The 97 % myth

The myth of an almost-unanimous climate-change consensus is pervasive. Last May, the White House tweeted: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” A few days later, Secretary of State John Kerry announced, “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.” “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists” say no such thing.

Read more at: Climate Change: No, It?s Not a 97 Percent Consensus | National Review Online

( John Kerry...LOL)

KLATTU said:

The myth of an almost-unanimous climate-change consensus is pervasive. Last May, the White House tweeted: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” A few days later, Secretary of State John Kerry announced, “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.” “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists” say no such thing.

Read more at: Climate Change: No, It?s Not a 97 Percent Consensus | National Review Online

( John Kerry...LOL)
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You shouldn't disrespect Herman Munster like that.

The 97% figure isn't "scientists in the world" regardless of what Kerry might say.

It comes from a beta-study that looked through papers, determined which ones took a position on whether or not AGW is real, and then tallied them up. The meta-study's author then (1) invited the authors of each paper to comment, (2) also put it up on the web so that anyone who wants to call the author a liar can prove it.... if they think they're right.




So the correct statement would have been "97% of scientists in the field who have published papers taking a position on whether or not man is having an effect on global temperatures via greenhouse gas emissions agree that man is having an effect."

To be more accurate, he should have said, "BUT, the models are kind of all over the place."

[h=2] Beautiful to watch: Davies UK M.P. quotes IPCC in Parliament as a reason to be skeptical[/h]
This video gives me hope. Finally we are starting to see more sane commentary in western parliaments. David TC Davies MP shows how politicians can master enough of the scientific details on this debate to crush the usual bumper-sticker trite “consensus” hogwash. He talks of Roman warming, the Medieval Warm Period, the Younger Dryas, the age of the Earth. It’s high school science type level, but more than enough to expose some of the silliness. He also counters the “climate change denier” tag. He cites just enough key numbers to back up each of his points. His skill here is in prioritizing the numbers that matter. Here’s hoping a few of the silent political skeptics will feel more confident to speak out. The bullying and namecalling breaks when enough people stand up to it. That’s coming.
No one I’ve ever met has ever suggested the climate never changes…
Even the IPCC is not saying that most of the warming [since industrialisation] is caused by humans …
It is absolutely certain that the more we rely on renewable energy the more we have to pay for it. No politician from any party should be running away from this. They should be willing to go out and make the argument if they think we should be paying more … but none of them are. Nobody thinks it’s a good idea to increase energy bills…

Mr Davies is a former worker at a Steel Works, and a former Special Police Constable.
The official David Davies MP webpage and Davies personal website.

Lew Role Unravelled

Posted on 10 Nov 15 by Geoff Chambers • 5 Comments

The discussion between two psychologists, reproduced in Ian’s article Lew and George in Bristol, reveals environmentalism at its most deranged. It’s worth examining in detail, I think, in order to try and understand what we’re up against.
First of all, who they are:
Stephan Lewandowsky has a perfectly normal day job as professor of cognitive psychology. He has received a gold medal from the Royal Society for outstanding achievement and a five figure sum to attract him to Britain. He spends most of his free time lying about people who don’t agree with him and publishing his lies in ever more obscure peer-reviewed on-line publications. He also believes in numerology.
George Marshall also claims to be a psychologist, though I’m not sure on what basis. He certainly practises professionally, since he’s paid (by the Universities of Cardiff, Exeter, Edinburgh, Greenpeace, the WWF, the United Nations, and the British government, among others) to tell other people that they’re wrong and he’s right.
George has a blog called “Climate Denial.” In his most recent post (six months ago)
http://climatedenial.org/2015/05/06/get-radical-engaging-conservatives-about-climate-change-1/
he states his intention of “actively engaging with conservatives”. Two commenters (Paul Matthews and Barry Woods) politely pointed out that using the D-word about people you want to engage actively with is a bad start.
George replies: “I … recognise that this has become a divisive term and may be considered unsuitable for people who are, for whatever reasons, unconvinced about the issue. And then again, it takes a very long time to set up a blog and I’m rather loathe to do it again”.
Go on George, do it again. Do it with other people. It’s more fun that way. . . .

Climate culture

Posted on November 20, 2015 | 21 comments
by Andy West
A frequent topic at Climate Etc. is the ‘consensus.’ An argument is presented here that the climate consensus is as much about culture as it is about climate science.

". . . Considering how much may be predicted about the climate consensus from one single fact, i.e. it is a culture, this has to be the most important single fact one could possibly know about the climate Consensus. And if this fact isn’t grasped more widely, especially by those in the disciplines that deal with culture, everything we know about culture will have to be learned again within a climate-change specific context, the hard way. Worse, if we don’t choose to exercise our understanding about the phenomenon that is bulldozing its way through our morals and laws and infra-structure, there’ll be little chance to free science from its grip, or mitigate the downsides of its advance, or prevent fundamental cultural change that could never have happened without the stalking horse of science, from going bad on us."

Continue reading →

An another thread I posted a link to a Wikipedia article

Boiled down, they list 14 surveys of which two maybe three say
something about the effects of global warming. Here's the list
and the boiled down quotes of those that touch on the seriousness
of the issue:

1990 Global Environmental Change Report
1991 The Center for Science, Technology, and Media
1992 Gallup poll

1996 Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch

wide disagreement about the likely effects

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1997 Citizens for a Sound Economy
2004 Oreskes

2007 Harris Interactive

44% moderately dangerous
41% near catastrophic
13% little danger

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2008 Bray and von Storch
2009 Doran and Kendall Zimmerman
2010 Anderegg, Prall, Harold, and Schneider

2011 Farnsworth and Lichter

44% moderate
41% severe/catastrophic
13% trivial/mild
2% didn't know.

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2012 Lefsrud and Meyer

10% moderate public risk [Wikipedia wasn't exactly clear]

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2013 John Cook et al.
2013 Powell​

So according to Wikipedia's numbers it looks like 85% think it's a big deal.

[h=2] US Presidential candidates ranked for independent thinking and gullibility on climate science[/h]
How many Presidential candidates are susceptible to groupthink, scare campaigns and low-base science agitprop? Thanks to Seth Borenstein, Michael Mann & Andrew Dessler we can rank them according to their ability to resist profoundly unscientific propaganda like “there is a consensus”.
Ted Cruz is clearly the best at holding his own in the independent thinker stakes. Ben Carson and Donald Trump do well. But poor Hillary Clinton doesn’t stand a chance against the onslaught of junk graphs, hyperbolic claims, and inane bumper-sticker cliches.
…

Those who fall for the consensus argument are in no position to run a nation. Firstly it’s profoundly unscientific — we don’t vote for the laws of science; scientific theories are either true or not true regardless of opinions. Secondly, it only takes ten minutes of independent searching to find that there is no consensus among scientists as a broad group, anyway. There is a consensus among various definitions of certified climate scientists, but not among meteorologists , geoscientists and engineers or other hard science areas.
As I’ve said before, skeptics outrank and outnumber believers, they make planes fly, find mineral deposits, and walked on the moon. Believers produce climate models that don’t work. If climate scientists were good scientists, the first people they’d convince would be the physicists, mathematicians, geologists and engineers.
Most readers of skeptical blogs (who chose to respond to surveys and list their qualifications in comments^) have hard science degrees. Dan Kahan conducted a survey of 1,500 people and found people who knew more about maths and science were more likely to be skeptical. In other words, skeptics were better informed about science^. If we had to name a list of skeptics versus believers, the skeptics number 31,000, yet there is no list of named scientists who believe that comes close — let alone a list of 300,000 which would imply some truth to the statement that the science is settled, and the world’s scientists agree.
The famous 97% consensus is really a 0.3% consensus.
See real scientists review climate science with thousands of peer reviewed papers. NIPCC report.
Climate Depot, Pat

Jack Hays said:

[h=2] US Presidential candidates ranked for independent thinking and gullibility on climate science[/h]...

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Thanks for posting that

[h=2] The original meaning of “denier” was those who reject a religion[/h]
..

In 1475, the word “Denier” meant those who did not accept the church doctrine.
Five hundred years later, not much has changed.
“According to the Oxford English Dictionary, OED, the term “denier” — starting with its coinage in 1475, during the language’s transition period — has traditionally been used in a theological context, as in “Deniers of Christ Jesus.”
– Yale Climate Media Forum
The use of “Denier” in a theological sense continued for hundreds of years. Here it is in 1835:
“A denier of our Lord’s divinity will argue that it was an exclamation of surprise and ignorance; he makes it, in fact, a sort of modern profaneness.
The Literary and Theological Review, Leonard Woods Junior, 1835. p449
In 2015, anyone who thinks that leeks and lightbulbs won’t stop floods in Peru is a “denier”. If you don’t accept that your air-conditioner causes war in Syria, or that sharks can protect us from heatwaves, get used to being referred to as a mindless denying apostate.
I’ve put in excerpts from an 1840 book below. Breathe deeply:
“FOURTH. Point out the difficulties of Atheism
Keep reading →

Climate News
[h=1]The Paris effect: 97% Of Americans Don’t Believe Climate Change Is Top Concern[/h] From the “magic number is always 97%” department US Survey: 97% Of Americans Don’t Believe Climate Change Is Top Concern Via Dan Joseph, MRC TV News A new Fox News poll finds that in the wake of the Paris terror attacks, the issue of terrorism has become the top concern of American voters. Only 3 percent of respondents said…

Please note that the explicit endorsement of the 97% with quantification is only is only 65 of the 11,944 papers:



Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature - IOPscience

KLATTU said:

The myth of an almost-unanimous climate-change consensus is pervasive. Last May, the White House tweeted: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” A few days later, Secretary of State John Kerry announced, “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.” “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists” say no such thing.

Read more at: Climate Change: No, It?s Not a 97 Percent Consensus | National Review Online

( John Kerry...LOL)
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They used to say 100%, so even they admit they are losing ground

A 2004 survey, by Naomi Oreskes of 928 peer-reviewed scientific articles on global climate change published between 1993 and 2003. The survey, published as an editorial in the journal Science, found that every article either supported the human-caused global warming consensus or did not comment on it.[35] Gore also presented a 2004 study by Max and Jules Boykoff showing 53% of articles that appeared in major US newspapers over a fourteen-year period gave roughly equal attention to scientists who expressed views that global warming was caused by humans as they did to global warming "skeptics" (many of them funded by carbon-based industry interests), creating a false balance.[36]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth#Scientific_basis

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Warming scharming!

Jack Hays said:

Silly sociology (part 1)

Posted on 20 Dec 15 by Paul Matthews • 5 Comments
A common theme at my old blog was the biased and shoddy work done by social scientists and psychologists relating to public opinion on climate change (examples here, here and here). In the last few weeks some more classics of this genre have been published. Examining the Effectiveness of Climate Change Frames in the Face … Continue reading →

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Interesting link! :thumbs: When they talked about using psychology to manipulate thinking, it made me semi-understand why the words "vacuous windbag" is always guaranteed to get a big grin from me, no matter what the subject matter is! :lamo

polgara said:

Interesting link! :thumbs: When they talked about using psychology to manipulate thinking, it made me semi-understand why the words "vacuous windbag" is always guaranteed to get a big grin from me, no matter what the subject matter is! :lamo

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Good evening, Polgara.:2wave:

Glad you liked it.