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

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!

Besieged deniers Anthony Watts and Barry Woods engage in wishful thinking @wattsupwiththat ...

Science deniers are the same as everyone else in the world in regard to confirmation bias.  Well, maybe they have it worse than most of us when it comes to climate science.  Still, everyone suffers confirmation bias to some degree.

Today Anthony Watts and his correspondent, Barry Woods, have caught a bad case of it (archived here).  Most of Anthony's WUWT readers haven't.  Anthony and Barry think that Mike Hulme is disputing the fact that 97% plus of scientists who do research relating in any way to climate agree that humans are causing global warming.  But Mike Hulme is not disputing that at all.

---

**Update**

Barry Woods has stated in the comments that what he meant was "Mike Hulme doesn't appear to like Cook et al's paper".

I doubt I'll ever know what Anthony Watts thinks Barry Woods meant.  Obviously most of the WUWT-ers read it the same way as I did (see WUWT comments below).

It's interesting that Barry jumped in so quickly and went to a lot of effort to explain himself here at HotWhopper, but he didn't bother correcting the same interpretation as me, which everyone at WUWT made.   I wonder why that would be...

---

Anthony Watts picked out three paragraphs written by Mike Hulme and published them out of order, in contravention of the agreement with The Conversation.  (The Conversation gives permission to republish with provisos, including: Unless you have express permission from the author, you can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. To make material edits contact us.)

I'll publish the full article below, then make some observations.

---

Science can't settle what should be done about climate change

By Mike Hulme, King's College London

The sight of speakers known to dispute the scientific evidence supporting climate change being called to speak at a parliamentary select committee on the latest IPCC report last week has raised certain commentators' blood pressure.

Some have gone so far as to claim that the climate change debate in Britain has become “as depressingly unscientific and polarised as it is in the United States”.

I disagree. The debate about climate change needs to become more political, and less scientific. Articulating radically different policy options in response to the risks posed by climate change is a good way of reinvigorating democratic politics.

The now infamous paper by John Cook and colleagues published in May 2013 claimed that of the 4,000 peer-reviewed papers they surveyed expressing a position on anthropogenic global warming, “97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming”. But merely enumerating the strength of consensus around the fact that humans cause climate change is largely irrelevant to the more important business of deciding what to do about it. By putting climate science in the dock, politicians are missing the point.

What matters is not whether the climate is changing (it is); nor whether human actions are to blame (they are, at the very least partly and, quite likely, largely); nor whether future climate change brings additional risks to human or non-human interests (it does). As climate scientist Professor Myles Allen said in evidence to the committee, even the projections of the IPCC’s more prominent critics overlap with the bottom end of the range of climate changes predicted in the IPCC’s published reports.

In the end, the only question that matters is, what are we going to do about it? Scientific consensus is not much help here. Even if one takes the Cook study at face value, then how does a scientific consensus of 97.1% about a fact make policy-making any easier? As Roger Pielke Jr has often remarked in the context of US climate politics, it’s not for a lack of public consensus on the reality of human-caused climate change that climate policy implementation is difficult in the US.

So politics, not science, must take centre stage. As Amanda Machin shows in her recent book, asking climate scientists to forge a consensus around facts with the expectation that decisive political action will naturally follow misunderstands science and politics in equal measure. If democratic politics is to be effective we need more disagreement, not more consensus, about what climate change is really about.
As I have argued elsewhere, the most important questions to be asked about climate change extend well beyond science. Let me suggest four; all of which are more important than the committee’s MPs managed. They are questions which people should and do disagree about and they have no correct answer waiting to be discovered by science.

• How do we value the future, or in economic terms, at what rate should we discount the future? Many of the arguments about urgent versus delayed interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions revolve around how much less we value future public goods and natural assets relative to their value today. This is a question that clear-thinking people will disagree about.
• In the governance of climate change what role do we allocate to markets? Many arguments about climate change, as about environmental management more generally, revolve around whether commodifying nature, by pricing environmental “goods” and “services”, is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
• How do we wish new technologies to be governed, from experimentation and development to deployment? This question might revolve around new or improved low-carbon energy technologies (such as fracking, nuclear power, or hydrogen fuel), the use of genetically modified crops as a means to adapt to changing climate, or proposed climate engineering technologies. Again, these are not questions upon which science, least of all a scientific consensus, can adjudicate.
• What is the role of national governments as opposed to those played by multilateral treaties or international governing bodies? This requires citizens to reflect on forms of democracy and representation. They are no less important in relation to climate change than they are in relation to state security, immigration or financial regulation.

Any considered response to climate change will need to take a position, implicitly or explicitly, on one or more of these four questions, and others besides. And the percentage of climate science papers that accept humans are causing global warming has little to no bearing on public deliberations about these four questions.

Because the questions about climate change that really matter will not be settled by scientific facts. They entail debates about values and about the forms of political organisation and representation that people believe are desirable. This requires a more vigorous politics that cannot be short-circuited by appeals to science.

Mike Hulme does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

---

From his bio at The Conversation: Mike Hulme is professor of climate and culture in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. His work explores the idea of climate change using historical, cultural and scientific analyses, seeking to illuminate the numerous ways in which climate change is deployed in public and political discourse....From 2000 to 2007 he was the Founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, based at the University of East Anglia, and since 2007 has been the founding Editor-in-Chief of the review journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Climate Change.

Politicians and the public should be debating policy not the science

I agree with Mike Hulme that it's way past time politicians and the public accepted the science and moved on to discuss policy.  I don't agree with him if he was suggesting that there was any value whatsoever in UK politicians giving a platform to fake sceptics like Donna Laframboise and Richard Lindzen.

Most politicians of any standing do accept climate science.  Some might be reluctant in this regard, but it's getting harder and harder to deny it.  In the USA the Republican Party as a whole seems to punish members who do accept the science but this will change.  Looking around the world, though, governments (as opposed to individual politicians) have accepted the science for more than two decades now.  Governments have made some progress in doing something about global warming - just not nearly enough progress.  Some time over the next couple of decades no-one (except the bedraggled mob at places like WUWT) will have a choice about whether or not to accept the science.  The climate will be doing it's thing.  It's happening already with hotter heatwaves and flashier floods.  More and more people are noticing.

Barry Woods and Anthony Watts engage in wishful thinking

Anthony Watts and Barry Woods are engaging in wishful thinking.  They grabbed onto one word written by Mike Hulme: "infamous".  Mike used that word to describe the 97% consensus paper by John Cook et al, published last year.  Anthony Watts and Barry Woods decided that Mike Hulme thinks there is not an overwhelming consensus among scientists that humans are causing global warming.  That's despite the fact that Mike Hulme clearly wrote that humans are causing global warming - and Anthony even published that particular paragraph.  Anthony quoted from an email he got from Barry Woods:

Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but if Mike Hulme thinks Cook 97% is nonsense AND pointless, this will be noticed. 

Except that Mike Hulme doesn't think that the 97% is nonsense.  What he's arguing is that it's time to move beyond the science of climate and explore some big questions relating to what we are going to do about climate change.  I'll paraphrase his questions as:

• What value do we place on the future?
• What role do we want markets to play in mitigating global warming or adapting to it?
• Do we want to regulate new technologies and if so how?
• What is the role of national governments vs multi-lateral agreements vs international governing bodies?

These aren't new questions.  Nor are they single answer questions.  In fact, the article by Mike Hulme is probably quite a good illustration of the point he is making.  Scientists are good at science but can't be expected to excel at policy.

My reaction to the Mike Hulme article is - um yes.  Oversimplifying the obvious.  I reckon the people who are involved in high level discussions about climate action and associated policy development, have delved much deeper into these and other related issues.

It's science deniers who want to avoid discussing policy, not the general public. By continuing to rage against the science, deniers reckon they can avoid or put off the inevitable - deciding what to do about climate change.  Thing is, getting to policy solutions might be moving too slowly but it has been moving along.  Without the input of science deniers.  They have decided to forego the opportunity to help shape policy.  But policy is taking shape without them.  It's their choice to not participate.

From the WUWT comments

Quite a number of people pointed out to Anthony that Mike Hulme accepts the 97% consensus and is saying we have to move beyond debating science and into debating and developing policy. (Archived here.)


John F. Hultquist says:

February 4, 2014 at 9:52 am
My take-away of M.H.’s remarks is that he thinks “prominent critics” of the IPCC agree with the climate change projections, climate change is bad, governments can alter the future, and should, so let’s get on with it. Business as usual in the CAGW camp.

kenw says:

February 4, 2014 at 9:58 am
This is most telling: “What matters is not whether the climate is changing (it is); nor whether human actions are to blame (they are, at the very least partly and, quite likely, largely); …”
His mind is made up and the politicians have to tell us what to do about it. If they tell us to do nothing, well, it’s all their fault and we shall all cook like the frog in the slow boil.
as with most, he incorrectly believes that Mankind is in control of the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’. If you have such a mindset, it is obviously a political solution since the underlying science is settled and all that remains is to decide what (yes, if anything) to do about it. It’s just more of a throwing up of the hands, fatalistic, we’re doomed point of view.

Ken Hall agrees Mike Hulme doesn't doubt the 97% consensus, then accuses him of being a "human hating zealot" - and says:

February 4, 2014 at 10:09 am
He is not putting doubt on the 97% figure, only the importance of it in furthering the alarmist’s aims. He is suggesting that it is so obviously self evidently true, that it must no longer be questioned, and even if questioned, policy should now urgently be taken upon the assumption of it being true. 

The telling quote for me is the following:

“By putting climate science in the dock, politicians are missing the point [.…] In the end, the only question that matters is, what are we going to do about it?”

So it matters not if it is true or not? The alarmist scientists are done with trying to prove it, we must accept it on nothing more than blind faith before the earth cools anymore and further falsifies their CAGW hypothesis, and get on with implementing the alarmist’s cure.

In other words, sod the science, start the de-industrialisation and the destruction of industrial economies now. Truly, the argument of a human hating zealot.

Jammy Dodger says:

February 4, 2014 at 10:13 am
Yes, you are reading too much into it. He does not say Cook’s 97% is nonsense. Or pointless. A bit of confirmation fantasy there.

DirkH says:

February 4, 2014 at 10:14 am
Hulme doesn’t criticize Cook’s “methodology”. He’s perfectly fine with it. He essentially just says, this propaganda approach is not relevant for The Cause right now; how can we enforce the policies we planned? And he has no answer, that’s the good thing. Another failed NATO strategy.

There are many more in that vein.  WUWT-ers aren't buying what Anthony Watts and Barry Woods are selling. Not this time.


There is of course the normal (for WUWT) science denying response. It's Just Weather says:

February 4, 2014 at 1:55 pm
Hulme seems to believe that human beings are the primary cause of climate change. And that the change is significant enough to cause “risk.” I hate to break it to him. 97% of all people do not agree with that.

The human species has proven to be amazingly adaptive and lives and thrives in a wide variety of climates already. Almost all human beings (97+%) are continuing on with their lives as if they believe they will be able to adapt to the climate change headed our way whatever it might be.

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.

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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

How an economist seeks fame and riches...

Update: Apparently Richard Tol can't even categorise the abstracts to his own papers correctly, so he has a bit of cheek jumping up and down trying to find fault with Cook13.

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This one is funny peculiar.  Anthony Watts of WUWT was so irate that yet another study showing the 97% consensus among scientists who work in the area that humans are causing global warming, that he told big fat lies about the study.

See here and here and here and here for previous studies that found there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on the human causes of global warming.

Now Anthony has reported that an economist, Richard Tol, who happens to agree that humans cause global warming and doesn't appear to dispute the 97% consensus, has had a comment on the Cook paper rejected.

How (not) to become rich and famous

Tol tweeted that he wanted to become "rich and famous" by courting deniers at WUWT (Curry-style) . Tol figured he'd write a formal comment to the journal  that published the Cook et al study, Environmental Research Letters.

Maybe they got tired  ....

One of Tol's 'arguments' against the Cook et al paper was his speculation that the researchers surely got tired assessing so many abstracts.  I'm not kidding.  This is from the rejection letter as published on WUWT:

The author offers much speculation (e.g. about raters perhaps getting tired) which has no place in the scientific literature

Tol didn't make any rational argument that the method was unsound (which might have warranted a comment) or that he had come up with a different number using the same or different method (which might have warranted a comment or maybe a paper).  No - he argued that the authors might have got a bit sleepy.

Oh my!  What can I say.  Perhaps he's projecting his experience onto others?  Might be a new argument against all the hockey sticks that keep popping up in the literature - all the climate scientists are tired :)

It's a conspiracy!

As for Anthony Watts, he of Kenji fame decides it must be a conspiracy of one, writing:

Also, it appears the opinion of ONE board member is all it takes, so much for consensus.

Anthony doesn't know much about comments on scientific papers.  He says he thinks Tol's paper might have got rejected because Dr Gleick is on the ERL Board, because Dr Gleick helped expose Heartland Institute's dirty linen.  I wasn't aware of a relationship between Richard Tol and the Heartland Institute - maybe by way of the GWPF?   (Richard Tol is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation - along with climate science deniers like David Whitehouse and Ian Plimer).  Anyway, Anthony Watts implies there is a connection and he should know I suppose.

Dogwhistling the dwindling, raggedy, dispirited troop of deniers

While Anthony Watts conspiracy theorises, Richard Tol takes a guess at which Editorial Board member wrote the rejecting report.  That's enough for Anthony Watts, who posts the credentials of the Editor In Chief (which are very impressive) and blows his dog whistle calling for WUWT readers to spam that Board member, posting a link to the editor's email address "for those that wish to query him" (most WUWT readers don't know how to use a search engine).

Unabashed and uncaring...

Unabashed and uncaring of his professional reputation, Richard Tol has published the rejection letter and his rejected comment on his blog for all the world to see.  He really must want that "fame and riches" very badly.  Seeking a career change perhaps?  Maybe Richard Tol is tired of being a lead author of the IPCC AR5 report.

Time to take a nap.

Wake up to the 97% consensus

Okay, I'm awake again and have read a couple of the comments below, which brought to mind a tweet from a wise man who wrote that Anthony Watts at WUWT just "doesn't get it":

Science isn't strong because of the consensus; 

the consensus is strong because of science.

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When is it time to stop digging the hole you've dug yourself into?

Perhaps when new-found "friends" say it's time?

One side show is the three way fight among the denialati: poptech vs Shollenberger vs  Tol, sort of.

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Bad Hair Day: Eli points out that this silly episode was just one of three losses the deniosaurs had recently!