Clean thread because the point was to just post some numbers for people who haven't sen them themselves. Not to wade through reams of pre-emptive rebuttals before finding the numbers which aren't actually up for debate (unless there's an error).
This is all probably elsewhere too, I'm sure. But I thought I'd look at the actual data myself.
Ok. So this idea that 97% of climate scientists agree that [global warming is real and...] man is the primary driver of global warming has largely been centred around the 2013 paper from the professional cartoonist Peter Cook and his fellow activists at skepticalscience.com:
Skepticalscience.com states "Global warming is happening - and we are the cause." (Skeptical Science Study Finds 97% Consensus on Human-Caused Global Warming in the Peer-Reviewed Literature)
It's parroted by people like NASA, and so people believe it.
http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
"Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals1 show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities."
The idea of science being settled by consensus is absurd, but that's not the point. I'm just pointing out the sophistry & more blatant deception involved in this whole thing.
Now... I've mentioned these last few points to try to put this in context - because things get decidedly slippery from here.
While skepticalscience.com (and everyone parroting their sophistry) ostensibly aims to convince that human beings are the primary driver of global warming ("Global warming is happening - and we are the cause."), their methodology in no way aims to actually make this point.
The best you can get from the data is, even if you assume that it's all legitimate, is that a certain percentage of papers either state or imply that human beings contribute in some way to global warming. Not that human beings are the primary driver (over 50%) - let alone the IPCC's claim that human beings are responsible for > 90% of warming.
This is especially significant considering the real, albeit typically misrepresented situation, which is that it's *very* rae to find a sceptic (they'll call sceptics 'deniers' in order to subliminally tar them with 'holocaust denial' etc) who takes it seriously and also insists that man doesn't contribute anything at all to global warming.
The volunteers reviewed anonymised abstracts of ~12000 papers (I'll post some abstracts towards the end), which were grouped as such:
Impacts: effects and impacts of climate change on the environment, ecosystems or humanity
Mitigation: research into lowering CO2 emissions or atmospheric CO2 levels
Methods: focus on measurements and modelling methods, or basic climate science not included in the other categories.
Paleoclimate: examining climate during pre-industrial times
And each one was marked with one of the following (note that i've re-keyed the options with letters instead of numbers, to avoid confusion, as the numbers aren't consistent among different use cases elsewhere for the same options):
A) Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%
B) Explicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimise
C) Implicitly endorses AGW without minimising it
D) No Position
E) Implicitly minimizes/rejects AGW
F) Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW but does not quantify
G) Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW as less than 50%
So lets see how many papers, of 12 thousand, endorse the idea that man is responsible for the majority (over 50%) of warming...
And the answer (according to the data I've filtered and sorted in front of me just now - which matches what i've seen elsewhere) is 64.
So there you have it. 64 out of 12000 papers surveyed claim (assuming the classification is correct - which I'll move onto late) that man is the main cause of global warming. That's not even one percent.
So lets give them the benefit of the doubt (honest guvnor!) and assume that the 8 thousand papers that don't present a view either way weren't meant to bolster the apparent sample size to lend credence, and use 3974 papers as our real sample size (much less impressive, right?).
That's 1.6%.
We've gone from 97% of "actively publishing climate scientists...", according to Nasa, to 97% of climate papers which state [they mean imply] a position agree that "Global warming is happening - and we are the cause.", to 1.6 percent.
It's worth mentioning at this point that they also contacted a little over a thousand of the authors in order to get their own self-rankings for abut half of those 4 thousand papers - which roughly match up with the initial rankings. Note the following instruction on the survey, which is relevant later when we look some abstracts.
"Note: we are not asking about your personal opinion but whether each specific paper endorses or rejects (whether explicitly or implicitly) that humans cause global warming:"
But before we finally look at some of the abstracts that were ranked, lets quickly consider a couple of points regarding the makeup of the papers being surveyed (and those making it into our actual sample of just under thousand).
1915 of the 3974 fell under the category "Mitigation: research into lowering CO2 emissions or atmospheric CO2 levels". That is to say that half of the papers in the entire sample only exist in the first place because the author's consider man-made warming to be a problem that needs addressing - while eight thousand papers were dismissed for not expressing an opinion on the matter.
That is equivalent to performing a survey on whether motorcycles are cool or not where your sample of 400 people consists of 100 in an ice-cream parlour, another 100 at a horse race, and then 200 at a motorcycle shop - and then dismissing 2 thirds of those at the horse race and ice-cream parlour because they didn't care enough to comment, and then concluding that 85% of the population think that motorcycles are cool.
This group of papers belong in the survey, but it is not appropriate - especially given their overwhelming number - to include these papers when drawing conclusions from the resulting stats.
Finally, I took a quick look at 4 random abstracts from the list which supposedly endorse at least some man-made contribution to warming, albeit implicit rather than explicit (comprising a whopping 2910 papers, or 73% - only 922 are supposedly explicit about mankind even having some kind of influence).
Of the 4, only 1 was legitimate. I spent 5 minutes picking the first 4 I randomly selected, and you'll just have to trust me that I didn't go hunting for dodgy examples. Everything else is easily verifiable. What this says about the wider sample I don't know - but I do know that the quality of these assessments has been widely criticised elsewhere.
This is all probably elsewhere too, I'm sure. But I thought I'd look at the actual data myself.
Ok. So this idea that 97% of climate scientists agree that [global warming is real and...] man is the primary driver of global warming has largely been centred around the 2013 paper from the professional cartoonist Peter Cook and his fellow activists at skepticalscience.com:
Skepticalscience.com states "Global warming is happening - and we are the cause." (Skeptical Science Study Finds 97% Consensus on Human-Caused Global Warming in the Peer-Reviewed Literature)
It's parroted by people like NASA, and so people believe it.
http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
"Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals1 show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities."
The idea of science being settled by consensus is absurd, but that's not the point. I'm just pointing out the sophistry & more blatant deception involved in this whole thing.
Now... I've mentioned these last few points to try to put this in context - because things get decidedly slippery from here.
While skepticalscience.com (and everyone parroting their sophistry) ostensibly aims to convince that human beings are the primary driver of global warming ("Global warming is happening - and we are the cause."), their methodology in no way aims to actually make this point.
The best you can get from the data is, even if you assume that it's all legitimate, is that a certain percentage of papers either state or imply that human beings contribute in some way to global warming. Not that human beings are the primary driver (over 50%) - let alone the IPCC's claim that human beings are responsible for > 90% of warming.
This is especially significant considering the real, albeit typically misrepresented situation, which is that it's *very* rae to find a sceptic (they'll call sceptics 'deniers' in order to subliminally tar them with 'holocaust denial' etc) who takes it seriously and also insists that man doesn't contribute anything at all to global warming.
The volunteers reviewed anonymised abstracts of ~12000 papers (I'll post some abstracts towards the end), which were grouped as such:
Impacts: effects and impacts of climate change on the environment, ecosystems or humanity
Mitigation: research into lowering CO2 emissions or atmospheric CO2 levels
Methods: focus on measurements and modelling methods, or basic climate science not included in the other categories.
Paleoclimate: examining climate during pre-industrial times
And each one was marked with one of the following (note that i've re-keyed the options with letters instead of numbers, to avoid confusion, as the numbers aren't consistent among different use cases elsewhere for the same options):
A) Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%
B) Explicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimise
C) Implicitly endorses AGW without minimising it
D) No Position
E) Implicitly minimizes/rejects AGW
F) Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW but does not quantify
G) Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW as less than 50%
So lets see how many papers, of 12 thousand, endorse the idea that man is responsible for the majority (over 50%) of warming...
And the answer (according to the data I've filtered and sorted in front of me just now - which matches what i've seen elsewhere) is 64.
So there you have it. 64 out of 12000 papers surveyed claim (assuming the classification is correct - which I'll move onto late) that man is the main cause of global warming. That's not even one percent.
So lets give them the benefit of the doubt (honest guvnor!) and assume that the 8 thousand papers that don't present a view either way weren't meant to bolster the apparent sample size to lend credence, and use 3974 papers as our real sample size (much less impressive, right?).
That's 1.6%.
We've gone from 97% of "actively publishing climate scientists...", according to Nasa, to 97% of climate papers which state [they mean imply] a position agree that "Global warming is happening - and we are the cause.", to 1.6 percent.
It's worth mentioning at this point that they also contacted a little over a thousand of the authors in order to get their own self-rankings for abut half of those 4 thousand papers - which roughly match up with the initial rankings. Note the following instruction on the survey, which is relevant later when we look some abstracts.
"Note: we are not asking about your personal opinion but whether each specific paper endorses or rejects (whether explicitly or implicitly) that humans cause global warming:"
But before we finally look at some of the abstracts that were ranked, lets quickly consider a couple of points regarding the makeup of the papers being surveyed (and those making it into our actual sample of just under thousand).
1915 of the 3974 fell under the category "Mitigation: research into lowering CO2 emissions or atmospheric CO2 levels". That is to say that half of the papers in the entire sample only exist in the first place because the author's consider man-made warming to be a problem that needs addressing - while eight thousand papers were dismissed for not expressing an opinion on the matter.
That is equivalent to performing a survey on whether motorcycles are cool or not where your sample of 400 people consists of 100 in an ice-cream parlour, another 100 at a horse race, and then 200 at a motorcycle shop - and then dismissing 2 thirds of those at the horse race and ice-cream parlour because they didn't care enough to comment, and then concluding that 85% of the population think that motorcycles are cool.
This group of papers belong in the survey, but it is not appropriate - especially given their overwhelming number - to include these papers when drawing conclusions from the resulting stats.
Finally, I took a quick look at 4 random abstracts from the list which supposedly endorse at least some man-made contribution to warming, albeit implicit rather than explicit (comprising a whopping 2910 papers, or 73% - only 922 are supposedly explicit about mankind even having some kind of influence).
Of the 4, only 1 was legitimate. I spent 5 minutes picking the first 4 I randomly selected, and you'll just have to trust me that I didn't go hunting for dodgy examples. Everything else is easily verifiable. What this says about the wider sample I don't know - but I do know that the quality of these assessments has been widely criticised elsewhere.
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