By Dennis Ambler on SPPI
A recent re-posting on the SPPI blog from the HockeySchtick site, with the title, “The 97% “Consensus” is only 75 Self-Selected Climatologists” was a second look at the claim first made in January 2009, in a paper called “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” by Peter Doran and Kendall Zimmerman, from the department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois.
This was their stated aim: “The objective of our study presented here is to assess the scientific consensus on climate change through an unbiased survey of a large and broad group of Earth scientists.”
It was roundly de-bunked at the time by several commentators and it would have been forgotten and consigned to its proper place in the dustbin, if it hadn’t been continually quoted by activists as fact.
Barry R. Bickmore, an associate professor of geological sciences at Brigham Young University, Utah, was the most recent to quote it in an op ed in the Deseret News of November 25th 2010, entitled “Global warming consensus matters”, where he attacks Utah Senator Orin Hatch for challenging consensus claims.
He starts by saying, “Two recent studies have shown that 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers who actively publish peer-reviewed research on climate change agree that humans are significantly affecting Earth’s climate.” He then proceeds to justify the use of “consensus” statements.
“It would be unacceptable in a peer-reviewed scientific publication, for instance, to brush aside legitimate objections to a theory by saying the vast majority of researchers in the field agree. That just isn’t how science is done. I’m sorry, but that is exactly how climate science is “done” these days. He makes yet more appeals to authority, that these poor scientists have such great difficulty in transmitting their superior knowledge to the masses, that the only answer is to say that “the majority of scientists agree” on the main issues. Of course this is also how they try to stifle dissenting voices from climate scientists who are just as qualified to address the climate issues, if not more so, than the main protagonists.
This is not arcane knowledge for the select priesthood, this is science and we can read scientific papers and apply quality judgements to them, whether we be specialists or not. He says that: “scientists simply don’t have time (and the audience typically doesn’t have the interest) to lay out all the evidence, the arguments and counterarguments, in full detail. Isn’t it legitimate, then, to simply note that almost all the experts have been convinced of a given point?”
This is never valid and certainly not when the claim that “almost all of the experts agree” is shown to be a total distortion of the real facts, as in the “97%” scenario from the Doran and Zimmerman paper. By quoting it without checking the detail, he tarnishes his own credibility as a scientist.
He was preceded earlier in the month on this topic by former Republican congressman Sherwood Boehlert, in a Washington Post Op-ed, attacking the climate stance of the GOP in Congress. He is an honorary board member of Republicans for Environmental Protection, (REP), an organisation that seems to be a cheerleader for the EPA.
This is what Boehlert said: Science the GOP can’t wish away, November 19th 2010
“National Journal reported last month that 19 of the 20 serious GOP Senate challengers declared that the science of climate change is either inconclusive or flat-out wrong. Many newly elected Republican House members take that position. It is a stance that defies the findings of our country’s National Academy of Sciences, national scientific academies from around the world and 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists.”
Mr Boehlert, like most politicians, obviously doesn’t read the documents that are presented to him in any depth, but is quite content with the headline statements. The findings of the National Academy of Sciences are the subject of another paper.
The phrase “97 percent of the world’s climate scientists” sounds very dramatic and overwhelming, but the truth is somewhat different. According to the figures presented in the paper, 90% of the scientists were from the US, including federal and state bodies, 6% from Canada and 4% from 21 countries around the world.
We are also told that only 5% of the original sample responses were climate scientists, so if we pragmatically apply those proportions we end up with just 141 from the US, 9 from Canada and just 6 from 21 countries around the world, hardly a global consensus.
THE FIGURES
The paper is behind a pay wall but there is a comprehensive summary here. We find that they originally contacted 10,257 scientists, of whom 3,146 responded, less than a 31% response rate. “Impending Planetary Doom” was obviously not uppermost in the minds of over two thirds of their target population. Of that number, only 5% described themselves as climate scientists, numbering 157. The authors reduce that by half by only counting those who they classed as “specialists”.
“In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2.”
There is little detail of how many peer reviewed papers are needed to qualify as a specialist, it could by their definition be just two papers, one of which needs to be on climate change. What a poor example of scientific enquiry this survey really is. There were supposed to have been nine questions asked, but we are only given sight of two of them.
1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
This is quite banal and shows the desperation of those involved in this “unbiased survey of a large and broad group of Earth scientists.”
Has it got warmer since pre-1800 levels? This really depends on the time period referred to. Do they mean the Little Ice Age, when disastrously cold temperatures caused massive loss of life and untold hardship? Of course temperatures are now warmer than that desperate period in climate history. Is that what they would wish to regard as normal?
Perhaps they refer to periods mentioned by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in an information leaflet that was available on their pre-climategate web site, where they acknowledged earlier warm periods in the Central England Temperature record, but didn’t explain the lack of a CO2 link. However that would produce difficulties for the theory, so maybe not. One wonders what time period the 76 specialists out 79 thought they were answering yes to.
...seasonal and annual temperatures for the entire CET series...show unprecedented warmth during the 1990s, but earlier decades such as the 1730s and 1820s are comparable.
Alas, the link is no longer available.
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
This is the classic closed question, in that it implies mean global temperatures are being changed and someone must be responsible. The response to this question was 75 specialists out of 77, so here we have our massive 97%.
It is disingenuous to now use the “climate scientists” as a new population sample size. The response figure of 3,146 is the figure against which The original number contacted was 10,157 and of those, 69% decided they didn’t want any part of it, but they were the original target population. When the figure of 75 believers is set against that number, we get a mere 0.73% of the scientists they contacted who agreed with their loaded questions.
However a headline of “0.73% of climate scientists think that humans are affecting the climate” doesn’t quite have the same ring as 97% does it? This CNN posting was typical of the Press coverage at the time:
Surveyed scientists agree global warming is real January 19, 2009
A survey of more than 3,000 scientists found that the vast majority believe humans cause global warming. Human-induced global warming is real, according to a recent U.S. survey based on the opinions of 3,146 scientists. However there remain divisions between climatologists and scientists from other areas of earth sciences as to the extent of human responsibility.
Against a backdrop of harsh winter weather across much of North America and Europe, the concept of rising global temperatures might seem incongruous. However the results of the investigation conducted at the end of 2008 reveal that vast majority of the Earth scientists surveyed agree that in the past 200-plus years, mean global temperatures have been rising and that human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.
This was the message on the Mongabay website: “A new poll among 3,146 earth scientists found that 90 percent believe global warming is real, while 82 percent agree that human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures. The survey, conducted among researchers listed in the American Geological Institute’s Directory of Geoscience Departments*, “found that climatologists who are active in research showed the strongest consensus on the causes of global warming, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role”.
What a gross travesty of the truth, and such appalling reporting, but these are the messages fed to acquiescent politicians who do not bother to check the facts, and criticise those who do. How low has science sunk, that scientists will dispense this sort of disinformation to promote their own agenda? PDF
By Marlo Lewis, Master Resource
Next year, Republicans will be the majority party in the House of Representatives, which means they’ll hold the committee chairmanships and run the hearings. They’ll have opportunities aplenty to review the Obama administration’s global warming policies and the alarmist “science” that supposedly justifies cap-and-trade, renewable energy mandates, and EPA regulation of greenhouse gases.
They would do well to study how in the 105th and 106th Congresses, a GOP House committee chairman from Missouri single handedly debunked the Clinton-Gore administration’s economic analysis of the Kyoto Protocol.
Kyotoism: Down but Not Yet Out
Politically, the last eighteen months have been remarkable. In June 2009, the House passed H.R. 2454, the “American Clean Energy and Security Act,” popularly known as the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. Waxman-Markey’s passage was the culmination of a 20-year PR/lobbying campaign waged by U.N. officials, regulatory bureaucrats, environmental activists, lefty politicians, and corporate rent seekers.
Many of them crowed that ultimate victory was inevitable. With Barack “Blueprint for Change” Obama in the White House, Speaker Pelosi and Chairmen Waxman and Markey running the climate show in the House, and Majority Leader Reid and Chairman Boxer setting the agenda in the Senate, expectations ran high in green circles.
Their optimistic scenario went as follows: Congress would finally enact cap-and-trade, which would shame China into accepting binding emission limits at the Copenhagen conference, which would then remove the chief obstacle to U.S. ratification of a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol.
Things did not turn out that way. Waxman-Markey quickly became a political liability for many of its supporters, Copenhagen fizzled, and by the summer of 2010 the greenhouse bubble burst. Among the chief factors derailing the Kyoto agenda were the Climategate scandal, Waxman-Markey’s outing as a stealth energy tax, 15 years of no net warming, the worst recession since the 1930s, China’s unwavering rejection of binding emission limits, and growing realism about the economic and technical downsides of wind and solar power.
Energy realists, however, can ill-afford to become complacent. EPA is moving rapidly to “enact” Kyoto-like restrictions on the U.S. economy. The Supreme Court could also launch an era of CO2 tort litigation if it decides Connecticut v. American Electric Power in favor of plaintiffs.
Moreover, few defeats in politics are permanent. The greenhouse gang is nothing if not inventive in recycling their policy nostrums under new guises and rationales. What was cap-and-trade, after all, but an obfuscatory repackaging of Al Gore’s Btu energy tax? And when proponents could no longer sell cap-and-trade as climate policy, they blathered about air pollution and asthma, oil dependence and national security, stimulus and green jobs.
Bear in mind, too, that cap-and-trade is a wealth-transfer scheme, and there is never any shortage of politicians and interest groups eager to bilk the public. They count on the fact that most voters are so busy with work and family matters that they are rationally ignorant of the harm lofty-sounding regulatory initiatives can do to them.
No, we dare not rest on our laurels. Frederic Bastiat debunked the broken window fallacy more than 150 years ago, yet Obama officials say with a straight face that putting a price on carbon (smashing that very big “window” consisting of all companies that make or use energy from fossil fuels) will stimulate the economy and create jobs.
Man from Missouri
Missouri is the “Show Me State,” which also makes it the Skeptic State, a place where plain folks proudly insist on seeing the evidence before assenting to the “frothy eloquence” of experts. How fitting, then, that James Talent, Republican of Missouri, adroitly used the hearing process to challenge climate-related flim-flam when he was Chairman of the House Committee on Small Business. In the 112th Congress, House GOP chairmen will need something of Jim’s talent to consolidate the gains energy realists made in the November elections and to roll back EPA’s greenhouse power grab.
On June 4, 1998 during the 105th Congress, and then again on April 29, 1999 during the 106th Congress, Chairman Talent grilled Janet Yellen, head of the Council of Economic Advisors, about the Clinton-Gore administration’s Kyoto economic impact analysis. Despite repeated Web searches, I am unable to locate the committee print for the June 4, 1998 hearing. Fortunately, I wrote a column about that hearing and excerpted much of the pertinent exchange.
Both hearings examined the Clinton-Gore administration’s estimate that implementing Kyoto the “smart way” would cost the United States only $14-23 per ton of carbon, or about 0.1% of GDP.
In the 1998 hearing, Yellen was the sole witness on the first panel. This allowed Talent to pursue a single line of inquiry. He asked her: $14-23 per ton - why so cheap? Yellen said it was because of the flexibility mechanisms (emission trading, banking, CDM credits, and the like) that the Clinton-Gore team negotiated in Kyoto.
So Talent asked, how much would complying with Kyoto cost absent the flexibility mechanisms, or “sweeteners,” as he called them? Yellen could not or would not say, raising the suspicion that Kyoto would be very costly if we had to meet the targets mainly via domestic policies and measures.
Talent then asked the obvious follow up - if you don’t know how much Kyoto would cost without the sweeteners, how can you estimate what it costs with the sweeteners? Suppose the sweeteners do reduce the overall cost of compliance by some percentage. Still, if we don’t know the base case or “raw” cost of Kyoto, how can you calculate the discounted cost? Time and again Talent pressed Yellen on this, but never got an answer. He put her on the horns of a dilemma. She could either acknowledge that Kyoto was potentially very costly or come across as incompetent or disingenuous.
In the 1999 hearing, there were only two witnesses - Yellen and Rob Reinstein, an environmental negotiator in the first Bush administration. Reinstein had estimated for each Kyoto Annex I (developed) country how many tons of emission allowances it would have to sell and how many it would need to buy. He added up the numbers and found that even with the inclusion of former Soviet bloc countries, whose economies and emission levels had collapsed, demand would exceed the supply by anywhere from 1.3:1 to 12:1 (p. 33). Implication: The price of emission allowances would be higher than $14-23 per ton, potentially much higher.
Talent asked Yellen for her supply and demand estimates. She did not have the numbers but said they were “implicit” in the administration’s model. However, she offered no evidence that those “implicit” numbers were based on the kind of country-by-country assessment that Mr. Reinstein performed. Talent commented:
We asked you, the Committee asked you, in a written question for estimates of the U.S. demand for emission credits by year for the period, 2008 through 2012. And we asked for the potential supply from Russia and the Ukraine. And here was your answer: “The Administration has no estimates of the demand for emission credits by year for the period, 2008 through 2012. Demand will be sensitive to a variety of factors that are quite different [sic] to forecast ten to fourteen years in advance, especially the rate of technological innovation and the diffusion and adoption of current innovations and those placed on the market over the next ten years. For the same reason, we have no estimates of the supply of emission credits.”
In short, Talent said “show me,” and Yellen gave him “frothy eloquence.”
Implications for current committee chairs
In two hearings, using simple logic and refusing to let the witness change the subject, Jim Talent, a lawyer, stumped the White House’s top economist, discrediting the Clinton-Gore Kyoto economic analysis. What lessons should today’s chairmen draw from this slice of climate policy history?
First, conduct an oversight hearing with a simple but carefully prepared prosecutorial plan of action. An oversight hearing is an adversarial proceeding. It is much like a trial, albeit conducted before the court of public opinion rather than a court of law. The chairman should have a clear idea what fact or facts he wants to bring to light, what headline he wants the media to report, what conclusion he wants fellow policymakers to draw. In the 1998 hearing, I believe, Talent wanted to reveal that the administration essentially pulled its Kyoto cost numbers out of thin air and could not or would not explain how it arrived at the $14-23 per ton estimate. In the 1999 hearing, I believe, Talent wanted to reveal that the administration estimated emission allowance prices without first doing the empirical (country-by-country) research needed estimate supply and demand.
In addition, to having clear objectives about what the hearing is to reveal, the chairman must be dogged in questioning the witness. He must accept only two results as satisfactory: (1) the witness finally comes clean and gives a straight answer, or (2) the witness finally exposes himself as evasive and non-responsive.
Second, limit the number of witnesses per panel to one or at most two persons. Limiting the panel to one witness ensures that the witness is on the hot seat the whole time and gives the chairman more control over the back-and-forth, facilitating a prosecutorial mode of interrogation. Adding a second, friendly witness (Reinstein, for example, in the 1999 hearing) enables the chairman to grill the other team’s witness on the basis of competing expert testimony.
A two-person panel can also be structured as an actual debate. Acting as referee, the chairman can ensure that the other team’s witness addresses the friendly witness’s arguments. He can repeatedly ask each witness to respond to the other’s arguments. Both formats - single witness or two witnesses - enhance the chairman’s ability to pursue a question until he gets a real answer or or an obvious non-answer.
A debate format would be ideal for examining the claims of climate alarmists. For example, when University of Alabama in Huntsville Prof. John Christy challenged Columbia University Prof. James Hansen’s high-end climate sensitivity estimates at a Ways and Means Committee hearing in February 2009, Hansen declined to address Christy’s argument on the merits. Instead, Hansen advised the committee to ask the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to produce a report and then accept its verdict as “authoritative.” Very convenient considering that Hansen is an NAS member and Christy is not, and that NAS is something of an old boys network.
Unsurprisingly, Chairman Rangel let Hansen off the hook. I’ll bet Jim Talent would not have done so. He’d have said something like: “You can’t refute Prof. Christy by ignoring him. And I am not going to be persuaded by a report that the NAS hasn’t written. I’m from Missouri. Show me!”
See post and links here.
Project 21 Press Release
Washington, D.C. - As winter weather already grips portions of the United States, the need for cheap and efficient power for heat and light is essential. Deneen Borelli, a fellow with the Project 21 black leadership network, points out that the Obama Administration’s continued war on fossil fuels that is making the guarantee of a comfortable winter increasingly bleak for the nation’s poorest citizens.
“With millions of Americans unemployed and struggling to keep their homes warm, the need for government assistance will only increase. Heavy demand and higher prices due to the Obama Administration’s assault on the fossil fuels we rely upon are going to stretch charities to their limits and beyond,” noted Project 21’s Borelli. “It’s disgraceful that the first black president and the first black EPA administrator are advancing policies that will preferentially harm blacks who overwhelmingly supported Obama.”
In a speech in late November to the Aspen Institute, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson demonized the private sector and strongly defended the Obama Administration’s decision to regulate “greenhouse gas” emissions without having specific Congressional authority to regulate these emissions.
Twisting the results of an October Gallup poll in which five percent of those surveyed said the government should have no role in environmental protection, Jackson claimed: “When it came to protecting the environment… 95 percent of Americans said government should have a role in protecting the environment. Fifty percent of Americans said government should be the only protector of the environment, indicating a lack of trust, if you will, in the private sector, not because the private sector is bad… but because the private sector is motivated by profit, and oftentimes without regulatory restrictions.”
“By having the EPA regulate carbon emissions, Lisa Jackson is laying the foundation for the 2010 version of bread lines by supporting efforts that will raise energy costs,” noted Project 21’s Borelli. “It’s outrageous that Jackson’s policies will drive many low-income citizens to the government plantation.”
The Congressional Research Service predicts this winter will cost the average American household $986 just for heat. Already, people are scrambling to find ways to keep warm:
* In Cobb County, Georgia, hundreds of people waited outside in freezing temperatures to apply for county heating assistance—with two people having to be taken away by ambulance due to the cold. Applicant Deandre Marshall told WSB Radio that people in line were crying over the thought there would not be enough money for everyone, saying, “It’s almost like being in a soup line during the Great Depression.”
* By late November, over 8,000 households in St. Lawrence County, New York were approved for heating assistance, but county social services coordinator Linda Clark told North County Now that “everyone here is a little edgy” about the consistency of aid funding.
* John J. Drew, the president and CEO of Action for Boston Community Development said: “Washington’s inaction on fuel aid, rising energy prices, a ruthless economy and the predicted severe winter” create a “perfect storm of conditions that will leave seniors and low-income working families in grave danger.”
“Americans will suffer as a consequence of the Obama EPA’s anti-energy agenda. They will experience reduced living standards and have less disposable income because of higher energy costs,” noted Project 21’s Borelli. “The EPA’s plan to regulate carbon emissions would unfortunately result in still higher energy costs and more job losses. With unemployment officially hovering around ten percent, this is something our nation cannot afford.”
A 2009 poll of 800 black Americans conducted by Wilson Research Strategies for the National Center for Public Policy Research—the parent organization of Project 21—undercuts EPA administrator Jackson’s claim on broad public support. Among the key findings of the National Center poll:
* Fifty-six percent of blacks believed those in Washington setting climate policy fail to properly consider economic and quality of life concerns in the black community.
* Fifty-two percent of respondents don’t want to pay more for gasoline or electricity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Seventy-three percent are unwilling to pay more than 50 cents more for a gallon of gas, and 76 percent are unwilling to pay more than $50 more per year for electricity.
Project 21, a leading voice of black conservatives since 1992, is sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research