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!
Arctic sea ice is declining rapidly, yet Anthony Watts sez it may rebound! Is he claiming that an ice age cometh? Not really. He usually leaves that nonsense to his "essayists" like David "funny sunny" Archibald. Yet if you read his headline without the article he copied and pasted (archived here), that's the conclusion you'd draw.
