We often hear of the 'Scientific Consensus' WRT Global Warming.?
All we seem to hear are 'armwaving' terms like "overwhelming majority of scientists", etc.
Well hundreds of scientists are documented as being very skeptical of human caused global warming.
Do the global warming people think that saying 'overwhelming majority' enough times without backing it up makes it true?
Simply listing scientists is not good enough. I can create an anti list as long as any pro list.
Answer:
Science is never done by survey. Most of the important science was rejected by the majority (including other scientists) in the past. Real science is always controversial.
Consensus has never been a good way to find truth.
Global warming is a mix of science and politics. Politics is done by surveys. This is a bad mix. They are incompatible.
Read what it is that scientist agree on, and you find it to be carefully worded. Things like 'Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat', 'Some of the warming is likely caused by human generated CO2'. These things can be taken by a majority as a matter of scientific fact since they are simple statements. I think these types of statements are what are meant when they say 'overwhelming majority...'.
I am not aware of any survey that says a majority agrees that we have the ability to simulate the climate accurately enough to separate out the human effects vs the natural ones.
In 2004 an article in Science magazine discussed a study by Prof. Naomi Oreskes in which she surveyed 928 scientific journal articles that matched the search [global climate change] at the ISI Web of Science. Of these, according to Oreskes, 75% agreed with the consensus view (either implicitly or explicitly), 25% took no stand one way or the other, and none rejected the consensus.
Benny Peiser attempted to replicate the study, and found 34 articles that "reject or doubt" the consensus view--that is, 3% rather than the 0% that Oreskes found in her sample. Only 1 of those papers actually rejected the consensus, and it was an editorial, not a research paper.
Another guy did a similar small study of 25 papers to verify the claims, and found 20% explicitly endorsed, 84% explicitly or implicitly endorsed, 16% were neutral, and none rejected the consensus position.
http://www.norvig.com/oreskes.html...
Since no research papers rejected the 'consensus', how is that not a consensus? We're talking about peer-reviewed scientific papers here. Not a single one out of a thousand disagreed with the consensus.
*edit* whoops, thanks Bob. I think pee-reviewed papers would be a little less convincing than peer-reviewed ones!
The best evidence is that virtually every major scientific organization supports (mostly) man made global warming.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/scientific_...
A survey of the literature showed zero articles from skeptics. That may have changed a little, but not enough to matter.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/fu...
Can you answer this guy?
"The fact that the community overwhelmingly supports the consensus is evidenced by picking up any copy of Journal of Climate or similar, any scientific program at the AGU or EGU meetings, or simply going to talk to scientists (not the famous ones, the ones at your local university or federal lab). I challenge you, if you think there is some un-reported division, show me the hundreds of abstracts at the Fall meeting (the biggest conference in the US on this topic) that support your view - you won't be able to. You can argue whether the consensus is correct, or what it really implies, but you can't credibly argue it doesn't exist."
Dr. James Baker - NOAA
Bottom line:
"There's a better scientific consensus on this [climate change] than on any issue I know - Global warming is almost a no-brainer at this point. You really can't find intelligent, quantitative arguments to make it go away."
Dr. Jerry Mahlman, NOAA
Before anyone brings up that bogus "Oregon Petition". It was a scam, designed to fake an official communication from the National Academy of Sciences. The NAS issued a press release about that, since they're one of the organizations that supports man made global warming. It's just a list of names supposedly emailed in, and so uncheckable. Is "Perry Mason" a scientist with a funny name, or a joke? Who knows? More details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/oregon_peti...
To be clear, when the words "global warming" are used here it means warming that is mostly man made.
Note to Dana - a little proofreading is in order.
This is THE joke:
"Another guy did a similar small study of 25 papers to verify the claims, and found 20% explicitly endorsed, 84% explicitly or implicitly endorsed, 16% were neutral, and none rejected the consensus position.
http://www.norvig.com/oreskes.html...
Since no research papers rejected the 'consensus', how is that not a consensus? We're talking about pee-reviewed scientific papers here. Not a single one out of a thousand disagreed with the consensus."
From this, we can only assume that the "consensus" is 20%. And even then, you would expect to know exactly what the "consensus" position is. For example, was the position posited as man-made greenhouse emissions are responsible for 80-90% of global warming over the last 40 years? Or was it more like man-made emissions have had a measurable effect on greenhouse forcing?
"Implicit" agreement is an entirely subjective analysis. Where's the rubrick to determine "implied" agreement. However you look at it, it does NOT constitute "consensus".
If I asked 10 people whether they thought that Obama would be a good president, and 9 said yes, you could not assume that 90% of these 10 people want Obama to be president. (And of course, the sample would be meaningless in determining national population). The polltaker might think that their answers "implied" that Obama would be their choice. Maybe all nine do. Maybe all 10 do. Maybe none do. It is not scientific analysis to lump "implicit" anything. In my opinion, anyone who accepts such "evidence" as scientific, illustrates the fundamental lack of science of their ENTIRE methodology.
But it gets worse.
Science is about supporting or not supporting hypotheses. It is not about accepting or rejecting a hypothesis. You are more likely to see support given as a probability that never reaches 100%. That means that there is always a possibility for a given hypothesis, hence an inability to outright "reject" it.
This is not the same as a statistical acceptance or rejection. It's pretty obvious from the absence of a rubrick and the subjectivity of the analysis, that this was NOT a statical evaluation...
As far as what "pee-reviewed" is, I'll let Dana answer that. Must be a San Francisco kinda thing...
I am a scientist, and I personally know about 100 scientists in the physical sciences or climate science well enough to know their thinking about global warming issues. There is one who thinks we need to better refine computer models of climate before taking any political action. There is another who thinks it is too late, and too expensive to do anything about global warming. The other 98% are in favor of political action to reduce CO2 emissions. About half of them are really frightened by the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect that raises global temperatures over the next several centuries to the point where much of the Earth is uninhabitable. None of the scientists I know doubt that the Earth's surface has warmed in recent decades, or that anthropogenic CO2 is the cause.
P.S. I might add that there is considerable uncertainty among my acquaintances about some things. Most scientists would agree, I believe, that there is "some hope" that things will be mostly OK, even if we blindly continue to burn fossil fuels until they are all gone, some 100 or 400 years from now. While it is clear that the excess CO2 in the atmosphere is anthropogenic, the natural sinks of CO2 are not well understood, nor are the mechanisms that prevent runaway glaciation during ice ages or the mechanisms that prevent runaway warming during inter-glacial periods. What is meant by "some hope" in this context varies widely from person to person, and most scientists would say that we simply do not know. There is no consensus about the likelihood of doom if there is no political action to reduce carbon emissions. There is, however, a very real consensus on the possibility of doom.
P.P.S. There is no scientific evidence that rules out the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect. By "runaway greenhouse" I don't mean a 500 C increase like Venus, but say, a 50 C increase perhaps 4000 years from now, bringing the equatorial oceans near the boiling point. The primary driver of the current warming is unprecedented in the history of the Earth---never before has buried carbon been extracted and returned to the atmosphere on this scale, at this rate. The natural factors that have in the past balanced the Earth between runaway greenhouse and runaway glaciation may not apply in this case. In particular, we may be adding CO2 on such a short timescale that the squestration mechanisms have no chance to catch up, whereas the positive feedback mechanisms may continue to operate.
It's not logical to ask for a "tabulation" of scientists and then complain that consensus isn't good enough.
Did you know there are people who still think the workd is flat? Maybe you're one of them? Seriously. Go to the link below.
So does this mean that even though 99% of people know the Earth is round but 1% think it's flat, that the Earth must be flat??
Science is science.
Opinion? That's something you get from AM talk radio.
This is funny. Those who claim a consensus nearly all claim 100%...the amazing part of that is that there are many scientists speaking out against their findings.
There is probably 100% consensus that the earth has been warming lately, but there is NOT EVEN CLOSE to 100% of scientists claim that it is not cyclical and can be thwarted and is due in great part by man.
There are 3 types of lies: Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Anyone who can claim, with a straight face, that there is 100% consensus falls in the last, and possible the 2nd and last categories.
"Simply listing scientists is not good enough. I can create an anti list as long as any pro list."
No you can't. Not of scientists who actually study climate. And many of those "hundreds" that are often referred to (that signed over ten years ago) have changed their mind with the improved science of the last ten years.
From an earlier comment:
"About half of them are really frightened by the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect that raises global temperatures over the next several centuries to the point where much of the Earth is uninhabitable"
Utter crap. There will be no runaway greenhouse effect, stop with the scare mongering.
one thing that i know about science even though the weather doesn't lend itself to any worthwhile projections, is that it continually proves itself wrong. mean while even if we were in grave danger(meteor coming toward the earth) the moral thing to do would keep your mouth shut. but no, the libs just want to scare the crap out of the ignorant with with clever wording in order to retain power.
Actually, you can't create an anti- list as long as the pro list. For example, if you're thinking about using the Oregon Petition as a starting point, you might want to think again. Many of the signers could not be verified, some were bogus, most were not climate scientists at all, but had degrees in other fields, and many of their degrees were at the bachelor's and master's level rather than PhD. When you whittle it down, out of 19000 signers, only about 1400 had PhD's in a climate-related field.
Further, since the petition was circulated in 1999, many of the signers have changed their positions in light of the increasing flood of evidence for anthropogenic causes. In 2005, Scientific American sampled 30 of those 1400 and found that: four could not be identified at all, six would not sign the petition today, three did not recall signing in the first place, one had died, and five could not be reached. Crudely extrapolating, that would imply about 200 climate scientists worldwide in the skeptical camp today. A sizable number, but a small fraction of the thousands of PhD climate scientists currently working in the field.
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