Published climate science denial ignored by Christopher Monckton @wattsupwiththat

Christopher Monckton has issued a call to defund all the weather bureaux. He wants us all to stop monitoring weather and climate. The headline of his latest article on Anthony Watts climate conspiracy blog (archived here, latest here) is: "Time to defund the weather-forecasting rent-seekers".

What upset Christopher this time was a climate statement issued by the Royal Meteorological Society and endorsed by 33 organisations around the world. He doesn't like to be reminded that global warming is real and happening. Christopher's answer to his cognitive dissonance is to stop funding weather agencies. He'd rather not know if the sun will shine or the rain will pour tomorrow, than have to read that global warming is real and dangerous and caused by us.

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.

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.)

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...)

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!

Confirmed: 97% consensus that in utter nutter week there are a few roos loose in the top paddock at WUWT

The descent into utter nuttery continues at WUWT.

Anthony has probably spent a heap of time copying an image of The Consensus Project, trying to argue that an opinion survey of members of the American Meteorological Society can be equated with a survey of scientific literature by Cook et al.  And this after goodness knows how many WUWT protests that "opinions don't count".  (Anthony's probably been working on this article for a while because the paper came out a little while back.)

Anthony Watts hasn't even read the abstract of the Cook13 97% consensus paper

What is really weird is that Anthony Watts hasn't even read Cook13, the paper that he's made umpteen protests about.  How do I know that? Simple.  This is what Anthony has written - at least four times.  And he's wrong each of those times:

You see, it turns out that Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers, rather than letting all authors of the papers rate their own work

And again:

Most people who read the headlines touted by the unquestioning press had no idea that this was a collection of Skeptical Science raters opinions rather than the authors assessment of their own work. Readers of news stories had no idea they’d been lied to by John Cook et al².

And again:

...The result was that the “97% consensus” was a survey of the SkS raters beliefs and interpretations, rather than a survey of the authors opinions of their own science abstracts.

And again:

Had Cook actually done an honest survey, we’d have the opinions of the authors about their papers, not the opinions of the SkS pal review squad in place of those opinions.

Anthony Watts has always had a tendency to leap first look later. In the case of Cook13, Anthony has leapt about twenty times or more and looked not once.  It looks as if he "read the headlines" and not the paper.

Although he has no excuse for not reading the paper itself because it's open access, Anthony wouldn't even have had to read the whole paper to know that he was wrong.  He could have just read the abstract - from Cook13:

. ..In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. 

If Anthony Watts had bothered to glance at the full paper he would have seen (my bold italics):

To complement the abstract analysis, email addresses for 8547 authors were collected, typically from the corresponding author and/or first author. For each year, email addresses were obtained for at least 60% of papers. Authors were emailed an invitation to participate in a survey in which they rated their own published papers (the entire content of the article, not just the abstract) with the same criteria as used by the independent rating team. Details of the survey text are provided in the supplementary information

In Anthony's eagerness to embrace the opinions of meteorologists, particularly those who've never studied climate or done any research on climate, he shows once again that he is:

• is a  stubby short of a six pack
• has a few roos loose in the top paddock
• is thick as a brick...

You get the idea.

Acceptance of AGW increases with increased knowledge

Anthony is delighted that he's found a paper showing that there are quite a few meteorologists who don't do any scientific research and who don't think that humans are affecting the climate to any great extent.  (AFAIK in the USA, even a television weather announcer can call themselves a "meteorologist", and they are likely to have had some post-secondary education in the science of weather at some stage.  AMS members these days would probably mostly have at least a bachelor degree in science.  Maybe a reader from the USA can shed some light on the situation.)

Most of the AMS members who have done research say they know that climate change is real and that humans are causing it.   But that latter finding just supports Anthony's conspiracy theory.  He's a nutter of the 'climate science is a hoax' variety - and getting more entrenched as time goes by.  Anthony twists deeper knowledge of climate science into "fudging results" to suit some supposed funding body objective.  Why any government or funding body would want to fabricate such a problem is answered by the "new world order" conspiracy theory, which merges with the anti-semitic "evil banker" conspiracy theory and the "fiat money/someone stole all the gold in Fort Knox" conspiracy theory.

It's a tangled web of paranoid conspiracy theories in climate science denier land.

WUWT is "unreliable" - changing articles and censoring comments

As the thread grows, Anthony gets increasingly stroppy with anyone who points out where he went wrong.  Funny thing is that when people do point out in the comments that the opinions of scientists on their own work was obtained, Anthony backtracks and edits his original article changing this (archived here):

You see, it turns out that Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers, rather than letting the authors of the papers rate their own work. The result was that the “97% consensus” was a survey of the SkS raters’ beliefs and interpretations, rather than a survey of the authors opinions of their own science abstracts.

To this where he added the bolded italics sentence (archived here):

You see, it turns out that Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers, rather than letting all authors of the papers rate their own work (Note: many authors weren’t even contacted and their papers wrongly rated, see here). The result was that the “97% consensus” was a survey of the SkS raters beliefs and interpretations, rather than a survey of the authors opinions of their own science abstracts. 

Aha - so he's now tentatively admitting that authors were contacted - but he's not properly correcting his article or comments.

From the WUWT comments

It didn't take long before someone brought up another "opinion poll" - the fraudulent "petition" known as the Oregon Petition. .  dbstealey says:

November 20, 2013 at 11:11 am
As I’ve often said, you couldn’t get 97% of Italians to agree the Pope is Catholic.
Anyone who believes that 97% of scientists think human activity is the cause of global warming appears to be ignorant of the OISM Petition, in which more than 30,000 American scientists co-signed a statement saying that more CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere.
There is nothing comparable from the climate alarmist crowd, whose numbers are much smaller than generally assumed.

itooktheredpill is a fake sceptic who didn't bother reading Cook13 either, not even the abstract, and says, quoting Anthony Watt's fib:

November 20, 2013 at 11:14 am

You see, it turns out that Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers, rather than letting the authors of the papers rate their own work. The result was that the “97% consensus” was a survey of the SkS raters’ beliefs and interpretations, rather than a survey of the authors opinions of their own science abstracts.

Those who can’t handle the truth,
try to silence those who speak it.
Cook effectively silenced the authors’ beliefs by replacing them with his SkS raters’ beliefs.
Cook can’t handle the truth.

Anthony wouldn't brook any facts in the comments.  He got very irate when Dumb Scientist asked some pertinent questions.  Dumb Scientist says:

November 20, 2013 at 11:28 am

Anthony Watts: The 97% consensus myth – busted by a real survey … We’ve all been subjected to the incessant “97% of scientists agree …global warming…blah blah” meme, which is nothing more than another statistical fabrication by John Cook and his collection of “anything for the cause” zealots … Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers … a lie of omission … they’d been lied to by John Cook et al². … we’ll be fighting this lie for years … blown Cook’s propaganda paper right out of the water.

==================================
Isn’t a survey of opinions different from a survey of scientific abstracts? If so, how can an opinion survey show that a survey of scientific abstracts is a “lie”?

Note that 78% of meteorologists who publish mostly on climate agree that the warming is mostly human-caused. Only 5% of all meteorologists claim that the warming is mostly natural, and only 4% claim that the warming isn’t happening.

If we can agree about these facts, that’s great news!

True to form Anthony demonstrates bullying and cowardice. First off, Anthony doesn't give any real sceptic the courtesy of using his screen name. He figures 'naming and shaming' people will intimidate them and scare them away. (After all, what self-respecting person would admit to visiting a site like WUWT!).  It's not as if he's a dinky di fake sceptic like itooktheredpill above.

REPLY: Bryan, This response suggests you are simply concern trolling. Had Cook actually done an honest survey, we’d have the opinions of the authors about their papers, not the opinions of the SkS pal review squad in place of those opinions.
For more shenanigans related to SkS, you might look up the sort of pea and thimble switcheroos (they didn’t survey skeptical blogs) and statistical techninques (populations of N=0 are allowed, add your own interpretation) employed by the gang that couldn’t shoot straight when it came to their published opinions on skeptics and their supposed belief in “faking the moon landing”. What you have here with SkS is an organized propaganda team. They aren’t interested in science.
– Anthony

Concern trolling?  The questions and statements were matter of fact, on point and courteously expressed.  Anthony must really be feeling under the hammer, mustn't he.

Anthony couldn't cope with much more from normal people.  Heck.  That's not what WUWT is all about.  WUWT is for people who don't read abstracts.  People who don't check up on Anthony's fibs.  People who embrace wacky conspiracy theories and all the utter nutter fake sceptics.  There is no room for reason, fact-checking or science on WUWT.

Since bullying didn't work, Anthony takes the coward's way out. Anthony got out his censorship keyboard and went haywire any time he saw a comment that pointed out where he got it wrong.  For example. when Dumb Scientist suggested that WUWT do its own survey, Anthony "snipped" it.  At least he left the follow up comment though not without another whine:


Dumb Scientist says:

November 20, 2013 at 12:55 pm
[snip - not interested in your characterization of me - Anthony]
==========================================
Just a few days ago, dbstealey and Ferdinand Engelbeen drew my attention to the WUWT sidebar which criticizes SkS for deleting user comments and noted that this means SkS is “dishonest”.

So it’s disappointing that my comment was snipped, but even more disappointing that Anthony claims it was because of a “characterization” after he accused John Cook and other SkS authors of dishonesty.

I still think it’s possible that Anthony has the integrity to not snip this comment, so I’ll repeat my challenge that got snipped earlier: “I’d be very interested to see WUWT read through 10,000 scientific abstracts and rate them. You could show the world how to do a proper survey… right?”

REPLY: Oh please. Bryan for the record, I don’t give a rats ass about what you think about comment policy (see here). You put words in my mouth in the last comment, I snipped it because of that. Get over yourself. Why don’t you get your peers at JPL to do it, if it is so important to you? After all, you’ve got millions of dollars of government money at your disposal there and we have next to nothing.

The whole consensus chasing is a waste of time in my opinion, Mother Nature will be the final arbiter of the AGW issue- Anthony

For a "waste of time" Anthony has sure spent a lot of time and written an awful lot of articles in protest :)  And he complains he can't be bothered surveying the literature because he wouldn't get paid for it!  I guess the Heartland Institute don't see it in their best interest to have Cook13 confirmed yet again.  John Cook and his team looked at more than 10,000 abstracts in their own time without being paid a penny.  But Anthony Watts isn't interested in doing it because, as he knows, he'd end up with the same result as Cook13.

There are a number of people who've noticed that although the uninformed (non-research) meteorologists are less likely to attribute climate change to mostly human activities, only 5% have said that "it's natural".


I'm on the road so won't write any more on this right now, but I see there is lots more fun to be had with articles put up at WUWT in the past few hours.  So I'll be back soon.

Meanwhile, you can read the various WUWT archives on this zany article here in order:  First, second, third, fourth.  The comments are a mix of the rational through to the utter nutters.  Anthony Watts is leaning towards the utter nutter end of the spectrum but there are quite a few who surpass him.

---

Neil Stenhouse et al (2013), Meteorologists' views about global warming: A survey of American Meteorological Society professional members, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 2013 ; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00091.1

Fruit cake anyone? Or has Anthony Watts finally cracked completely?

The Tol attack against science

I knew someone once who got angry when he was lying.  I remember thinking, that's a tell tale sign he wasn't telling the truth because he didn't get angry very often.  It was strange to me.

That's by way of introduction to Anthony Watts' latest rant against Cook et al.  How many protests now? Anthony Watts has already been caught out in a whopper of a lie about that study.  Now he's found an ally in another strange character, Dr Richard Tol of the University of Sussex and on the advisory board of the anti-science lobby group the GWPF.  Richard somehow managed to be appointed as a lead author of a chapter in one of the IPCC volumes.  Thankfully not all on his own or who knows what would end up in the report.  He's been on a mission of protest at Cook et al from the outset.  Apparently he tried to write a rebuttal but it was so bad that it didn't ever get accepted for publication.  So now he's trying another tack.  The blog attack.

I don't understand what either of them are on about and I've yet to come across anyone who understands it.  But this pair really don't like the fact that scientists know that global warming is real and caused by human activity.  And they really don't like it that, just like all previous similar studies to date, Cook et al have confirmed that 97% of scientific papers on global warming that attribute a cause, attribute it to human activity.

What is so contentious about that?  It's quite bewildering to you and I.  All you have to do is google "global warming" in Google scholar and you'd know that, if you didn't already know what's causing global warming.  The greenhouse effect has been understood for more than a century. But these people get so upset by this that they make stuff up.  And if 97% didn't agree then surely we'd have heard something from the thousands of scientists by now.

And Richard and Anthony's lies are so easy to check.  I mean they are talking about John Cook "not releasing data".  All you have to do is go to the journal and you'll find all the data anyone needs sitting right there - where it's been sitting since the paper was first published.

Weird, huh?  If they really believed what they are trying to get other people to believe they'd do their own study, or if they were lazy they'd check the papers reviewed by Cook et al.  But no - they are off on some strange tangent about "data" when all the data they need has been sitting right in front of them all along for all the world to see.

There sure are some nutty people in the world  Nutty as a fruit cake!

He even said the study must be wrong because the researchers must have got a bit tired!  (I kid you not!) It looks to me as if Richard is equating a large review of scientific abstracts with a market research poll.  He goes on about "rater fatigue" and "long surveys" and "few researchers".  There were 24 people of whom 12 looked at most of the papers according to the study.  That's a lot of people.  Other similar studies were done by only one, two or three people.  And the study would have taken place over a period of time.  It's not as if they sat in a room answering questions of an interviewer over a day or two.

For example, in the comments people go along with Richard and think that the study was a questionniare with 4,000 questions.  I mean deniers are weird at the best of times, but this takes the (fruit) cake. Duster says:

August 28, 2013 at 3:28 pm
Matt Bergin says: August 28, 2013 at 11:41 am I am surprised anyone would complete a survey consisting of 4000 questions. I suspect most people would be checking random boxes well before the 2000th question mark

That type of “survey” can be considered as 1) slave labor (e.g. students drafted for the duration), 2) beer and booze labor (colleagues lured to help with a promise of beer, whiskey, pizza, etc.), or 3) conviction labor (laborers passionately convinced of their cause). The latter reminds me of R.A.Wilson’s dictum – “convictions make convicts.” From the drop-out rate I suspect the labor pool was drawn from groups two and three. Since members of three are likely to hang in there simply through shear bloody mindedness, that could explain the “drift” as well.

Yeah, Matt and Duster, I'd be surprised too.  But nobody did.  So no need for surprise.

There are some seriously weird people out there in science denier land.

Denier Weirdness: Don't count climate science papers to "prove" there's no consensus!

An economist, Richard Tol, is feeling a bit left out and lonesome.  So he has started hobnobbing with science deniers like Anthony Watts of  WUWT (and even the idiot poptech), courting them for attention.  He's protesting the 97% scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming.  Let's see what he has to say - we'll start with Anthony Watts version of Tol on WUWT.

The basic argument seems to be that Cook13 shouldn't have counted the papers that are about climate science - you know, scientific papers on the impacts of global warming, or applied science papers on mitigation.  If you thought Richard Tol had odd ideas, here's the proof. (We already know Anthony Watts has odd ideas.)

Arithmetic fail

Let's start with some basic arithmetic.  For an economist, Richard Tol is not very good at arithmetic.  He gets the following wrong saying he's using data from Cook13.  Either he's not using that data or he can't do arithmetic - he calculates 98% somehow, when the answer is 97.1%:

3896/(3896+78+40) = 98%  

No, Richard, it equals 97.1% just like the paper says.

Anthony is not very good at peer/pal/blog review or he would have picked that up.

Neutral vs No Position

Richard keeps talking about a "neutral" category.  There is no such category in Cook13.  Now I'm not sure if English is Richard's first language, so I'll hold back on questioning his ability to understand the difference between "neutral" and "no position".  It's an important difference.

• "Neutral" could indicate a half-way point between two extremes. Global warming being caused by humans and global warming being caused by other means.  
• "No position" means just that.  The authors will be likely to know full well that global warming is caused by humans, but the particular abstract in question does not allude to the cause.  That is a different meaning to "neutral".

Making up his own rules - toss out the bulk of climate science research, says Richard

Anthony quotes Richard Tol saying 35% of abstracts were 'misclassified'.  He didn't say why, so I went to Richard's article (yes, he went ahead and tried to justify his tweets!) and found this:

The majority of the selected papers are not on climate change itself, but rather on its impacts or on climate policy. The causes for climate change are irrelevant for its impact. Therefore, impact papers should be rated as neutral.

The causes of climate change are irrelevant to the impact of climate change so should be rated as neutral?  What? Why?

Impacts are defined in Cook13 as: Effects and impacts of climate change on the environment, ecosystems or humanity.  Impacts papers constitute the biggest single component of climate science research, comprising 48.4% of the abstracts examined in Cook13.  It would be nonsense to rate them all "neutral" (which isn't a category anyway) or "no position" - when the cause of global warming may be a fundamental aspect of the research.

I looked up one such abstract.  It was rated by Cook13 as "Explicit endorsement without quantification - Explicitly states humans are causing global warming or refers to anthropogenic global warming/climate change as a known fact"

Here is the abstract (excerpt from a longer abstract, my bold):

A complex earth system model, simulating atmosphere and ocean dynamics, marine biogeochemistry, terrestrial vegetation and ice sheets, was used to study feedbacks between the terrestrial biosphere and climate with a set of long-term climate change ensemble experiments. CO2 emissions were assigned according to historical data and the IPCC SRES scenarios B1, A1B and A2, followed by an exponential decay of the emissions for the period 2100–3000. The experiments give a reasonable reconstruction of the measured CO2 concentrations between 1750 and 2000. Maximum atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 520 ppm (B1), 860 ppm (A1B) and 1680 ppm (A2) were reached between 2200 and 2500. Additional experiments were performed with CO2 emissions and suppressed climate change, as well as an experiment with a prescribed land surface. The experiments were repeated with the vegetation model driven offline, to investigate the effects of climate and CO2 changes separately. The biogeochemical and biogeophysical interactions between terrestrial biosphere and atmosphere were quantified and compared.

Clearly the cause of global warming is critical if one is to estimate its progression.  The major forcing is CO2, therefore emissions of CO2 will determine the impact. The above paper refers to the different impacts of global warming, depending on the scenario.  Richard Tol is very wrong in his 'rule' to rate "impact" papers as "neutral".  He's not a scientist, that's quite clear.

While we're at it, toss out most of the rest of the research, says Richard

Richard then says to chop out even more papers, based on another of Richard's own made up "rules":

However, a paper discussing, say, carbon capture and storage cannot be taken as evidence for global warming. These papers should therefore also be rated as neutral.

Why? On what grounds?  Mitigation papers constitute the next largest category, or 28.3% of the abstracts in the Cook13 sample.  I found papers on carbon capture and storage that had different ratings - some were rated as endorsing AGW and others as taking no position.

This one was rated as implicitly endorsing AGW based on this abstract (excerpt only and my bold):

Coal-fired power plants account for nearly 50% of U.S. electricity supply and about a third of U.S. emissions of CO2, the major greenhouse gas (GHG) associated with global climate change. Thermal power plants also account for 39% of all freshwater withdrawals in the U.S. To reduce GHG emissions from coal-fired plants, postcombustion carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems are receiving considerable attention.

This one as taking no position on AGW:

The evaluation of life cycle greenhouse gas emissions from power generation with carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a critical factor in energy and policy analysis. The current paper examines life cycle emissions from three types of fossil-fuel-based power plants, namely supercritical pulverized coal (super-PC), natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) and integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC), with and without CCS. Results show that, for a 90% CO2 capture efficiency, life cycle GHG emissions are reduced by 75–84% depending on what technology is used. With GHG emissions less than 170 g/kWh, IGCC technology is found to be favorable to NGCC with CCS. Sensitivity analysis reveals that, for coal power plants, varying the CO2 capture efficiency and the coal transport distance has a more pronounced effect on life cycle GHG emissions than changing the length of CO2 transport pipeline. Finally, it is concluded from the current study that while the global warming potential is reduced when MEA-based CO2 capture is employed, the increase in other air pollutants such as NOx and NH3 leads to higher eutrophication and acidification potentials.

(If I were rating the above I'd probably rate it as "implicit" rather than "no position" based on the last sentence in particular.  That suggests that marginal decisions probably balance out in the long run, or that the reviewers if they erred, tended to err on the conservative side when it came to categorising the abstracts.)

Who's the denier, Richard?

Now if Richard took out all the "impacts" papers and all the "mitigation" papers, he'd be tossing out the bulk of climate research - in fact he'd toss out 77% of the literature.  He'd be left with just the following:

• Methods - Focus on measurements and modeling methods, or basic climate science not included in the other categories
• Paleoclimate - Examining climate during pre-industrial times

Richard Tol needs to rethink his "analysis".  He does sound like a typical denier, doesn't he.  Toss out all the papers on climate science and you'll surely be able to prove there's "no consensus".

Count the papers on climate science and there's a 97% consensus that humans are the cause of global warming.

Postscript

In the comments on WUWT the fake skeptics are very relieved that Anthony has told them they don't have to take any notice of yet another study.  They say they would have sat up and taken notice if 97% of science really and truly found that humans are causing global warming.  "What a relief", they say.  "Thank goodness for Anthony."  It means they can sit back and continue to deny reality.  It makes little difference that Tol himself has not disputed the 97% number.  They don't even seem aware of that fact.

One of the fake skeptics wants to give more weight to attribution studies and not count or give lesser weighting to research on impacts.  None of them seem aware that removing thousands of studies from the 'count' as Richard suggests, may not make any difference to the 97% number.

I have to wonder how many more thousands of studies deniers need before they accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and adding more of it to the air warms the planet?  How does their denial of human-induced global warming stack up against their certainty that H pylori exists?  Deniers often quote that discovery as 'proof' there will one day be a paper that the greenhouse effect doesn't happen.  How many papers did they need for "proof" of H pylori?  What about the helical structure of DNA?  Are they still waiting for the one paper that "proves" DNA doesn't exist?  Or maybe they are still waiting for the one paper that "proves" the earth is flat.

Tol says he's been told how the 97% is calculated, but no-one takes any notice.  They prefer his wrong version.  In any case, he doesn't explain it well, talking about 'reported data' and 'original data' implying there was some sort of dodgy activity instead of just admitting he got it wrong.  He is not coming out of this smelling of roses.  That doesn't matter to deniers and dismissives.  They lost their senses a long time ago, if they ever had any.


For more enlightenment on the different shades of denier weirdness plus a discussion of Cook13 by people closer to the research than I am, visit Eli's blog.

Anthony Watts is in Serious Trouble with a Whopper of a Lie of 'Epic Proportions'

Update: I've added a few tidbits at the end.


Anthony Watts of WUWT is in serious trouble now.  He can't get away from it.  John Cook and the good people at SkepticalScience.com have got him on the back foot.  He's squealing and squirming and has resorted to telling lies.

As if the Cook et al study wasn't enough all by itself.   But what really got Anthony going was the tweet from President Obama, telling his 31,567,991 followers and the whole world all about it:

Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous. Read more: OFA.BO/gJsdFp
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 16, 2013

Anthony is green with envy.  He spent ages trying to figure out whether the President used his own fingers and thumbs (and personal Blackberry) to type the tweet.  Check this out - part 3 is the last of a series. Nuts is right (pun fortuitous):

@wattsupwiththat dude, you have seriously lost it.
— nuts (@sherieapple) May 17, 2013

Anthony's Lie of 'Epic Proportions'

Now here is Anthony's lie of 'epic proportions' (my bold):

...When you take a result of 32.6% of all papers that accept AGW, ignoring the 66% that don’t, and twist that into 97%, excluding any mention of that original value in your media reports, there’s nothing else to call it – a lie of presidential proportions.

Anthony wrote that 66% of scientific papers don't accept AGW.  That's a Whopper of a Lie!  

Now just in case you think Anthony was just being sloppy in his writing, well no. He's repeated his big fat lie of 'epic proportions' here at the end of a comment by a reader:

This study done by John Cook and his “team” found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it.

The fact is that 97% of scientific papers that take a position on the cause of warming attribute the cause to humans.

Cook et al (2013) classified 11,944 papers.  Of those, 4,014 expressed a position on global warming.  3,896 of these or 97.1% attributed the cause to humans.

What Anthony has done is added the 78 papers that dispute this fact to the 40 that aren't certain to the 7,930 that took no position on current anthropogenic climate change.

That's right! Anthony added a whopping 7,970 to the mere 78 papers that dispute global warming - to try to fool his readers.

The papers that took no position included papers about past climate (where today's warming is not relevant), papers on mitigation and lots of other subjects relating to climate change.  They did not dispute that humans are causing global warming.

The fact that Anthony has to lie is a big tell.  He is on the back foot.  He doesn't know what to do, so he resorts to telling big fat lies.

Try it out - classify science papers

You can classify the abstracts that were the subject of Cook et al at SkepticalScience.  You'll even get to compare your ratings with those of the study itself.

Spread the word, visit The Consensus Project.

A few tidbits:

First a real howler from Anthony Watts himself, who says:

May 17, 2013 at 11:40 am:  ...I challenge any blog pro/con for AGW to match our track record for allowing adverse comments and comment volume.

Don't know about volume, but then quality outranks quantity every time.  Anyway, here's a couple or more: Deltoid, RealClimate - with the real bad ones here, and then there's WatchingtheDeniers.


And another one from Anthony.  To explain the context, Anthony has a headline that denies the fact, it reads: The 97% consensus – a lie of epic proportions.  Anthony's whole post is predicated on a lie yet he gets all upset that Washington post didn't correct their too obviously wrong story?

pt (@pt460) says:
May 17, 2013 at 11:35 am  Ummm, that 31 million followers figure is what @BarackObama has and I think someone misread how that figure was used. It was supposed to be something like, 31million is good exposure, meaning BO brought the info to that many people.

REPLY: No doubt, but what does it say about professional journalism when the WaPo reporter can’t get that basic fact right and makes story headlining that? Worse, I’ve made them aware of it and it still isn’t corrected. -Anthony

Well, Anthony, a number of your readers have corrected your lie.  Not only have you failed to correct it, you've repeated it.

Enough of the mendacious Watts. (One of Tony's favourite words is mendacious).  I got a kick out of this one - denier humour from Kaboom, who says:

May 17, 2013 at 10:44 am  If that number was true, 97% of scientists have not done their homework and need to be sent to bed without dinner.

And we'll finish up with a half-baked conspiracy thought from Jolan, who says:

May 17, 2013 at 10:23 am  Is Obama really that thick, or does he have an ulterior motive?