in Climate
Here in Colorado at the moment the League of Conservation Voters is running a carpet-bombing TV ad campaign against Republican Congressman Mike Coffman (and three other Republicans elsewhere) for the sole sin of not signing up the for the environmentalist climate agenda. There are two fun parts of the Coffman ad: first, the factoid that he accepted $300,000 from “big oil and gas” interests. Whoa! I note that the LCV ad campaign will spend something like $800,000 on these spots against Coffman. Pot, meet kettle. (Make sure they are lead-free, and heated by renewables.) Clearly Coffman hasn’t taken enough campaign contributions from oil and gas, and I hope they step up to defend him.
But much more fun is to take in the current climate campaign mantra in the ad that “97 percent of scientists agree” about human-caused global warming. The only notable thing here is that the survey doesn’t find that 100 percent of all scientists agree about human-caused global warming, because the survey question is so broad and anodyne that it easily sweeps up all of the leading skeptics including Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels, among others. (If I’d been surveyed, I’d have said yes, too, but I’m not a natural scientist and haven’t published a scientific journal article, which was the data domain used for this claim. In other words, I’m in the exact same position as Al Gore.)
The argument from authority is the only argument climate alarmists are willing to make these days–when is the last time you saw one of them sharing a podium with a climate realist?–so this survey, reported by James Taylor of Forbes represents a significant nail in the alarmist coffin:
Here in Colorado at the moment the League of Conservation Voters is running a carpet-bombing TV ad campaign against Republican Congressman Mike Coffman (and three other Republicans elsewhere) for the sole sin of not signing up the for the environmentalist climate agenda. There are two fun parts of the Coffman ad: first, the factoid that he accepted $300,000 from “big oil and gas” interests. Whoa! I note that the LCV ad campaign will spend something like $800,000 on these spots against Coffman. Pot, meet kettle. (Make sure they are lead-free, and heated by renewables.) Clearly Coffman hasn’t taken enough campaign contributions from oil and gas, and I hope they step up to defend him.
But much more fun is to take in the current climate campaign mantra in the ad that “97 percent of scientists agree” about human-caused global warming. The only notable thing here is that the survey doesn’t find that 100 percent of all scientists agree about human-caused global warming, because the survey question is so broad and anodyne that it easily sweeps up all of the leading skeptics including Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels, among others. (If I’d been surveyed, I’d have said yes, too, but I’m not a natural scientist and haven’t published a scientific journal article, which was the data domain used for this claim. In other words, I’m in the exact same position as Al Gore.)
Andrew Monfort of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the UK has the skinny on this fat claim, in a new paper, “Consensus? What Consensus?”
Recent reports that 97% of published scientific papers support the so-called consensus on man-made global warming are based on a paper by John Cook et al.
Precisely what consensus is allegedly being supported in these papers cannot be discerned from the text of the paper.
An analysis of the methodology used by Cook et al. shows that the consensus referred to is trivial:
• that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas
• that human activities have warmed the planet to some unspecified extent.
Almost everybody involved in the climate debate, including the majority of sceptics, accepts these propositions, so little can be learned from the Cook et al. paper.
The extent to which the warming in the last two decades of the twentieth century was man-made and the likely extent of any future warming remain highly contentious scientific issues.Monfort goes on to reverse-engineer the methodology of the survey behind this claim, showing that it required the most shallow definition in order to achieve this result.
JOHN adds: The global warming theory as it is propagated by the alarmists–the claim that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause–is held by only a minority of professionals in the relevant scientific fields, 36% in this survey.
(HERE IS THE ARTICLE FROM THE END OF ABOVE POST):
Most Geoscientists Reject Global Warming Theory
in Climate
The argument from authority is the only argument climate alarmists are willing to make these days–when is the last time you saw one of them sharing a podium with a climate realist?–so this survey, reported by James Taylor of Forbes represents a significant nail in the alarmist coffin:
Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.
The survey results show geoscientists and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.
According to the newly published survey of geoscientists and engineers, merely 36 percent of respondents fit the “Comply with Kyoto” model. The scientists in this group “express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.”
…
The survey finds that 24 percent of the scientist respondents fit the “Nature Is Overwhelming” model. “In their diagnostic framing, they believe that changes to the climate are natural, normal cycles of the Earth.” Moreover, “they strongly disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal lives.”
What I refer to as the “global warming theory” is properly denominated “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.” Alarmists constantly pull a bait and switch by claiming that nearly all climate scientists “believe in global warming.” But what does that mean? The only proposition on which there is anything like unanimity is that it is warmer now than during the depths of the Little Ice Age–an utterly trivial proposition. Those who demand draconian action on the climate must go far beyond this: they must argue that 1) the Earth is warming at an alarming if not unprecedented rate, and will continue to warm significantly in the future; 2) that warming will have catastrophic consequences; 3) the warming is caused primarily if not exclusively by human activity; and 4) there are some practical measures that humans can take to prevent future warming from occurring. It is clear that only a minority of scientists in the relevant fields believe that all of those propositions are true.
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