When 97% becomes 99.6% - climate change in 2017

Anthony Watts has kindly pointed out that the scientific consensus on climate change is changing. He wrote the very strange headline: "‘The 97% climate consensus’starts to crumble with 485 new papers in 2017 that question it". Apparently some drongo (who does this every year IIRC) has only managed to dig up 485 "papers" that he claims " in some way questioned the supposed consensus regarding the perils of human CO2 emissions or the efficacy of climate models to predict the future."

I expect that, as in past collections, many of findings of those 485 don't dispute climate change, and many probably support the fact that human activity is causing global warming, but I haven't bothered checking (because that's not the point of this little article).  What struck me was that 485 was a pretty small number given the vast number of peer-reviewed publications on climate change these days.

If you go to Google Scholar and search for the term "climate change" and select "2017-2017", you'll find there were "About 115,000 results". Now 485 is 0.4% of 115,000, so even if all those 485 papers disputed the greenhouse effect (which they don't), it would still mean that one could argue that 97% has become 99.6% :D

Now that even beats the 98.4% of WUWT-ers who deny straightforward science. Who'd have thought!

Thanks, Anthony Watts, Breitbart, Pierre Gosselin and Kenneth Richard.

Settled science: there is a scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change

You probably think this topic has been done to death, however there are still people who won't or can't accept that there is a strong scientific consensus on climate change. Even people who accept the strong scientific consensus keep coming up with claims that it isn't. The science on the consensus is "settled science". (I say that to annoy science deniers who don't understand the difference between settled science and ongoing research.)

There are two new papers about the extent to which there is a consensus that humans are causing global warming. One is a rather silly comment by Richard Tol (who can't let it go). The other is a reply to Richard's comment by a team of heavy hitters, including many of the people who have already published papers quantifying the consensus, plus more. The reply is much more than a mere reply. It's a synthesis of the consensus papers and something that you'll no doubt find useful the next time you come across a climate science doubter.

The illogic of deniers: David Legates on the 971 vs 20 in a thousand abstracts

David Legates is a Professor at the University of Delaware who somewhere along the way managed to get a tenured position. I don't know what he teaches or if he's allowed to get anywhere near students - his profile gives not a clue. However he spends some of his time writing articles for climate conspiracy blogs. Today he's written an article for WUWT (archived here) where he's making wild and wrong claims about consensus studies. That is, about studies that show that almost all scientific papers that attribute a cause to global warming attribute it to human activity. David tells outright lies and also builds a few men of straw along the way.

971 in a thousand vs 20 in a thousand

Let's get the numbers from the Cook13 study. Did you know that Cook13 found that since 1991, there were less than 7 abstracts out of every thousand, that disputed humans are the main cause of global warming? That's not how it's presented in Cook13 though. In that paper they properly looked at the numbers only in the context of abstracts in which a position was expressed. In Cook13 the researchers categorised 4,014 papers that expressed a position on the cause of the current global warming.

More BS from the unethical fraud Anthony Watts - 97% of climate science *IS* for real

Anthony Watts is continuing to work hard to appeal to the dregs of humanity. He has all but rid his blog, finally, of any normal-thinking human being. He thinks he has to keep up his fight against reason and ethics, and has another protest about the 97%. Anthony really doesn't like it that 97% of scientific papers that attribute a cause to warming have it caused by humans. It seems he'll go to any lengths. That's because more than 97% of his readers are climate conspiracy nutters who think climate science is a hoax, and he can't bear to lose a source of income (his blog). Anthony Watts is trying to corner the market of paranoid conspiracy theorists and other shady types. Surely no sane person who prides themselves on their rational ability would admit to being a fan of WUWT.

The fall and fall of Gish galloping Richard Tol's smear campaign

A short while ago I wrote an article demolishing Richard Tol's latest demonisation of Cook13, the well known 97% consensus paper. (Update: there's still more to the saga - see here.)

"The consensus is of course in the high 90s" - Richard Tol

As you know, Richard agrees that of all the scientific papers that attribute a cause to global warming, the percentage that attribute it to human activity is "in the high 90s". Here is his confirmation at ATTP's blog:

Richard Tol says (my emphasis):

June 14, 2013 at 11:44 am
The consensus is of course in the high nineties. No one ever said it was not. We don’t need Cook’s survey to tell us that.

Cook’s paper tries to put a precise number on something everyone knows. They failed. Their number is not very precise.

So why does he think Cook13 failed, even though it "put a number" that "everyone else knows"? He doesn't say - anywhere.

Deconstructing the 97% self-destructed Richard Tol

If you're a mediocre academic who yearns to be in the spotlight, what do you do? If you've burnt your bridges academically and cemented a reputation as a bit of a hack who isn't too fussed about accuracy.  If you aren't too worried that you'll end your lack-lustre career on a third-rate public speaking circuit, talking to a handful of doddering deniers in seedy back rooms of government buildings, then you might consider a career as a climate science denier.

That's the image that comes to mind when I consider the antics of Richard Tol over the past few years. Richard managed to snag a position as Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex in the UK. He specialises in the economics of climate, sort of, though he's had mixed success. That's mainly because he's not a detail person. He isn't too fussed when he lets mistakes slip through - unless, that is, someone catches him out.

On Gateway Beliefs: And a tough question at WUWT that no-one could answer

A new paper by Sander L. van der Linden and colleagues has been published in the open access journal PLOS | One. It describes a 'gateway belief model' in the context of the scientific consensus on global warming.

This new paper is another one that finds that people will be more likely to accept the science of climate if they understand how much scientists agree on the subject. And in turn, they'll be more likely to support action to mitigate climate change once they understand the extent of agreement among scientists.

This article is another one that's a bit "too long". It's in two parts, so you can take your pick, if you're short of time. One part starts here at the top, or you can skip to the failure of denialists here :D

Belief trumps fact at WUWT. And are fake sceptics "cynics"?

Anthony Watts gives another illustration of his limited vocabulary and poor grasp of English (archived here). Anthony put up a rather nice photo of a researcher at Michigan State University and described him as looking "angry". He doesn't. He's even showing a hint of a smile.

Many times when Anthony disagrees with someone, he describes them in terms of being "angry" or "full of hate" or "mendacious" or a variation. Those are three of his favourite ways of describing people with whom he disagrees. He couldn't label this scientist using what is pretty well the only other descriptor in his arsenal, an "anonymous coward" or a "hateful anonymous coward", because his name was on the research paper and in the press release. And anyway, he showed his photo, which tends to dispel any notion of anonymity.

Anthony seems unable to write: "I disagree with X because Y".  Many times it's because Anthony can't figure out what "X" is.  All he knows is that it's something that he disagrees with. Maybe because a scientist wrote it. Or maybe because the person who said "X" votes Democrat. Or maybe because they wear yellow socks, or a polka dot tie, or a skirt and high heeled shoes. Whatever. If by some chance Anthony does work out what is being said (the "X"), then he's unable to articulate the "Y" - why he disagrees. In this case it's really hard to figure out what Anthony Watts disagrees with or finds contentious. The research results should not surprise anyone.

This particular researcher, Michigan State University sociologist Aaron M. McCright, has had a paper published about American perceptions of weather and human-caused global warming. Interestingly it was published in Nature Climate Change, rather than a sociology journal.

Anthony Watts fails to save face, pretending not to be excited

Remember a couple of days ago how Anthony Watts was itching to "sue the pants off" skeptical science? How he just knew that they were up to something nefarious. How he figured that John Cook and his team were going to defame deniers? (Would that even be possible?)

He was wrong.

To hedge his bets Anthony later added that perhaps they were going to say something about science itself but if they were, they'd do it in Monty Python style like the 10 out of 10 video that some group came up with (not SkepticalScience), which deniers pretend "shock horror" about. He was wrong about that, too.

A failure to predict - and more

In a pathetic attempt to save face, today he wrote:

The latest propaganda stunt from the Skeptical Science Kidz is underway and it is about as exciting as it is predictable. 

If it was as exciting as it was predictable by Anthony, then he's saying he failed to find it exciting just as he failed dismally in his attempt to predict it.

At least he's owning up to his failure to predict. Or did he make another gaffe and was wanting to make out that he did predict it, when he didn't, but messed up and said it was very exciting.

The SkepticalScience initiative was exciting enough for Anthony to write two articles about it, wasn't it.

What other dismal failures does he achieve in his delayed reaction to 97 hours?

Anthony Watts mistakes Greenland for the entire world - and gets even Greenland wrong

Anthony probably likes to think he deceives his readers well. Perhaps he does, but that's because his readers are only too willing to be deceived not because Anthony is any good at deception.

His deception today is that he presents the ice sheet way up on a freezing cold summit in central Greenland as a good proxy for the entire world.  That's as ridiculous as presenting the Simpson Desert as a proxy for the entire world.

Anthony put up a chart of GISP2 temperatures and couldn't even get that right, labeling it as stopping in 2000, when in fact it stopped in 1950 and shows the temperature up to 95 years before 1950. In other words, it doesn't show any temperatures past 1855.

Flawed chart from WUWT, annoted by HotWhopper

See if you can spot other things wrong with the chart. I mean the chart itself, not just the fact that the average global temperature on earth is quite a bit higher than minus 30 degrees Celsius. Or the fact that temperatures in any one spot on land will fluctuate more than the average temperature over the entire earth.

Anthony Watts thinks weather happens by magic

Then Anthony disputes the fact that all weather now is affected by the amount of energy in the system. He seems to think that physics doesn't apply with some weather. Quoting climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, Anthony wrote:

“all weather is now connected to climate change” – Yikes, every cloud is hiding a climate change boogie man now?

Yes, Anthony. If there was less energy in the system then weather would be different. What do you think. Is some weather governed by magic?

Anthony knows he's a loser, so invokes Godwin's Law

Then he sees a Nazi salute in a friendly wave. He wrote:

I had to chuckle though, because the SkS kids went to all this trouble to make this page where when you mouse over one of the cartoon character climate scientists, their arm goes up in the air to say “hey, I’m part of the consensus!”. That sort of high salute reminds me of the Nazi dress up photos we found last year on the Skeptical Science website. 

Can you believe that Anthony sees a Nazi salute in this sort of pose? What a warped mind he must have.

Professor J Marshall Shepherd. Credit: SkepticalScience

The dress up photos he refers to are about how some people at SkepticalScience coped with Anthony Watts and other lowlifes calling them Nazis in the past. Instead of letting it get to them they made light of the disgusting name-calling. In private. On a private website. Then the images were stolen.


Oh, and it looks as if HotWhopper is getting to Anthony too. Excellent!


PS While I was writing this article, readers were commenting about Anthony's recent effort and picked out other points of interest.

From the WUWT comments

biff33 thinks it was predictable. Maybe, but Anthony failed to predict it.

September 8, 2014 at 3:21 am
Don’t you mean as boring as it is predictable?

Kit Carruthers wonders what goes on in Anthony's twisted mind when he sees children waving.

September 8, 2014 at 3:44 am
Anthony, so do school kids remind you of Nazis? They put their hands up too!

knr decides to act the fool and writes:

September 8, 2014 at 3:56 am
Trenberth ‘missing heat ‘ is a result of poor science not of good theory.
For if temperatures had increased in the way they said they would, STELLED SCIENCE, with increases in CO2 , then there would be no need for any ‘missing heat ‘ in the first place . The fact he cannot justify or even remotely prove his ‘missing heat’ idea is the reason why he tried to reverse the null hypothesise in the first place. And approach which results in a total fail for any undergraduate handing in an essay, would seem to be an acceptable standard with climate ‘science’ professionals . And they wonder why they consider a joke. 

Oatley finds it rather odd that Anthony Watts claims the average global temperature of earth is around minus 30 degrees Celsius, and asks:

September 8, 2014 at 4:05 am
Help me understand the RH scale on the graph…

jmrSudbury doesn't comment on Anthony's major mistake, but answers Oatley's question:

September 8, 2014 at 4:50 am
The air temperature of Greenland averages near -30 C. — John M Reynolds

richard verney looks again at Anthony's chart and wonders how the settlers survived in ancient Greenland:

September 8, 2014 at 6:03 am
I do not disagree with your summary of the charts, but is the reconstruction of the past temperatures accurate?

How could the Vikings with their primitive technology (and no mechanical aids such as mini diggers and tractors) have farmed Greenland for a couple of hundred years if the temperatures were only about 1 or so degrees warmer than today? That is the question that should be asked when tuning the proxies.

Where they were located (and I accept that their settlements were not spread right accross Greenland), it must have been about 4 degrees (and possibly more) warmer than it is today, if not just 1 or 2 harsh winter would have wiped them out.

Greg is a bit worried that Anthony Watts is giving publicity to proper science communicators (instead of the usual WUWT fare of paranoid conspiracy theories):

September 8, 2014 at 4:54 am
This is too feeble to even bother trying to counter it.
Don’t flatter thier sorry efforts by reading and commenting on them. 

JLC is baffled that anyone would be interested in what climate scientists have to say about climate. It just goes to show how out of touch with reality are deniers. JLC - most people aren't very interested in the pseudo-science quackery and paranoid conspiracy theories, which is the normal fare at WUWT.

September 8, 2014 at 5:30 am
This baffles me. It might increase the number of hits on their website and entertain the true believers but I can’t see that it would achieve anything else. 

Denier weirdness: 97% irony - deniers deny the science about the science

On undermining public support

...Previous research has shown that four key beliefs about climate change—that it is real, human caused, serious and solvable—are important predictors of support for climate policies. Other research has shown that organized opponents of climate legislation have sought to undermine public support by instilling the belief that there is widespread disagreement among climate scientists about these points—a view shown to be widely held by the public. Ding et al (2011) Nature Climate Change

Key fact: global warming is primarily due to increased CO2

...When asked how to address the problem of climate change, while respondents in 1992 were unable to differentiate between general “good environmental practices” and actions specific to addressing climate change, respondents in 2009 have begun to appreciate the differences. Despite this, many individuals in 2009 still had incorrect beliefs about climate change, and still did not appear to fully appreciate key facts such as that global warming is primarily due to increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the single most important source of this carbon dioxide is the combustion of fossil fuels. Reynolds et al (2010) Risk Analysis 

Plausibility that climate sensitivity is above 4.5°C remains high 

...Across groups, the non-interactive disjunction is used, assuming that when several scientific theories compete, they cannot be all true at the same time, but at least one will remain. This procedure balances points of view better than averaging: the number of experts holding a view is not essential.

This approach is illustrated with a 16 expert real-world dataset on climate sensitivity obtained in 1995. Climate sensitivity is a key parameter to assess the severity of the global warming issue. Comparing our findings with recent results suggests that the plausibility that sensitivity is small (below 1.5 °C) has decreased since 1995, while the plausibility that it is above 4.5 °C remains high. Ha-Duong (2008) International Journal of Approximate Reasoning

Energy conservation is becoming increasingly important (1991) 

To avoid the risk of global warming energy conservation is becoming increasingly important. Gruber and Brand (1991) Energy Policy

Crazed deniers rant and rave and reject science

Anthony Watts and his fringe followers deny the fact that there is an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that humans are causing global warming. In fact, since the middle of last century, our actions have probably caused all the global warming observed.

Deniers don't just want to deny the fact that we are causing global warming, some of them even want to deny that the world is warming and that an increase in greenhouse gases warm the world and even, in some cases, deny basic chemistry - that burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide.

Science rejected on political grounds

Most HotWhopper readers know that deniers who frequent fringe conspiracy blogs like Anthony Watts' WUWT are utter nutters. They'll do and say anything to reject science. It doesn't have to make sense or be consistent.

The quotes above are from abstracts that were collated by John Cook and his colleagues in their search of the Web of Science database to see what was in the research papers about climate change and global warming.

Anthony has found some wacky PhD candidate from somewhere in Europe the USA, who's supposedly studying psychology, and who is an ideological denier of climate science (archived here).  José Duarte is an extremist right wing ideologue. Not just a libertarian but a nutty libertarian. He quotes a bunch of papers, including the above, and cries "fraud", "retraction" (archived here).

José's excitable and irrational. He was most irate that "The editor of ERL, Daniel Kammen, personally promoted the paper [Cook13] on his blog". He hilariously claimed that "The people doing the reading were militant political activists on the issue of AGW".  Militant...political...activists. What a nutter. Here are the affiliations of the authors of Cook13:

• Global Change Institute, University of Queensland, Australia 
• Skeptical Science, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia 
• School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Australia 
• Tetra Tech, Incorporated, McClellan, CA, USA 
• Department of Chemistry, Michigan Technological University, USA 
• Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, UK 
• Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada 
• Department of Environmental Science and Policy, George Mason University, USA 
• Salt Spring Consulting Ltd, Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada 

Not an army, navy, or airforce affiliation among them :) I'll venture to guess that to the young denier activist Jose, it's not just every climate scientist on the face of the earth who is a "militant political activist", it's everyone who accepts science - that is the majority of people who know anything about the subject are all "militant political activists". (If only there were more people taking action to mitigate global warming.)

I've listed below the papers José complains about, together with the category they were put in and the level of endorsement. The link goes to the paper in each case. The details are from the page on SkepticalScience.com that has the abstracts and other details about the papers.

Remember, the researchers were only categorising the abstracts of the paper and did not see the title, the authors, the journal name or the full paper. [Fixed: I'm told by a very reliable source that the researchers did see the title. Sou 31 Aug 14] Therefore, before you decide whether you'd agree with the category or the endorsement level, read the abstract in isolation of everything else. I've added a link to the paper after the title in each case.

Category: Mitigation

Biomass Fuel Use, Burning Technique And Reasons For The Denial Of Improved Cooking Stoves By Forest User Groups Of Rema-kalenga Wildlife Sanctuary, Bangladesh (link to paper)
Authors: Chowdhury, Msh; Koike, M; Akther, S; Miah, Md (2011)
Journal: International Journal Of Sustainable Development And World Ecology
Category: Mitigation
Endorsement Level: 3. Implicitly endorses AGW without minimising it

Initial Public Perceptions Of Deep Geological And Oceanic Disposal Of Carbon Dioxide (link to paper)
Authors: Palmgren, Cr; Morgan, Mg; De Bruin, Wb; Keith, Dw (2004)
Journal: Environmental Science & Technology
Category: Mitigation
Endorsement Level: 3. Implicitly endorses AGW without minimising it

Climate Change And Climate Variability: Personal Motivation For Adaptation And Mitigation (link to paper)
Authors: Semenza, Jc; Ploubidis, Gb; George, La (2011)
Journal: Environmental Health
Category: Mitigation
Endorsement Level: 3. Implicitly endorses AGW without minimising it

Promoting Energy-conservation In Small And Medium-sized Companies (link to paper)
Authors: Gruber, E; Brand, M (1991)
Journal: Energy Policy
Category: Mitigation
Endorsement Level: 3. Implicitly endorses AGW without minimising it

Category: Impacts

A Strategy And Protocol To Increase Diffusion Of Energy Related Innovations Into The Mainstream Of Housing Associations (link to paper)
Authors: Egmond, C; Jonkers, R; Kok, G (2006)
Journal: Energy Policy
Category: Impacts
Endorsement Level: 3. Implicitly endorses AGW without minimising it

Category: Methods

Hierarchical Fusion Of Expert Opinions In The Transferable Belief Model, Application To Climate Sensitivity (link to paper)
Authors: Ha-duong, M (2008)
Journal: International Journal Of Approximate Reasoning
Category: Methods
Endorsement Level: 3. Implicitly endorses AGW without minimising it

Category: Not climate related

Now What Do People Know About Global Climate Change? Survey Studies Of Educated Laypeople (link to paper)
Authors: Reynolds, Tw; Bostrom, A; Read, D; Morgan, Mg (2010)
Journal: Risk Analysis
Category: Not climate related
Endorsement Level: 1. Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%

Support For Climate Policy And Societal Action Are Linked To Perceptions About Scientific Agreement (link to paper)
Authors: Ding, D; Maibach, Ew; Zhao, Xq; Roser-renouf, C; Leiserowitz, A (2011)
Journal: Nature Climate Change
Category: Not climate related
Endorsement Level: 3. Implicitly endorses AGW without minimising it

José's depth of research - 10 minutes!

"I only spent ten minutes with their database" says Jose. "...I'm not willing to spend a lot of time with their data, for reasons I detail further down...." I don't believe he only "spent ten minutes". He went looking for stuff. And if he really only spent ten minutes with their data base up till the 28 August 2014, then on what grounds did he write his diatribe on the 22 July this year? And on what did he base his opposition to the fact there is an overwhelming consensus in his rants at Judith Curry's blog? (Okay, those were all based on pure, unadulterated ad hom attacks mixed with a lot of disinformation, not on any examination of the paper itself.)

I can believe he's "not willing to spend a lot of time with their data". He'd find he couldn't dispute their findings and that wouldn't do. Not at all.

If he worked at the rate of 8 abstracts in ten minutes, Jose could rate all 11,944 abstracts in about six weeks, working eight hours a day, five days a week. He'd rather not.

He's not very good at research, that is clear. He flies off the handle before doing it. And the little he does is very poor. For example, Jose wrote:

I discovered that the following papers were included as endorsement, as "climate papers", again in just ten minutes of looking. They are classified as either implicit or explicit endorsement, and were evidently included in the 97% figure:

No, José, not all of them were included in the 97% figure. Two of the papers he listed were very clearly marked for the category "not climate related". And it's not as if Jose could have easily missed that point, because he wrote:

In Table 1, page 2, the authors claimed that social science papers were classified as "Not climate related" and not included as endorsement cases. This is a false claim, and the authors should be investigated for fraud. (There were some papers that were classified as "Not climate related" in my quick search, but the above papers were not -- they were classified is implicit or explicit endorsement.) 

That's a strong and wrong allegation. All you need to do is go to the SkepticalScience search facility and you'll find that two of the papers that Jose included in his list were clearly categorised as "not climate related" - here and here. Therefore they weren't included in the 97%.

Now what would be the result if Jose were to remove the other six studies from the 3896 endorsing the human cause of global warming (out of 4014 abstracts that were classified as taking a position on the subject)? You'd get 3890 out of 4008, which is still, you guessed it:

97%

Deniers cannot disprove the findings, and won't even try!

And do deniers really and truly doubt that almost all the science points to the fact that humans are causing global warming? Why don't they provide evidence that a quarter, a third, half the scientific papers dispute this? Why can't they prove that even 10% of scientific papers dispute this.

Because it's not so!

Why don't they do their own research? Because they know they'll find that at least 97% of scientific papers that attribute a cause of modern warming, show it to be human activity.

From the WUWT comments

Max Roberts reckons all psychologists are stupid and untrustworthy, except for those rare beasts who reject the findings of experts and deny the undeniable:

August 29, 2014 at 3:21 pm
Finally, a psychologist with intelligence, analytical skills, and integrity.
Most of us do pointless crap (I have a PhD in psychology, university lecturer in a small useless provincial university for over 20 years, the sort of place that turns out a constant stream of political ‘scientists’ and sociologists who then go off to trash the world).
I always say: social psychology is trivial answers to interesting questions, cognitive psychology is interesting answers to trivial questions.
Its people like this who can buck that trend. 

pokerguy is easily persuaded to believe what he believes, no matter how nutty his beliefs are:

August 29, 2014 at 4:20 pmThis is splendidly written, brilliant, passionate, dripping with common sense and integrity….and extremely persuasive. Any remaining supporters of the nutters who authored this “paper,” should bow their heads in shame.

Eamon Butler is incapable of doing his own research, but he can ask a question:

August 29, 2014 at 3:05 pm
Just so I’m clear, but apart from Cook’s and the Doran/Zimmerman surveys, are there any other studies that conclude the 97% result? I’m sick to death of this nonsense being pushed down my throat as though it was supposed to be proof of CAGW. I’m sure you have all seen the ”97% of engineers and the dodgy bridge” analogy. I ask those promoting this rubbish, from which survey are they referring to? Most haven’t got a clue of it’s source let alone the controversial background.

This is a very damning rebuttal of the Cook fraud. Thanks to Jose for this. Hopefully criminal charges will soon follow. I won’t hold my Co2 laden breath.

Here are some other studies for you, Eamon, since you aren't familiar with climate science yourself (or you wouldn't need such studies, you'd know):

• Oreskes, Naomi. "The scientific consensus on climate change." Science 306, no. 5702 (2004): 1686-1686. (link)
• Verheggen, Bart, Bart Strengers, John Cook, Robert van Dorland, Kees Vringer, Jeroen Peters, Hans Visser, and Leo Meyer. "Scientists’ views about attribution of global warming." Environmental science & technology (2014). (link)
• Anderegg, W. R., Prall, J. W., Harold, J., & Schneider, S. H. (2010). "Expert credibility in climate change." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(27), 12107-12109. [Added 31 Aug 14 - H/t John Cook] (link)
• Not to forget the extensive but unpublished research of James Lawrence Powell.
• or the IPCC reports.

Fred W. Manzo  - his high school science teacher was correct. It's Fred who belongs to the utter nutter fringe group of science deniers. (Fred doesn't know what a personal attack is. And I wouldn't mind betting Fred added the last bit of his quote all by himself.)

August 29, 2014 at 1:50 pm
I did bring up the bias in “97 percent of all scientist say AGW is the most important problem facing humanity” to a High School science teacher. His defense was “that’s impossible. Everyone knows its true and it’s been repeated everywhere.” His implicit position was that only fringe groups dispute such basic scientific thinking. That is, he had nothing but personal attacks to use in its defense.

The delusional seem to dominate at WUWT. Kozlowski  assumes too much:

August 29, 2014 at 1:21 pm
When they retract the paper will Obama retract his citation of the paper?

fobdangerclose has no sense of proportion. He thinks that someone who says he has spent only ten minutes looking at the data and who is "not willing to spend a lot of time with their data", "makes too much sense". And that an extensive study over several months, examining almost 12,000 published abstracts can therefore be dismissed.  Even though it's supported by other studies - and by anyone who's read any climate science. Confirmation bias in action.

August 29, 2014 at 11:33 am
José,
Well you make too much sense and use too many facts to back up your point.
That is just unacceptable to the CO2 cult. 

And deniers wonder why they are ridiculed.

---

Cook, John, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A. Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce. "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature." Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 2 (2013): 024024. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

Irony alert! More conspiracy plots discovered at WUWT and elsewhere...

Irony meter blows up.

The irony meter is overheating today.

Anthony Watts decided to whistle up all his conspiracy theorists today (archived here). He's found some grad student blogger called José Duarte who's been ranting and raving against Cook13 on any denier blog he can find (to uncritical acclaim by Judith Curry and critical derision by others). On his blog, after deciding that scientists (citizen or otherwise) aren't competent to read scientific abstracts, he wrote (archived here):

There's a much better method for finding out what scientists think — ask them. Not just about their abstracts, which you already rated – you're still adding unnecessary layers of complexity and bias there. Direct surveys of scientists, with more useful questions, is a much more valid method than having ragtag teams of unqualified political activists divine the meanings of thousands of abstracts. 

Ha ha. Guess what, those nefarious plotting "unqualified political activists" did ask them. But that's not what José wants. He doesn't want to confuse the results of a study looking at what the science says by examining what the science says. That would add unnecessary layers of complexity. Say that again? (Best not.)

José's also been writing nonsense about Lewandowsky13, the "moon landing" paper, about how people who think climate science is a hoax don't necessarily think that HIV causes AIDS - or do think that, or something or the other. He's a bit of a nutter. Full of conspiracy ideation himself. And very emotional about it too. He's flinging all the usual accusations using words like fraud and scam. Which is funny, because Anthony Watts has just written two articles bemoaning the fact that climate change tugs at the emotions. After flinging around wild accusations, claiming that the paper was a scam and a lie, José himself tells a lie of his own by implication. He wrote (archived here):

Why would anyone participate in our research if our goal is to marginalize them in public life, to lie about them, to say that they think the moon landing was a hoax, to say they don't think HIV causes AIDS, to say they don't believe smoking causes lung cancer – when none of those things are true. Do we hate our participants?

Thing is that the paper didn't find that every science denier thinks all those things. Not every conspiracy theorist thinks those things. Not every right winger thinks those things. What the paper found was the thinking those things was a predictor of science denial. This is what the paper found, from the abstract:

Paralleling previous work, we find that endorsement of a laissez-faire conception of free-market economics predicts rejection of climate science (r≈.80 between latent constructs). Endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer. We additionally show that endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin-Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing) predicts rejection of climate science as well as the rejection of other scientific findings, above and beyond endorsement of laissez-faire free markets. This provides empirical confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science.

José fits the bill. He is obviously prone to conspiracist ideation, which he dresses up using words like "scam" and "fraud". (In much the same way as Steve McIntyre did.) He clearly places himself at the extreme end of the right wing ideology spectrum. And I'm guessing from his strong reaction to Cook13 that he also rejects climate science. I wonder what other science he rejects. I wonder what other conspiracy theories he subscribes to?

On the topic of conspiracy theories, sometimes I check out who's been discussing HotWhopper. Guess what I found. John Reece wrote: :

"...The AGW scam is the greatest hoax in the history of the world. What could be more fascinating as a focus for one's attention?..."

Followed shortly afterwards with this. John Reece wrote:

"...Anyone who sees (in what I post) evidence of a conspiracy theory mindset is projecting in the psychological sense ― a phenomenon with which I am quite familiar, having worked for an entire career as a professional colleague of psychiatrists and psychologists in a community mental health center..."

Similarly at WUWT, in response to Anthony's call for all his readers to come up with their best conspiracy theories.

ossqss thinks there is deception in the climate science community and says:

August 6, 2014 at 10:26 am
It is amazing the extent of deception in the climate science community. Data tampering, rigged review, outright lies, refusal to share code or data, policy implementation without representation, agenda driven study results, funding impropriety, and on and on. We need a reset button as everyone is paying the price for this abhorrent behavior.
Incarceration is the only button that can bring this systemic fraud to an end.

Alec Rawls is a long time conspiracy theorist who I've written about before. He claims scientists deploy "scurrilous strategems" and goes further. He's doing what John Reece did above. He's projecting (excerpts):

August 6, 2014 at 9:13 am
As any real scientist should be, Duarte is flabbergasted to witness the scurrilous stratagems deployed by the relentlessly dishonest Lewandowski, Cook et al.. Those of us who have for years been the targets of eco-alarmist slander cannot muster the same surprise, but our years of familiarity can help to answer the questions Mr. Duarte has about the etiology of this perversion.

...These leftists always assume that the correlation between right-left ideology and skeptic-believer views on climate are because people on the right compromise scientific thinking in favor of politically preferred conclusions. The reason they jump to that conclusion is because they are always projecting. Leftists think that everyone engages in “motivated cognition” because that is what THEY do.  ...

...The leftist mind is a truly foul and perverted thing....

Alan Robertson speaks about nefarious plots and says:

August 6, 2014 at 10:05 am
It was only a matter of time until someone within the social sciences community spoke against the farcical works of Lewandowsky. Now that Oreskes has inextricably linked her name to Lewandowsky, the scions of Harvard are surely plotting their next move… 

MattN decides that at least two scientists are charlatans and says:

August 6, 2014 at 9:42 am
Lewandowsky and Cook are just two more in a long line of charlatans bleating out the party line, albeit with unusual attitude and arrogance. 

john robertson reckons that science is dangerous to personal liberty and destructive to civil society and says:

August 6, 2014 at 8:44 am
Possibly too little too late.
Climatology is drowning in Lew Paper and the byproducts associated with it.
Social Science is about to get lumped in with “Climate Science”.
As dangerous pseudo sciencey rubbish that is dangerous to personal liberty and destructive to civil society.
Just another front, a cover for the statist do-gooder power hungry people haters. 

There's a bonus, too. I've often noticed that most deniers at WUWT don't click links. It took more than two hours and 32 comments before someone remarked that the main link to the origins of Anthony Watts' copy and paste was broken! MattS finally says:

August 6, 2014 at 10:38 am
The link in the main post to the José Duarte blog is broken.

And they don't bother reading the papers they complain about, either. If arthur4563 had bothered to read Cook13's scientific consensus paper he'd have known that asking the scientists was exactly what the researchers did. And guess what. 97% of them said their papers endorsed the fact that humans are causing global warming. But arthur4563 is a science denier and science deniers as a general rule don't bother with papers in scientific journals. He says:

August 6, 2014 at 10:42 am
To me the major problem with Cook’s sudy was the fact that it was so stupidly designed and
obsolete. The study was supposedly to determine the opinion of climate scientists about global warming. That implies it should canvas their “current” beliefs, not beliefs they may have held in the past, in some paper they may have been involved with (perhaps before the “pause”).

And the strategy Cook chose almost looks as if it was designed to introduce human bias into the results. If you want to know a scientist’s beliefs about an issue, you do what everyone else (except Cook) would do : YOU ASK THEM. You don’t dig thru a bunch of published papers trying to read tea leaves and infer the answer to a question that the papers probably never even addressed. In court, such a claim as Cook’s study makes would be tossed out as “not best evidence” as well as “including answers likely to be obsolete.” 

The other problem with arthur4563's comment was that the Cook13 study wasn't about personal opinions. It was about the science.


Perhaps the most irony-filled comment comes from Anthony Watts himself, smearer extraordinaire, morally bankrupt blogger, who wrote:

It is heartening to see somebody outside of climate science finally call these spades a spade. Now if we can just instill some sense of moral responsibility to people in climate science who really should be speaking out about using science as a smear tactic, we’ll be gettin somewhere.

---

Cook, John, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A. Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce. "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature." Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 2 (2013): 024024. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

Lewandowsky, Stephan, Klaus Oberauer, and Gilles E. Gignac. "NASA faked the moon landing—therefore,(climate) science is a hoax an anatomy of the motivated rejection of science." Psychological science 24, no. 5 (2013): 622-633. doi: 10.1177/0956797612457686

Not in god's image: head vice material from unscrupulous E. Calvin Beisner

E. Calvin Beisner's been mentioned before on HotWhopper recently. He's reared his ugly rejection of science again at WUWT today (archived here), right after an article in which Anthony celebrates Australia's backflip on the carbon price.

This is an article exposing the deceit of E Calvin Beisner. He's not clever about it. He's like the classroom sneak. Everyone despises the sneak. Everyone knows the sneak will tell lies at the drop of a hat and will blame someone else for his actions. The sneak is a liar and a coward.

Calvin hides behind his god, too. For me, I don't care normally care what a person believes about religion. I think religion can be a great help and comfort to a lot of people. It's when people present themselves as religious on the one hand while being dishonest in the extreme that they lose my respect.Calvin presents as an elder in the orthodox presbyterian church (whatever that his) and a spokesperson for the pseudo-religious cult, the Cornwall Alliance. But on climate science he specialises in twisting the truth, distorting facts and misrepresenting them.  I have nothing but contempt for the E. Calvin Beisner's of the world.

Calvin probably thinks he's being clever in much the same way as a child does when lying to his teacher. He doesn't come across as very clever. He comes across as one of the dumber variety of deniers with no scruples. Calvin cannot point to any evidence to support his rejection of climate science so he resorts to wordplay.

A most fascinating aspect of climate change denial

Calvin's main article is a belated response to a rather good article Phil Plait wrote back in January, after James Powell updated his tracking of science denial vs science papers. Phil Plait starts with an observation:

To me, one of the most fascinating aspects of climate change denial is how deniers essentially never publish in legitimate journals, but instead rely on talk shows, grossly error-laden op-eds, and hugely out-of-date claims (that were never right to start with). 

Ironically, rather than address the issue by doing a scientific study, E. Calvin Beisner relies on the anti-science blog WUWT to boast about his denial of climate science, with a "grossly error-laden" blog article.

(If you're on the home page, click the "read more" link for an analysis of the "tricks" Calvin tries on.)

Guess what disinformer Anthony Watts isn't telling his readers

Talking about spin. A short while ago I wrote about how a blog article on WUWT by Rachel DeJong misquoted Gina McCarthy of the EPA. Anthony Watts is doing the same thing (archived here).

He's gloating over some US poll, by Rassmussen Reports, which is regarded by some people as being somewhat to the right politically. But that is not the point. Earlier this week Rasmussen Reports asked several questions of 1,000 likely voters:

1. * How closely have you followed recent news reports about global warming?
2. * How serious a problem is global warming?
3. * An increasing number of news organizations are now banning articles or TV appearances by those who think global warming is not a serious, man-made problem. Do you favor or oppose the decision by some news organizations to ban global warming skeptics?
4. * Is the scientific debate about global warming over?
5. * Does the media make global warming appear to be worse than it really is, better than it really is or do they present an accurate picture?

NOTE: Margin of Sampling Error, +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence

Only 14% believe global warming to be "not at all serious"

Anthony Watts was very selective in what he told his readers. This is some of what he didn't tell his readers. The stereotype of a climate science denier is supported by the poll.

• Based on the results reported by Rassmussen, deniers are more likely to be older, male and vote Republican.
• Although only 60% of respondents agreed global warming is a serious problem, 35% thought it very serious.  Another 35% thought it wasn't all that serious. 
• What deniers won't like is that only 14% of respondents believed global warming to be not at all serious.

You can read the write up of the survey results here. It includes some results from previous surveys as well, such as the results of a May poll, which found that  "just 30% of voters think the president should take action alone if necessary to deal with global warming.  Twice as many (59%) say the federal government should only do what the president and Congress jointly agree on."

Looking back at past Rasmussen poll results, it appears that there could be an upward trend in the number of people in the USA who think global warming is a serious problem.

What Anthony Watts did tell his readers

This is how Anthony Watts reported the results, quoting directly from Rasmussen Reports:

From Rasmussen Reports:

Voters strongly believe the debate about global warming is not over yet and reject the decision by some news organizations to ban comments from those who deny that global warming is a problem.

Only 20% of Likely U.S. Voters believe the scientific debate about global warming is over, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Sixty-three percent (63%) disagree and say the debate about global warming is not over. Seventeen percent (17%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Forty-eight percent (48%) of voters think there is still significant disagreement within the scientific community over global warming, while 35% believe scientists generally agree on the subject.

The BBC has announced a new policy banning comments from those who deny global warming, a policy already practiced by the Los Angeles Times and several other media organizations.  But 60% of voters oppose the decision by some news organizations to ban global warming skeptics. Only 19% favor such a ban, while slightly more (21%) are undecided.
But then 42% believe the media already makes global warming appear to be worse than it really is. Twenty percent (20%) say the media makes global warming appear better than it really is, while 22% say they present an accurate picture. Sixteen percent (16%) are not sure.
Still, this is an improvement from February 2009 when 54% thought the media makes global warming appear worse than it is. Unchanged, however, are the 21% who say the media presents an accurate picture.

That's where he stopped. He didn't let on about findings that might be disturbing to the fragile egos of his audience. Such as that only 14% of respondents believe global warming is not at all serious.

The US public is ignorant of the science

The finding that almost half of those surveyed mistakenly think that there is significant disagreement in the scientific community about global warming shows the importance of studies of scientific consensus. More importantly, it highlights the importance of communicating the findings of those studies.

Denier Weirdness: Why won't Anthony Watts release his data and code for the 97%?

Anthony Watts has an article today about reproducibility of scientific experiments (archived here). It's mainly about medical and pharmacological research. It's not at all about climate science.

However I noticed that Anthony himself, in the opening paragraph, snuck in an example of what he reckoned couldn't be reproduced - it was Cook13, the research that examined the nearly 12,000 papers that were retrieved from a Web of Science search of scientific papers on global warming. That study in itself could be regarded as a reproduction and validation of other similar studies, which all found that going back over the past 20 years or so, around 97% of science on the subject supports the fact that humans are causing global warming.

So I was intrigued to find Anthony had written (my bold italics):

Reproducibility — the ability to redo an experiment and get the same results — is a cornerstone of science, but it has been the subject of some troubling news lately. In recent years, researchers have reported that they could not reproduce the results from many studies, including research in oncology, drug-target validation, and sex differences in disease (and climate with Cook et al. ).

What is Anthony Watts hiding? I wondered. Does that mean that he or someone else has tried to reproduce Cook13 and been unable to do so? If so, why is he hiding his working, results and code? Why hasn't he shouted to the world his effort to reproduce the study?

Of course, I thought, it could be that because he doesn't understand much science his failure to reproduce the results is simply incompetence on his part.

Replicating research vs replicating researchers

Anyway, Anthony provided a link - so I followed it. It turns out that it's got nothing at all to do with the research itself. Anthony didn't redo the work. He didn't even try to reproduce the results. All he did was link to a dumb letter from an idiot denier complaining that he can't get confidential information about the people who did do the research.

It looks as if Anthony Watts thinks that redoing research and reproducing results means that you have to replicate the researchers! What a nutter.

File this one under "Denier Weirdness".

PS The latest "reproduction" of this research is by James Powell, who's been checking the science for some time now. His latest analysis is from last year. What he found is illustrated below:

---

Cook, John, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A. Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce. "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature." Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 2 (2013): 024024. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

Ridiculous Richard Tol sez 12,000 is a strange number...

Anthony Watts has put up another promo for Richard Tol (archived here, latest here). Richard is an economist who agrees there is an overwhelming consensus among the experts that global warming is real and caused by human activity. Over the last year or so, however, he's been on a crusade to try to argue that 97% isn't 97% or something.

I've already written how Richard's "arguments" range from the idiotic to the preposterous and have been well and truly demolished. For a more orderly, less snarky and highly readable account, see the paper by John Cook and co where they identified at least 24 major blunders in Richard's silliness.

This time, because there have been a number of articles in the UK Guardian about Richard, his errors in his economic papers and now his "verging on the lunatic" crusade against John Cook and SkepticalScience.com - the Guardian allowed him an article of his own.

Richard contradicts himself

Richard doesn't start off his article too well, contradicting himself right up top, writing:

I show that the 97% consensus claim does not stand up. 

At best, Nuccitelli, John Cook and colleagues may have accidentally stumbled on the right number.

It gets worse from that point onward. (If you're on the home page, click here to read on...)

BUSTED: How Ridiculous Richard Tol makes myriad bloopers and a big fool of himself and proves the 97% consensus

Update - see below.


Anthony Watts is all excited (archived here, latest here) because economist Richard Tol finally found a journal to publish a paper he's been trying to get someone to publish for nearly a year.  Anthony wrote, mischievously and wrongly a headline and opening comment:

BUSTED: Tol takes on Cook’s ’97% consensus’ claim with a re-analysis, showing the claim is ‘unfounded’

A new paper by Dr. Richard Tol published today in ScienceDirect, journal of Energy Policy, shows that the Cook et al. paper claiming that there is a 97% consensus among scientists is not just impossible to reproduce (since Cook is withholding data) but a veritable statistical train wreck rife with bias, classification errors, poor data quality, and inconsistency in the ratings process. The full paper is available below.

Anthony Watts is wrong, and wrong and wrong again - he's busted!

Firstly, Richard Tol didn't do any reanalysis. He didn't categorise all the abstracts himself. He just did some wonky sums and got the wrong answer, based on flawed assumptions and more. And he threw in a large number of unfounded speculative statements. Not only did Richard not show the claim was "unfounded", he wrote that he accepts the main finding of Cook13.

Secondly, thirdly and fourthly etc, John Cook isn't withholding any data. He provided more than just all the data anyone would need to repeat the analysis (here and here), he even provided a web tool to help people who wanted to to categorise abstracts for themselves. John Cook provided all the data needed to reproduce the analysis. Richard Tol didn't even try to do so. As for the quality of the data - it's a complete set of around 12,000 abstracts returned using a Web of Science search of key terms. So I don't know if Anthony is trying to say that Web of Science isn't any good.  Anthony probably doesn't know either. He just likes blowing hot air.

Anthony's wrong on another point, too. The full paper isn't available at the site Anthony linked to unless you're a paid up subscriber or are willing to pay for the privilege.  (You can read one of Richard's earlier rejected versions here, which I got from Richard's own blog. It's not much different to the final paper.)

This is a very long article, although it barely scratches the surface in the myriad flaws in Ridiculous Richard's paper. If you're on the home page, click here for more.

Anthony Watts' bombshell goes pear-shaped. 82% of WUWT-ers aren't interested!

In a burst of unfettered excitement, Anthony Watts has uncovered yet another bombshell (archived here,  latest update here). He wrote his shocking headline:

John Cook’s 97% consensus claim is about to go ‘pear-shaped’

About the shape of a pear

Anthony began by spending some time explaining to his readers the meaning and origin of the term "pear-shaped". Or one supposed origin - a military one. There are several other possible origins.

The top-ranked ERL paper of 2013

Most readers will be familiar with Cook13, the 97% consensus paper, which got deniers in such a tizz without them even reading the paper. Many of you will remember how Anthony Watts blew a gasket at the Presidential tweet.

What you may not know is that the 97% consensus paper was the most read of all the papers published in Environment Research Letters last year. And not just last year - it's the most read paper in ERL for all time. In fact it's the most-read paper in all (80+) Institute of Physics Journals - of all time, ever. Or that it was awarded the "Best Article of 2013" by the Editorial Board of ERL.

Is it any wonder that some devious deniers will not stop at anything - not just lying but also stealing - to try to discredit this solid piece of research.

Pears or nuts, anyone?

Anyway, once Anthony got his "pear-shaped" explanation out of the way, he copied part of a blog article by Richard Tol. Richard has been going nuts (acting nuts?) for months trying to find a flaw in the paper he accepts as having correct results, writing in one of his silly and wrong protest drafts (trying to prove the researchers got tired. Yes, really!):

There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct.

Despite his certainty that there is an overwhelming consensus, Richard said he's finally got someone to publish his "comment" of protest at Cook13.  This is after almost 12 months and four failed attempts with three different journals. And that's somehow going to prove - just what exactly neither Anthony nor Richard say! (Most likely that Richard doesn't know what he's talking about, going by his early attempts at knocking the paper.)

Anthony also quotes Brandon Shollenberger, who apparently lacks ethics (like Anthony) and has no sense of proportion. Brandon, remember, is the same person who buries his long nose in trivia looking for misquotes and tiny glitches and then yells for weeks about it, long after his alleged errors, where they exist, have been corrected or at least acknowledged (where correction is either not possible or seen as too trivial to matter in the slightest). Brandon, being a true blue science denier, bypasses the very real and grievous frauds and deceptions. Disinformation about climate science itself doesn't bother Brandon, the "denier".

According to this latest WUWT article there must have been nefarious activity afoot, or ahand or asomething-or-other. This as yet un-identified nefarious activity is based, not on any analysis of scientific papers, but on a hack of a private forum (where apparently SkS authors discuss blog posts to make sure they are correct and readable before posting them to the main SkepticalScience blog, or whatever).

It's quite possible that Brandon himself hacked his way into the SkS private forum, which is what his tweets suggest, when he writes - "I just made a really cool discovery" and "Too bad there's no way to sell it. That'd be cool" and "I've posted a teaser of my recent discovery. I wonder how many people can figure out what the image is".

On the other hand, Brandon might have just been the willing receiver of stolen property from the thief who hacked the SkS forum in 2012.

Upstaged! (What a shame shambles)

Poor old Richard Tol, having finally attained his moment (half second?) of glory in deniersville, he's been upstaged by Brandon Shollenberger, of all people! With Anthony Watts doing his best to get in on the action, of course.  And all of them completely missing the fact that if they wanted to do their own analysis of scientific papers on climate change they could have done so ten times over in the past twelve months, or at any time.

The deniers could have done their own Web of Science search. If that was too much like hard work (after all, they might get tired), they could have used the data all packaged up for them by the hard (tiring) work of John Cook and his co-authors.  The Cook13 researchers have already provided them with all the data they need in the form of 11,944 papers written by 29,083 authors and published in 1,980 journals from the past 20 years! SkepticalScience even has a tool with which you can rate the abstracts yourself. And anyone interested can download the details and see the researchers ratings as well as download the ratings of the papers' authors by year and rating.

The mugger politely asks his victim for more ...

So who has the nefarious intent?  Brandon Shollenberger, Anthony Watts and Richard Tol are sorely lacking in the ethics department. Anthony Watts quotes Brandon writing quite openly and without a hint of the shame any decent person would feel if they were tempted to steal:

I’ve sent John Cook an e-mail alerting him to what material I have, offering him an opportunity to give me reasons I should refrain from releasing it or particular parts of it. I figure a day or two to address any potential privacy concerns should be enough.

His response will determine how much information I provide. No obligations were placed upon me regarding any of the material I have, but I don’t see any compelling reason to provide information about how I got it either. I’d need a better reason than just satisfying people’s curiosity.

That's a bit like a mugger asking their victim if there is any good reason why the mugger should give her back her wallet. And then graciously offering to not publish her love letters immediately, giving the victim time to dwell on the privacy implications.

Maybe if Brandon got a sharp knock on his door from someone in blue waving a badge, they should be able to give him a very good reason for "providing information" about how he "got it".  Being a thief or a receiver of stolen property is a much better reason than simply "satisfying people's curiosity", don't you think?

What is the startling new information?

There is no new information that would change the results of Cook13.  Brandon says he has information that will show which people rated which papers and how - or at least that's what I think he's saying. This information is going beyond "need to know" and I don't know of any scientific publication that would provide that amount of detail. The most that climate science papers normally show is who did the data collection, who did the analysis and who wrote the paper or similar, not normally the details of who collected which precise tiny bits of information.

In any case, to demonstrate the accuracy or otherwise of the Cook13 findings, you'd have to either categorise scientific papers the Cook13 team used or do another study from scratch. At a pinch, you could ask the authors of the papers to categorise their own papers though I think an independent categorisation is preferable. To my knowledge, no denier has bothered doing any of these options, or if they have they haven't come up with any different results.  (The Cook13 researchers categorised the abstracts and validated their findings by asking authors to categorise their own papers.)

Laughably, Richard Tol, in his befuddled brain apparently thinks that "only" twelve people completing the ratings is somehow or other something or other (archived here). Never mind that it's eleven more people than did the ratings in Naomi Oreske's study published in Science several years ago. And eleven more people than did James Powell's unpublished works, the most recent of which came up with only one out of 2,258 recent articles, written by a total of 9,136 authors, which rejects the human influence of global warming.

Richard Tol's cause clause

What's even sillier (if possible) and shows just how far into conspiracy thinking Richard has gone, is the second part of the sentence where he wrote:

There were only 12 raters (24 at first, but half dropped out), picked for their believe (sic) in the cause. 

Seriously? He thinks that the ratings were skewed by a belief in "the cause"! What "cause" that would be Richard doesn't say. Remember, he is already on record, as writing that he accepts the scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming. Not only that, but the Cook13 study showed that the researchers were slightly more conservative than were the scientists who rated their own papers!

From the WUWT comments - how Anthony's bombshell goes pear-shaped

This one is classic. Anthony was in such a rush to print his bombshell (devoid of any bomb) that he spelt Brandon Shollenberger's name three different ways: Brandon Schollenberger, Schollenberg and only writing it correctly in his pastes from Richard Tol as Brandon Shollenberger. At least Brandon now knows how he's regarded (or not regarded) by Anthony. Brandon Shollenberger says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:42 am
My last name was spelled three different ways in this post. I don’t think that’s enough. We should see how many different ways we can spell it.

REPLY: Apologies, fixed. – Anthony

Many people were more interested in colloquial expressions than they were in the boring topic of scientific consensus. Latimer Alder was first cab off the rank and says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:13 am
A rather more lively Brit expression is ‘tits up’. Means the same

Pamela Gray says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:34 am
That would be of USA, not British origin. It is either a vulgar version of “belly up” (most likely), known in the US and first captured in print in 1920, or a reference to WW2 (unlikely) aeroplanes and one of their dials, which when broken, turns upside down. The upside down lettering looks like breasts, and usually means enough damage to the cockpit that you had better bail if you still can.

 And then decides that breasts is a dirty word at WUWT, and corrects it to:

Oops. I should have said tits instead of br***ts.

There were several more comments about colloquialisms, such as from The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley who says:

May 10, 2014 at 10:17 am
I don’t mean to start a pond war, but why do so many Americans think everything was started there? It reminds me of a conversation I heard a few years back. An American woman was talking to an English woman, and remarked on the Peter Rabbit books. “Do you have Beatrix Potter in England?” asked the American lady. The English woman just groaned.

One of the few comments that started off on topic, quickly went off topic and diverted to cricket or soccer or whatever the world cup is for at the moment. Auto says:

May 10, 2014 at 10:50 am
I would agree with Dr. Tol, and our host, that – as many here suspected – John Cook’s number resemble a crock of r*t s**t [no, not suet].
I continue to be disappointed in the media – the BBC today is pushing
“Scorching El Nino event could scupper England’s World Cup ”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27343057

Absolutely nothing about England not having enough players who are good enough, unhappily – it might be a degree or three warmer when we play our matches than the long-term average.
I guess that means weather . . . . .

Auto

In fact, out of all the comments there were only a few that had anything to do with the 97% consensus.  Yep, I've even just refreshed the page and updated the archive. So far, after around four hours of prime time, there are only 38 comments. Of those:

• 58% (22 out of 38 comments) were about pear-shaped or tits up or similar
• 8% (3 comments) were about the spelling of Brandon's name
• 24% (6 comments) were random off topic comments protesting climate science in general or other meaningless waffle of an unrelated nature
• 18% (7 comments) were vaguely related to the consensus discussion

Here are six of the seven comments that were more or less on the consensus topic, some at a stretch. The other one, which devoted more words to sport than science, is already listed above. Very deep and incisive commentary as you can see :)

Matthew R Marler says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:39 am
My applause and thanks to Brandon Schollenberger. This should be interesting.

Jimmy Haigh says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:49 am
More proof – were it even needed – that, basically, Warm-mongers are pretty thick.

michael hart says, quoting Richard's meaningless comment:

May 10, 2014 at 10:51 am
Theirs was not a survey of the literature. Rather, it was a survey of the raters.

And they found that they agreed with themselves. It doesn’t usually require a survey.

Mike Maguire talks about the "known law of photosynthesis" and says:

May 10, 2014 at 11:01 am
In a world that gives Al Gore a Nobel Peace Prize and an Emmy for his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and brainwashes the known law of photosynthesis out of people, while brainwashing in a theory on paper that has busted in the real world for 15 years……………..the 97% consensus of climate scientists paper fits right in.

John Whitman advocates forgetting ethics and petty things like the law of the land, and going for broke, and says:

May 10, 2014 at 11:13 am
{all bold emphasis mine – JW}
Shollenberger writes in comments at his blog:,
His [Cook's] response will determine how much information I provide. No obligations were placed upon me regarding any of the material I have, but I don’t see any compelling reason to provide information about how I got it either. I’d need a better reason than just satisfying people’s curiosity
- – - – - – - -
Brandon Shollenberger,
That turn of phrasing implies fairly reasonably that you got from a person(s) the “part of the missing data [from Cook’s consensus paper]“. It implies you didn’t just find the data.
After you duly consider any potential harm to the raters by making their names and IDs public, I do think it would be valuable in assessing bias if the names and IDs of the raters in the data you have were made public.
John

John F. Hultquist starts off with 97% and then launches into some unintelligible ramble about US history and says:

May 10, 2014 at 11:18 am
The 97% story just keeps going on and on and ….
… and speaking of rabbits, Ghost @ 10:17 asks why so many Americans think everything started there.
Many groups of people that become organized (a tribe?) and name themselves use a word or phrase that translates as “the people” and their beginning or origin story starts the history or timeline of what they know. For example, when Gouverneur Morris wrote the words “We the People … do ordain … the United States of America” – history began. It is that simple.

Anthony's big boast that a denier hacker stole private property from SkepticalScience went down like a lead balloon.  His bombshell went pear-shaped!