and post. You choosing to believe the authors meant something they clearly stated they didn’t mean is… well, wrong. Your argument common usage justifies your interpretation when we have overwhelming evidence contradicting you which you’ve made no attempt to invalidate is nonsense.
No. There is no recognition in the rating system used that not all climate papers are attribution studies. Many, if not most, of the papers in Category 1 are not attribution studies either. All they are are papers whose abstracts said humans are the main cause of global warming. This includes papers like Utilization Of Carbon Dioxide As Soft Oxidant In The Dehydrogenation Of Ethylbenzene Over Supported Vanadium-antimony Oxide Catalystst. This paper has absolutely nothing to do with global warming, but it was rated as Category 1 because its abstract begins:
That is clearly not an attribution study. It is merely a study which says carbon dioxide “is a main contributor to the global warming effect.” There is no recognition that not all papers are attribution studies in this rating system. There certainly isn’t an explicit one. Papers which are not attribution studies show up in all the categories.
And have you ignore them again? Sure, okay. From the post, quoting a paper John Cook co-authored:
From a comment, highlighting what the consensus paper itself said:
From the book, quoting a document the authors of the paper released to respond to a critic:
All three of these statements say Categories 1-3 quantify the human contribution as being 50+%. There are many more. They are all false as Categories 2 and 3 were explicitly designed to capture papers which do not indicate whether or not humans are the driving force.
You really ought to try not to assume people are contradicting themselves when there are much more reasonable interpretations. In this case, when I said I was stopping there, I was indicating I was going to stop going through your comment to respond to what you had said. Having stopped reading any further does nothing to prevent me from responding to what I had already read.
And no, I am not “implying that not all cases of fraud should be prosecuted.” I’m explicitly stating that. Because the word “fraud” is not inherently a legal term, and there are many types of fraud which couldn’t possibly be prosecuted. The fact a word can refer to a criminal activity does not mean every use of that word must refer to criminal activity.
But again, that’s a silly diversion. The primary issue at hand is your claimed interpretation of the Cook et al rating system which holds Categories 2 and 3 endorsed the idea humans are the main cause of global warming when we have a multitude of comments from the authors themselves saying otherwise. I’d really like us to focus on that.
Hi. I read your comment
and questioned it. But eventually I realized I don’t ‘get out’ much, maybe I’m simply not aware of the contrarian circles you’re referring to. What climate contrarian circles dispute this? I’m aware of (ahem) Principia Scientific and the Sky Dragons, anybody else? In my climate contrarian circles we laugh at the skydragons….
Thanks in advance for helping me out; I’m always glad to learn something I didn’t know.
Thanks,
Really? Ok, let’s have a look.
It really should be common knowledge that cows emit methane, and that there wouldn’t be so many cows if we did not breed them for dairy products and food. It’s also widely discussed in literature that warming initially triggered by CO2 emissions leads to thawing permafrost, which releases methane in the process as a feedback mechanism. Trace the causality chain and you end up with human activity.
Release of methane clathrates due to deep ocean warming are a frequently discussed concern in literature as a consequence of warming.
I don’t know how Skuce reasoned it since I’m not him, but at the very least I fail to see any direct contradiction of my argument here.
It has been demonstrated that the novel cream treatment on masonry buildings can help reduce damp problems and save household heating energy consumption which can make a significant contribution to addressing social, environmental, ecological and economic problems resulting from climate change and global warming.
I agree with that reasoning as I deem it consistent with the final sentence of the abstract, which you quoted. It’s consistent with my position previously stated above:
… the sum total of climate literature and IPCC assessment reports are telling us: the planet is warming, we’re doing it, and it’s in future generations’ best interest for the present generation to begin curtailing CO2 emissions by any reasonable means.
Again, I don’t see how “the authors of the paper directly contradict” me. Their reasoning on assigning implicit endorsement seems quite compatible with my own.
Good grief. It’s implicit in how categories 2 and 3 are worded, specifically the common English words “not quantified”.
As I understand your argument, I could just as easily say that there’s NO consensus among geologists that the Earth is approximately 4.543 billion years old because not every paper in the field attempts to estimate it. And by extension, because a significant number of people think the planet is no older than about 6,000 years that it would be fraudulent for a geology literature review to conclude that an overwhelming majority of papers implicitly reject the Young Earth hypothesis in favor of a much older but not explicitly specified number of billions of years.
Are you reading people’s minds and imputing motive again?
Are you still beating your wife?
You have made a number of comments and cited a number of statements, I wanted to make sure we were talking about the same things.
I have several times allowed that categories 2 and 3 are ambiguous and inconsistent with other statements in the paper itself. Here I’ll extend that to comments made by the authors themselves in public and in private communications to others. Let these statements stand as evidence that I have read those statements and acknowledge your arguments based on them.
My interpretation stands as previously stated. Explicit and implicit endorsement of the notions that “humans are causing global warming” (bucket 2) or “greenhouse gases cause warming” (bucket 3) are consistent with “humans are causing most of global warming” even without the “most” qualifier, or explicitly recognizing that humans are responsible for most of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution.
My interpretation may in fact be wrong. You might be correct that Cook and crew were trying to pull a fast one. Thing is, I’ve read a lot of climate literature, and the sum total of the message is crystal clear: the planet is warming, we’re doing most of it, and the prudent thing is probably not to be doing so.
What you have not done is demonstrate that the results would be demonstrably different if the categories were differently worded so as to be more consistent and less ambiguous. And you’re far from demonstrating that Cook et al. intended to defraud the public with they way they constructed their categories and survey instrument. No amount of believing such a thing, or stridently repeating it over and over and over again will make it so.
Oh irony. When were you planning on extending others the exact same courtesy?
Here’s another taste of your own bitter medicine: you are apparently still beating your wife. Just in case there’s any potential misunderstanding, the previous sentence is metaphorical rhetoric and not meant to be taken literally.
Even though Dragon Slayers are officially banned at WUWT, I’ve read — and on numerous occasions been part of defending against — assertions that “CO2 warming the planet” violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics because “heat flows from warm to cold, not the other way around”. Another frequent theme is, “how can CO2 warm the oceans when LW radiation only penetrates water on the order of a few microns?” I’ll grant that most climate contrarians I talk to there are probably lukewarmers like Anthony and dbstealey, who do not self-label as such, but are on record as saying they think the effect is real but “probably too small to be measured”. Legion are comments like, “how can a trace gas have such large effect?” and “water vapor is the dominant GHG, so how can CO2 be the ‘control knob’?” and “CO2 has always lagged temperature in the geological record, so it cannot therefore be the cause of warming” and “well duh, we’re coming out of the LIA, it’s just natural variability” and “it’s not actually warming, GISS/HADCRU/NOAA/BEST/etc. adjust the surface records to fit the hype” and finally the trump card, “The Pause falsifies AGW, may it RIP”.
My original statement might have been more correctly stated, “Happens to be a common point of contention …”, but I don’t think it was terribly far out of bounds as originally formulated.
Update 3/20/2016
Continuing discussion from Brandon Shollenberger's blog. If you read anything, be sure to read my post at the very end of the thread.Your claim was Categories 2 and 3 are endorsements of the idea humans are the main cause of global warming. As the quotes I provided demonstrate, the authors did not consider whether or not these papers endorsed the idea humans are the main cause of global warming. Instead, they merely required papers do things like acknowledge methane is a greenhouse. A person who thinks humans contribute only 25% of the observed warming could well acknowledge methane is a greenhouse gas, so merely acknowledging it is one cannot possibly be an endorsement of the idea humans are responsible for 50+% of the observed warming.
I have never said anything remotely like this. I don’t know how you came to “understand [my] argument” like this, but it is not because anything I have actually written.
That papers in Categories 2 and 3 are consistent with the idea humans are the main cause of global warming does not mean they endorse the idea humans are the main cause of global warming. It means they don’t take a position on that topic. Failing to take a position on an issue does not mean they endorse or reject the idea. It just means they don’t say one way or another. And because they don’t say one way or another, it is compeltely wrong to claim they endorse a particular position.
That is exactly why you will never see me saying the papers in Categories 2 and 3 say humans are responsible for only a little part of the observed warming. What they say is consistent with that idea just like what they say is consisten with the idea humans are the main cause of global warming. You can’t arbitrarily decide them failing to state a position means they endorse a specific one any more than I can arbitrarily decide them failing to state a position means they endorse the opposite one.
Whether or not there is a particular consensus is completely irrelevant to whether or not Cook et al did their work in a good or honest manner. We can tell things like, they lied about what they did, even if their results happen to be “right.” After all, it is incredibly easy to cheat to get an answer you know in advance.
Here’s the difference between you and me. I’ve spent a great deal of time and effort explaining the reasoning for what I say. You make absurd claims about what my positions are that have no basis in reality. We see it just above in your absurd “understanding” of my argumentt, just like we saw it above when you claimed:
When in fact I have done the exact opposite from day one, with me literally discussing how there are different consensus positions (with different levels of support) the day after this paper came out, explaining how Cook et al’s results hide that. I even wrote a post discussing how the authors intentionally conflated the different consensus positions a few days later, quoting the authors themselves acknowledging that’s what they were doing.
So while you can try to pretend I’m being unreasonable in my depictions, you’re the only one who consistently decides people believe things nothing like anything they have ever said or thought.
Oh, and let’s not forget you suggested I was responsible for a criminal activity I had no involvement with. Because, you know, that’s sort of a thing.
Gates does say simply stating, “Methane is a greenhouse gas” is consistent with believing humans are the main cause of global warming, but that’s uninformative as it is consistent with any number of positions. One cannot simply assume a paper endorses a consensus because it says something that is consistent with that consensus.
Oh, and Mark Bofill, there is definitely a sizable amount of people rejecting the greenhouse effect. They also have a meaningful impact, with their views being quite popular at places like WUWT where noted Dragon Slayers are allowed to post frequently, advancing Dragon Slayer voews. I know Brandon Gates says:
But if there is any sort of “official” ban on Dragon Slayers, it’s not one that is actually enforced. That’s why Tim Ball is still one of the (if not the?) most frequenter authors at WUWT>
Somehow as I said I was filtering my list of contrarians to include only ‘contrarians who don’t have their heads stuck up their @$$e$.’ without realizing it. It’s amazing how that cuts the list down to a manageable size.
But I know what you are saying about people rejecting the greenhouse effect, I’m about ready to rip out my hair right now due to such an argument. It truly amazes me sometimes, the lengths people will go to and the tricks they will use to try to stave off the inevitable…
Read the first sentence of the abstract
Methane may have been released to the atmosphere during the Quaternary from Arctic shelf gas-hydrates as a result of thermal decomposition caused by climatic warming and rising sea-level; this release of methane (a greenhouse gas) may represent a positive feedback on global warming [Revelle, 1983; Kvenvolden, 1988a; Nisbet, 1990].
Keeping in mind that Nuccitelli rated this abstract as a 3 (implicit endorsement), ask yourself whether you think that methane clathrates “care” whether the initial warming triggering the feedback is due to any other man-made forcing (like CO2) or purely natural mechanisms (such as the orbital forcings responsible for the timing of ice ages).
Academic. Also noted in the body of Cook (2015):
4.1. Sources of uncertainty
The process of determining the level of consensus in the peer-reviewed literature contains several sources of uncertainty, including the representativeness of the sample, lack of clarity in the abstracts and subjectivity in rating the abstracts.
Pot … meet kettle.
Friendly reminder that authors themselves were asked to rate their own entire paper, not just the abstracts.
Yeah, that would be pretty ludicrous since categories for “only a little” were among the eight bins:
(5) Implicit rejection
Implies humans have had a minimal impact on global warming without saying so explicitly E.g., proposing a natural mechanism is the main cause of global warming
(6) Explicit rejection without quantification
Explicitly minimizes or rejects that humans are causing global warming
(7) Explicit rejection with quantification
Explicitly states that humans are causing less than half of global warming
Note that they are the mirror opposites of categories 1-3.
I can arbitrarily decide whatever I want to … that’s what “arbitrary” means. Hence, the good practice of soliciting multiple opinions on these sorts of things.
Another friendly reminder that authors participated in this process and classified their own work. It stand to reason if the author thought their own results supported the conclusion that human activities supported “only a little” warming or none at all, they would have selected one of the bins 5-7.
If the results are of no consequence, one wonders why you then care whether Cook et al. were honest or not.
Pull my other one.
I allow for differing opinions on subjective topics, and don’t presume that someone is perpetrating fraud just because I don’t agree with their methods or conclusions.
So have I.
Sauce for the goose.
Good point. Now that I think about it, the ban applies specifically the Principia crew and at least one fellow called Konrad who asserts that CO2 leads to cooling at ALL levels of the atmosphere, not just the stratosphere. Much hand-waving ensues upon asking him why Venus isn’t colder than Pluto.
Most everyone else gets through.
My own (self-known) bias is that I have spent an (inordinate) amount of time on WUWT over the past year and a half to pretty much the exclusion of most other contrarian blogs. I check in on Dr. Curry’s place and Bishop Hill from time to time, but not enough to have a good sense of how the main objections differ. Impressions are that most Curry fans are lukewarmers concerned about uncertainty and scientific integrity. The BH gang seem like the UK version of WUWT.
On that we agree.
Brandon Shollenberger,
LOL. What can I say sir. The really funny part (to me) is that I honestly wouldn’t have seen it without having someone point it out.
That doesn’t matter. The abstract doesn’t state whether or not the human contribution to global warming is large or small, so you cannot state that it does.
Those are for ones which actually state that the human contribution is small. Once you decide to arbitrarily interpret categories as meaning things that aren’t stated anywhere, people can do the same. Nothing in Categories 2 or 3 state whether the human contribution is small or large, so if you’re free to interpret it one way, people are free to interpret it another.
Interestingly, if you actually look at the categories objectively, you find papers could be classified in more than one category. I wrote an entire post about this because the symemtry you highlight in these categories is actually not symmetry. There’s no particular reason to assume the authors of the papers would self-rate in any particular way.
Though really, none of this changes the point. If you can arbitrarily redefine categories however you want, people can do the same even if you think their interpretations are “ludicrous.” After all, they can think the same about your interpretations. That’s why in science we normally state what things mean and stick to that rather than just hoping people can guess what we mean. I think that might be done outside of science too.
Fair. I should have said, “With any reasonability.” You can arbitrarily choose to believe whatever you want, even though it obviously untrue, if you wish. It’ll just be silly and irrational.
These are not comments designed to further a discussion. I recommend you cut the petty attitude from your comments if you want to convince anybody of anything other than, “I’m rude, arrogant and don’t care what you have to say.”
It generally helps to directly and clearly address what people have said. Using attitude and rudeness like this to avoid doing so is a bad thing.
Which would have been the sensible way to do this project, with the authors examining the different positions people might take on global warming and how many people support those positions, he said:
This is the sort of remark I had in mind when I said the authors of the paper directly contradicted Brandon Gates in their forums. His suggestion Categories 2 and 3 endorse the idea humans are the main cause of global warming would fly in the face of an author saying, in a post titled, “Defining the scientific consensus,” Category 2 “doesn’t require an assumption of >50%” contribution. In the topic, “Proposed methodology,” John Cook listed these as qualifications for Category 3:
Not a single mention of humans being the main driving force of global warming. But that’s a boring demonstration. What’s more entertaining is this one from the previously mentioned post, where Cook says in the discussion, as I highlighted in a post more than two years ago:
This was a reference to the famous saying by a court judge where he said he may not be able to define what pornography is, but he knows it when he sees it. In other words, while Cook et al were fully aware of the fact there are multiple consensus positions, as indicated by things like Nuccitelli saying:
They decided not to examine both consensus positions. In fact, they decided not to examine either. Instead, they decided to use a “p0rno approach” and not even define the “consensus.” they were examining. Then, after directly stating they had ruled out the definition of their “consensus” being “”more than 50% human influence,” they went on to repeatedly claim they had found a 97% consensus humans are the main cause of global warming.
Now mind you, they didn’t decide to collapse these categories until after they collected the data. They discussed the possibility, with Cook saying things like:
But at the time they did their ratings, they intentionally left open the possibility of examining their data by comparing categories in a non-symmetrical way so they could examine both positions of interest (humans are contributing to GW; humans are the main cause of GW), saying they’d collapse the categories later if they wanted. Then, after they had finished their ratings, they decided to collapse the categories together to get a singular “consensus” position which they portrayed as humans are the main cause of global warming, a definition they had explicitly ruled out prior to beginning the project.
Oh, and for more fun, these ratings were Phase 2 of the project. Phase 1:
During Phase 1:
So John Cook looked at all these papers prior to designing the rating system, then he participated in the rating process, contributing a couple thousand ratings. Because apparently he saw nothing wrong with that. I like to think pretty much anyone who understands how science work would.
No worries. Plenty of people do the same thing, or even worse things, without ever noticing. It’s like how you say:
And I suspect most people would agree with that sentiment. They just won’t agree on who is doing it when.
Hence the stated need to solicit author self-reviews of their own entire paper. By my calculations far and away the greatest discrepancy was in category 4 abstracts that should have been rated 1-3:
Chg n % tot
— — —–
4>1 75 3.5%
4>2 297 13.9%
4>3 349 16.3%
— —–
Total 721 33.8%
This methane paper you’re using as anecdotal evidence was a category 3. The SkS team overrated 7.1% of those papers compared to the self-reviews:
Chg n % tot
— — —–
3>4 144 6.7%
3>5 4 0.2%
3>6 3 0.1%
3>7 1 0.0%
— —–
Total 152 7.1%
On the other hand, they underrated category 3 papers at a rate 1.7 times greater than they overrated:
Chg n % tot
— — —–
3>1 86 4.0%
3>2 170 8.0%
— —–
Total 256 12.0%
I’ll usually go with believing what quantified probability suggests over what mere anecdote suggests is possible.
Surely you’re not suggesting that a PhD researcher would read all seven categories and think they weren’t intended to be mutually exclusive? Or that upon seeing a category which uses the words “minimal”, “minimize”, “rejects” or “causing less than half” wouldn’t choose one of THOSE categories?
… looks like that’s what you ARE suggesting. But of course, because you explicitly state in the Amazon summary of your book …
The point of this book is not to disprove the “consensus” on global warming, and it doesn’t attempt to examine whether or not there is one.
… somehow I doubt that you will be much interested in testing a hypothesis that climate researchers are too stupid to know how to take a survey, to lazy to bounce an e-mail to the SkS team for clarification, or are such myopically naive hair-splitting pedants that they didn’t immediately grok from context that Cook and friends meant categories 2 and 3 to be the mirror opposites of 6 and 5 respectively.
I agree with that.
Politics being one exception which springs to mind immediately.
You’re back to implying that subjective definitions can be objectively true or false. I know you’ve explicitly said otherwise, but “obviously untrue” does not seem compatible with the concept of a simplified and arbitrary definition of a very complex subject. 2 + 2 = 5 is “obviously untrue”. It’s objectively false by definitions which are anything but arbitrary.
That’s funny. Here’s a challenge for you: write a full blog post that takes a critical position on something you feel strongly about but which doesn’t impute motive.
As you probably know Brandon long ago I used to do content analysis. Cook’s study violated just about every control we would have used.
It’s stunningly bad practice. And yes, I think the consensus ( humans cause more than 50% of the warming) is held by the vast vast majority
of folks published in climate science. Not that it matters. Rotten content analysis is still rotten content analysis. I don’t see why my belief in AGW compels me to defend awful work.. oh ya it doesn’t.
The authors doing their self-ratings used the same criteria as the Skeptical Science group, so any issues with the rating system would be present in both. That the same rating system produces similar results when applied to different data sets doesn’t indicate the rating system is fine.
I’m not suggesting anything about what people would do. I’m merely stating if one allows people to arbitrarily redefine categories, there is no limit to what can be done. You can consider a particular redefinition “ludicrous” if you want, but that doesn’t make it wrong. (Though I’ve shown as defined, the categories are not mutually exclusive, so it would hardly be surprising if some respondents failed to view the categories as mutually exclusive.)
You can believe or doubt whatever you want, but I gave a clear and simple demonstration of how the categories are not mutually exclusive, as defined by Cook et al. Your use of rhetoric and attitude will do nothing to contradict what I demonstrated.
I haven’t said, or even suggested, “subjective definitions can be objectively true or false.” What I’ve said is we can tell which subjective definitions were applied by using the authors’ words to determine what standards they applied. This misrepresentation of yours is rather remarkable given how many words I spent examining which subjective definitions were used while not stating any were true or false.
(Also, 2 + 2 does not equal 5 under any non-arbitrary definitions. All of math is inherently based on arbitrary definitions. That is a fundamental truth of math which should be recognized by anyone who truly understands it. I wouldn’t normally stress this point but I happen to have a love for math and have discussed this very point on this site before.)
I would have to first write a blog post that takes a critical position on something I feel strongly about. I can’t recall having done that, save for a couple posts in which I clearly indicated I was using a rhetorical approach. For the most part, I don’t care much about these topics. I don’t have any strong feelings regarding the Cook et al paper. There was maybe one or two moments where I did, but mostly, I just find it an interesting curiosity.
Beyond that, why would a person need to not impute motive in any blog post? I criticized your attitude and rudeness. You can impute motive without using either. In fact, I can explicitly ascribe a motive to a person without using attitude or rudeness. I’ve done it many times. Ascribing a motive to a person has almost nothing to do with being rude or copping an attitude.
Though for the record, all of this comment could be ignored because nothing in anything you said or I’ve said here has any real bearing on the central issue, as I have laid out here. You seem determined to avoid discussing the central issue. I don’t know why. I wouldn’t care to guess. I do, however, think it is remarkable how much time you’re spending on tangents while ignoring it.
Interestingly, I have no real opinion on what the actual numerical value for that consensus position would be. I think if the Skeptical Science group had used the consensus position of, “Humans are contributing to global warming to some extent,” they would have found a 99+% consensus. I think if they would have used the consensus position of, “Humans are the main cause of global warming,” they would have found a <97% consensus. I think by conflating the two they managed to achieve a very desirable figure of 97%.
But I don't think that tells us anything about what any consensus on global warming might be. I think this paper is complete and utter dreck. I wouldn't have the slightest idea of how to generate truly useful information (on how strong any consensus is) from it. And I don't have any real views on the "consensus" on global warming, other than to say there have been other bad papers written to reach similar conclusions.
I don't even find the idea of there being a consensus interesting enough to try to reach a conclusion on what any numerical values would be. I just think when complete and utter dreck is promoted at the highest of levels it's worth pointing out and discussing. I don't really care what the "right" answer is. I just don't like the idea of BS being promoted as sound science to the public and used as a basis for policy decisions.
I can't say I've seen a "consensus" study I think was done appropriately or whose results should be accepted, much less trusted, but I also don't have any strong views on what such a study would show if it were properly done.
I’m on record at ATTP’s as saying I’d rather discuss tree rings than Cook (2013). Speaking of ambiguity …
Regardless which one of us you were addressing, I did not know you used to do content analysis. I know nothing of it, however …
THAT doesn’t smell right.
Painful as it is to admit, Brandon S., you now have my full attention.
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To be continued.