Proof There is NO Climate Consensus

I wasn't aware that your so-called "97% consensus" meme was specifically for catastrophic AGW (as defined by this particular threshold in this particular poll), with those seeing AGW as important or serious but short of this threshold being lumped onto the 3% side along with the skeptics and the deniers.

 

Catastrophic in less than a century! Even if it takes 2 centuries to get to the "catastrophic" threshold (a blink in geologic time!) EVERYONE should be concerned, nay terrified for thier grandchildren. And here we argue about the arraignment of the deck chairs as we steam toward the proverbial iceberg!

Icarus

 

???? My poll? What poll did I introduce to this thread?

The only poll I referred to is the one you linked in your base post.

 

The fact that you (mojo) can applaud the fact that only 55% think that climate change is likely to be ~2C (catastrophic)in the next 50-100 years, is stunning, and reveals the depth of your denial! (and you extrapolate from that that climate change is a hoax!)Let's ask the question another way; how many of the 45% would bet on 2C in two centuries, or even three?


If, for example, you were to ask me (and 7500 other similar folks) "are you going to die in the next ten years". Most people would probably say no, assuming you use a similar demographic to me!). However, if you pose the question, "are young to die?" nearly 99% would (I'm guessing!) answer in the affirmative.

In your OP you cite ~44% who don't think we will reach the catastrophic level of 2C, and. It's that as evidence that the here is no consensus. What your post doesent say is what the 44% do believe. Ask them if they are going to die, ever!


Most rational people agree that Humans are causing (significant) warming. The only rational debate is how fast, and what the net consequences are going to b and to what degree....(no pun intended!)

Someone here should get a grip on reality!

Icarus

 

CAGW if that means catastrophic, I have to agree. It is the politicians that have a consensus. We have some scientists that were claimed to be part of that consensus say they never said that.

This was 2007 so that should have raised some red flags. Some of the emails were quite troubling. Did you need to exagerate to get published? To get promoted? To be part of the small club? It seems some were feeling that pressure. We also may see some were pressured the other way. Did you get higher speaking fees if you claimed it was not true. Did you need to lie to get traffic on your web site. Do you go along to get tenure? It seems some may have been pressured. Some have spoken out that they did not get published because they did not go along. Perhaps the next IPCC will correct some of those things that they got wrong the last time. If not others will.

I don't think anyone was pressured to change the temperature readings, but perhaps they looked the other way as the little ice age and medieval warm period were erased by some questionable proxies and incorrect statistical methods. Perhaps some made graphs that exaggerated certainty, and others nodded there heads yes that is the new science.

And the guy that made up the number said it is arbitrary. What is the consensus? That AGW - is occuring. What is in dispute? The sensitivity and the time scale. Here is one study from a year ago that says the sensitivity may be over stated
CO2 sensitivity possibly less than most extreme projections - latimes.com

Its good to be skeptical of numbers. Some say the sensitivity is 1 others say 6 but most, including the above study estimate that it falls between 2-4.5 as the IPCC said last time. Then the questions become how much is sequestered, and is it catastrophic. I'm sure some will say sandy was catastrophic, while others will claim the biblical flood was really a miracle.

 

Mojo @18 I am very glad that you find peer review to be the proximate arbiter of science. Welcome aboard.

 

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I have done it again, polluting a perfectly congenial with internet access junk. Can you ever forgive?

Mojo has told us that, since Mueller has not been published yet, it cannot be correct. Right? And further that BEST just used GISS data adjustments. This is not my understanding of what BEST did, so I suppose we await an arbiter.

But why would they even bother to repeat same old? The point was to start from the original data and make the best sense of it, no?

Austin@26 linked us indirectly to Schmittner et al 2011, and I an sure that I linked this study earlier here, by way of relatively good news. But no problem, that paper advances 2.3 degrees instead of 3 degrees per CO2 doubling.

I want that to be true. Really. We live in today's Mojo world where everybody can burn everything, so the smallest 'Charney sensitivity' is the one I really want to be true.

Really.

 

Oh by the way AustinGreen, as you have previously found fault with surface T summaries.

Here we are talking about the BEST re analysis. Does that allay your concerns, only partially, or does it have no effect?

It would be a shame to keep silence now, on what had been a talking point. Just say.

 

I mainly was distrustful of the HadCrut reconstruction, and the dog ate my homework excuse for not supplying reviewable methods and data. We have had GIS and NCDC, so I wasn't that concerned that there were big mistakes in recent reconstructions. These do use some older HadCrut data though, and it needed to be verified with open methods and data. The B.E.S.T. team has done this. HadCrut seems to have with the disinfectant of sunlight, seemed to have gotten its dog, to regurgitate its homework, but I don't think we should put it anymore because of past abuses. Once someone has been caught cheating, it doesn't give one confidence to see them locked in a closed room and expect that they won't cheat again.

Now the 5 B.E.S.T. papers seem to be going through the peer review process, and that is a good thing in my mind. They say that they have updated them from comments. Its a work in progress, but it seems to be going in the right direction if you ignore the political theater of press releases and op ed pieces before the review process is complete. I have no problem with them putting the papers and data in public though, it is probably a good thing.

 

This gives a good summery of where the research was in July. The things questioned in peer review do not appear to be the reconstructions but some of the conclusions.
'Converted' Skeptic: Humans Driving Recent Warming - NYTimes.com

I'm not sure it is good news, but if you agree with the paper you need to throw out Hansen's 6 degrees per doubling, and start thinking the sensitivity range is getting smaller. That paper seemed to conclude 2-4 degrees, a little better than the IPCC's 2-4.5 degrees, although some will find problems with the range. I'm sure Mojo can find catatrophists that still think its 6 or 10, and people he agrees with that think its less than 2, but they have seemed to pull these numbers out of the air instead of in a scientific way. Alley by the way finds 2.8, the IPCC 3 as the most likely, but we should think of the big uncertainty bars.

I guess I am a little hard nosed, and want the number to be what it is, and for someone to find away to determine it.

 

The survey sample is described in the article:

"Between March 19 through May 28, 2007 Harris Interactive conducted a mail survey of a random sample of 489 self-identified members of either the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union who are listed in the current edition of American Men and Women of Science."

1) This isn't a poll of climate scientists. Climate scientists are small minority of both organizations.

That's made completely clear in the writeup here, where the surveyed group consists of "scientists in the earth, space, atmospheric, oceanic or hydrological sciences."
Structure of Scientific Opinion on Climate Change – Journalist's Resource: Research for Reporting, from Harvard Shorenstein Center

If you look at the details of the poll, it's reasonably clear why they did this. This was a mail-based replication of a 1991 telephone survey. In 1991, there likely weren't enough climate scientists to fill out their 400-person sample. So they kept the same sample frame as the 1991 survey.

So, we can presume that most of those surveyed have some understanding of the topic. But this isn't a survey of climate scientists. For sure, it's not directly comparable to previous polls that actually polled climate scientists. Prior polls have shown that as you move away from those with the most understanding of the topic (climate scientists), you get more spread in the results. In particular, geologists and meteorologists are more likely to be "doubters".

2) Even understanding that, can we trust the results as presented above. This is five years old. That's a clue. Likely, that means it got dredged up and spun on some denialist website. Which means we have to check for cherrypicking. Let's take the part about "being pressured", and quote the George Mason article in full:

"
Are climate scientists being pressured to deny or advance global warming?
Five percent of climate scientists say they have been pressured by public officials or government agencies to “deny, minimize or discount evidence of human-induced global warming,” Three percent say they have been pressured by funders, and two percent perceived pressure from supervisors at work.
Three percent report that they were pressured by public officials or government agencies to “embellish, play up or overstate” evidence of global warming: Two percent report such pressure from funders, and two percent from supervisors."
"

I guess I should point that this this is somewhat different from what is cited in the original post. So, the seven percent cited in the original post comes from adding 3+2+2, above. Which, by the way, the people who did the survey didn't do, which should clue you in that those numbers likely overlap. And somehow the original post didn't mention mention the other side of those questions, or do the same "arithmetic", which would yield 5+3+2 = 10% pressured to deny global warming. So, by the numbers, more self-reported pressure to deny it than to exaggerate it.

So, give it credit for what it is, but don't make it what it's not. This survey was an attempt to see how scientists' opinions had changed since 1991. The 1991 sample frame was a broad array of earth-type sciences. They kept the same sample frame, and the same questions, as their 1991 telephone survey. To me, the interesting part is down at the bottom of the article, where they show the shift in opinion since 1991. This in no way challenges surveys actually focused narrowly on climate scientists.

 

^Oh the you again, relying on facts!

Icarus

 

Well, the whole thread strikes me as ill-defined.

So, we're not talking about "scientific consensus" as that term is normally used. E.g., an NIH consensus statement on some aspect of medicine NIH Consensus Development Program Where you get the best informed individuals on a subject, provide them with the relevant research, and ask them to put in the effort to produce a well-thought-out summary of the state of the science. That meaning of scientific consensus, that's far more like what the IPCC does.

But "consensus" here is used to mean that everybody agrees, off the top of their head, about some survey question.

About anything that anybody wants to ask in a survey about global warming? Well, that's silly. Look at the warming question, look at the ensemble of models the IPCC uses. You don't even get all the models to agree -- where that's just a calculation, not a set of opinions.

So the gist of this thread seems to be that "they lied" when they claimed consensus about climate change.

The thing that never got pinned down is, who claimed a consensus about what, exactly?

I only know of two answers to that. Where somebody claimed that nearly 100% agreement on something. Based on a survey , 97% of climate scientists agreed that manmade global warming is occurring. And based on a review of the scholarly literature, something like 97% of peer-reviewed studies confirm that global warming is occurring.

I think those are the two things where consensus has been claimed. I mean, that's it. As far as I can tell, that's where consensus, in this sense, has been claimed.

(I mean, shoot, go read what the IPCC actually wrote in their 2007 report. The strongest statement they were willing to make was that there was no more than a 10% chance that late-20th-century warming could be due to natural variation. Roughly speaking, even the IPCC report doesn't meet the 100%-agreement definition of consensus.)

So if the point of this thread is that somebody lied about "consensus", then ... those are the two statements that need to be disproved. Not anything anybody wants to ask about climate change, because, near as I can tell, nobody every claimed there was consensus about the rest of it. In the sense of 100% of climate scientists agreeing.

So if you'll start from this statement: People have claimed that nearly 100% of climate scientists agree that (fill-in-the-blank), and show me who said that, based on what evidence (i.e., not just some blogger spouting off), but this 2007 survey proves them wrong. Then you have a thread that makes sense.

But if you just pick any old question (how much warming do you expect), where there never was consensus, and nobody every claimed consensus, and make a big deal out of the fact that this 2007 survey shows that there is no consensus, then ... what's the point?

 

I was selected to participate in a 2003 survey of "climate scientists" (even though I'm a meteorologist). I'm not sure what criteria they used to select the participants. I was directed by an unsolicited email from AMS to go to a survey site on the internet, which i did.

I'm not sure of the results, apparently the survey received criticism because it was web-based, according to Wikipedia.

The only strong opinion I gave in that survey was my strong skepticism that climate models could do very well in projecting climate conditions decades in the future, based on my experience with numerical weather prediction models.

I also participated in an AMS survey on climate change. I believe this was open to all AMS members. The results of that survey are available at http://www.ametsoc.org/boardpges/cwce/docs/BEC/CICCC/2012-02-AMS-Member-Survey-Preliminary-Findings.pdf.

 

Now the problem comes in some serious claim problems. We have some claiming that this means that climate change is catastrophic or that it is about majority being man made, or that 97% endorse everything in the IPCC report. That is false.

We do definitely have people lying about consensus. Linzden was included in some of the catastrophic predictions but has spoken out that he only agrees with some benign agreement like the top questions. We already have had the thread about trenbleth claiming consensus on acc increasing hurricane frequency, with only contradictory data - a member so offended with his relying on grey literature he refused to be included in the chapter.

There definitely is reason to clarify claims of consensus do not apply to specific predictions, which is what this poll surveyed.