Posted by Anthony Watts
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
That is from Charles Mackay in his book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds first published in 1841.
I think it is an apt description of the process that led to Cook et al. (2013) Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature because that paper is in fact, a product of a crowd evaluating a crowd. As an example, Dr. Richard Tol has just discovered that using Cook’s own data, the consensus number Cook should have published is 98%, rather than 97%.
Dr. Tol writes in a critique of the Cook et al. paper:
In fact, the paper by Cook et al. may strengthen the belief that all is not well in climate research. For starters, their headline conclusion is wrong. According to their data and their definition, 98%, rather than 97%, of papers endorse anthropogenic climate change. While the difference between 97% and 98% may be dismissed as insubstantial, it is indicative of the quality of manuscript preparation and review.
He shows the Cook data as he compiles it:
You’d think such simple elementary errors in data would have been caught in peer review, after all, that is what peer review is for.
I think that there was a goal by Cook and his crowd, and that goal was to match the 97% number that has become a popular meme in the literature and the media. This intent seems confirmed by a recent statement by one of the co-authors, Dana Nuccitilli in a media argument that 97% global warming consensus meets resistance from scientific denialism
However, we have used two independent methods and confirmed the same 97% consensus as in previous studies.
It is that branding of “denialism” by Nuccitelli to Dr. Tol, who is hardly a “denier” on climate change even by the loosest definition, that has given Tol incentive to now start systemically deconstructing the paper. It also lends a window into the mind of the coauthor Nucitelli, who can’t seem to assimilate useful criticisms, no matter how valid, but instead publicly attributes discovery of real errors in the Cook et al. paper to “denialism” rather than the self-correcting process of science. Nuccitelli’s actions suggest to me, a mindset of zealotry, rather than one of discovery. His actions of branding Dr. Tol’s and others valid criticisms, seem to fit the textbook definition of the word.
As an aside, it seems truly laughable that the Guardian has created an entire regular opinion column based and named on this 97% number, and it supports that idea that this was the “target number” rather than the number that the actual data would report. Richard Tol has just proven their own data doesn’t even match the title of their paper. Will the Guardian now correct the title?
Tol goes on to say this about the crowd-sourcing:
The results thus depend on the quality of the volunteers. Are they neutral observers, or are they predisposed to endorsing or rejecting anthropogenic climate change? Did they suffer from fatigue after rating a certain number of abstracts? 12 volunteers rated on average 50 abstracts each, and another 12 volunteers rated an average of 1922 abstracts each. Fatigue may well have a problem. This level of effort by a volunteer could indicate a strong interest in the issue at hand.
Indeed, and he backs this up by saying it is evident in the data:
WoS generates homoskedastic data. Rating made the data heteroskedastic. Sign of tiredness or manipulation.
So which is it? Tiredness or manipulation, or perhaps both? Based on what has been observed so far, I’d say there is a combination, but given the obvious 97% target, more likely it is an unconscious manipulation by the chosen crowd of volunteer reviewers, which included no climate skeptics and consisted of mostly insiders for Cook’s antithetically named website, “Skeptical Science”. Tol goes on to comment:
No neutral person would volunteer to do 1922 tasks. Cook’s data duly show bias: 35% of abstract were misclassified, 99% towards endorsement.
To support the idea that bias played a role in reaching the conclusions of the Cook et al. paper, there seems to be a systemic sloppiness in the sampling process, as Tol points out in his critique:
In fact, 34.6% of papers that should have been rated as neutral were in fact rated as non-neutral. Of those misrated papers, 99.4% were rated as endorsements. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the volunteers were not neutral, but tended to find endorsements where there were none. Because rater IDs were not reported, it is not possible to say whether all volunteers are somewhat biased or a few were very biased.
Tol also says this about the 97% scientific consensus claim:
It is a strange claim to make. Consensus or near-consensus is not a scientific argument. Indeed, the heroes in the history of science are those who challenged the prevailing consensus and convincingly demonstrated that everyone thought wrong. Such heroes are even better appreciated if they take on not only the scientific establishment but the worldly and godly authorities as well.
Well known examples of this include the challenges to the theory that Earth was the center of the universe, that infection was spread by surgeons who didn’t wash their hands, that the Earth’s crust had plates that moved, and that gastric ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection, and not stress as physicians once widely believed. As William Briggs writes:
There was once a consensus among astronomers that the heavens were static, that the boundaries of the universe constant. But in 1929, Hubble observed his red shift among the stars, overturning that consensus. In 1904, there was a consensus among physicists that Newtonian mechanics was, at last, the final word in explaining the workings of the [universe]. All that was left to do was to mop up the details. But in 1905, Einstein and a few others soon convinced them that this view was false.
Consensus can also cause disaster, as NASA proved with a consensus of management that solid rocket booster O-rings affected by unusual cold weren’t worth worrying about or that a foam strike during launch wouldn’t damage the wing of the space shuttle and were “not even worth mentioning”.
Clearly, the power of thousands in agreement on scientific consensus can’t stand up to stubborn facts and that is the self-correcting process of science which sometimes works slowly, other times dramatically quickly. Given that consensus by itself means nothing in the face of such facts, it seems to me that consensus is just another manifestation of herd-like thinking as illustrated by Mackay.
From the Amazon summary of Mackay’s insightful book on crowds:
First published in 1841, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is often cited as the best book ever written about market psychology. Author Charles Mackay chronicles many celebrated financial manias, or ‘bubbles’, which demonstrate his assertion that “every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation.” This still holds fast today! Among the alleged ‘bubbles’ described by Mackay is the infamous Dutch tulip mania, the South Sea Company bubble and the Mississippi Company bubble. And what do bubbles do? Why they burst of course.
The Cook et al. paper bubble is about to burst.
UPDATE: Read the draft paper Tol is working on here, comments welcome.
See how the extremists Cook and Nucitelli planned their Oreskes like hoax in Cook’s 97% Consensus Study Game Plan Revealed. As we have shown in at least 25 ways, the theory has been falsified and should be discarded no matter how many papers the $100B invested in the hoax have been published in pal review.
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are to blame for global warming since the 1970s and not carbon dioxide, according to new research from the University of Waterloo published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B this week.
Chlorofluorocarbons are to blame for global warming since the 1970s and not carbon dioxide, according to new research from the University of Waterloo published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B this week. This graph shows the predicted path of global temperatures is set to continue their decline as a result of depletion of CFC’s in the atmosphere. Credit: Qing-Bin Lu, University of Waterloo
CCFCs are already known to deplete ozone, but in-depth statistical analysis now shows that CFCs are also the key driver in global climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
“Conventional thinking says that the emission of human-made non-CFC gases such as carbon dioxide has mainly contributed to global warming. But we have observed data going back to the Industrial Revolution that convincingly shows that conventional understanding is wrong,” said Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, biology and chemistry in Waterloo’s Faculty of Science. “In fact, the data shows that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays caused both the polar ozone hole and global warming.”
“Most conventional theories expect that global temperatures will continue to increase as CO2 levels continue to rise, as they have done since 1850. What’s striking is that since 2002, global temperatures have actually declined matching a decline in CFCs in the atmosphere,” Professor Lu said. “My calculations of CFC greenhouse effect show that there was global warming by about 0.6 C from 1950 to 2002, but the earth has actually cooled since 2002. The cooling trend is set to continue for the next 50-70 years as the amount of CFCs in the atmosphere continues to decline.”
The findings are based on in-depth statistical analyses of observed data from 1850 up to the present time, Professor Lu’s cosmic-ray-driven electron-reaction (CRE) theory of ozone depletion and his previous research into Antarctic ozone depletion and global surface temperatures.
“It was generally accepted for more than two decades that the Earth’s ozone layer was depleted by the sun’s ultraviolet light-induced destruction of CFCs in the atmosphere,” he said. “But in contrast, CRE theory says cosmic rays, energy particles originating in space, play the dominant role in breaking down ozone-depleting molecules and then ozone.”
Lu’s theory has been confirmed by ongoing observations of cosmic ray, CFC, ozone and stratospheric temperature data over several 11-year solar cycles. “CRE is the only theory that provides us with an excellent reproduction of 11-year cyclic variations of both polar ozone loss and stratospheric cooling,” said Professor Lu. “After removing the natural cosmic-ray effect, my new paper shows a pronounced recovery by ~20% of the Antarctic ozone hole, consistent with the decline of CFCs in the polar stratosphere.”
By proving the link between CFCs, ozone depletion and temperature changes in the Antarctic, Professor Lu was able to draw almost perfect correlation between rising global surface temperatures and CFCs in the atmosphere.
“The climate in the Antarctic stratosphere has been completely controlled by CFCs and cosmic rays, with no CO2 impact. The change in global surface temperature after the removal of the solar effect has shown zero correlation with CO2 but a nearly perfect linear correlation with CFCs, a correlation coefficient as high as 0.97.”
Data recorded from 1850 to 1970, before any significant CFC emissions, show that CO2 levels increased significantly as a result of the Industrial Revolution, but the global temperature, excluding the solar effect, kept nearly constant. The conventional warming model of CO2, suggests the temperatures should have risen by 0.6C over the same period, similar to the period of 1970-2002.
The analyses indicate the dominance of Lu’s CRE theory and the success of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.
“We’ve known for some time that CFCs have a really damaging effect on our atmosphere and we’ve taken measures to reduce their emissions,” Professor Lu said. “We now know that international efforts such as the Montreal Protocol have also had a profound effect on global warming but they must be placed on firmer scientific ground.”
“This study underlines the importance of understanding the basic science underlying ozone depletion and global climate change,” said Terry McMahon, dean of the faculty of science. “This research is of particular importance not only to the research community, but to policy makers and the public alike as we look to the future of our climate.”
Professor Lu’s paper, Cosmic-Ray-Driven Reaction and Greenhouse Effect of Halogenated Molecules: Culprits for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change, also predicts that the global sea level will continue to rise for some years as the hole in the ozone recovers increasing ice melting in the polar regions.
“Only when the effect of the global temperature recovery dominates over that of the polar ozone hole recovery, will both temperature and polar ice melting drop concurrently,” says Lu.
The peer-reviewed paper published this week not only provides new fundamental understanding of the ozone hole and global climate change but has superior predictive capabilities, compared with the conventional sunlight-driven ozone-depleting and CO2-warming models.
More information: Cosmic-Ray-Driven Reaction and Greenhouse Effect of Halogenated Molecules: Culprits for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change, Qing-Bin Lu, University of Waterloo, Published on May 30 in International Journal of Modern Physics B Vol. 27 (2013) 1350073 (38 pages). The paper is available online.
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By Steve Goreham
Originally published in The Washington Times.
Earlier this month, a New York Times article by Andy Revkin voiced concern over a gap between “the consensus” of climate scientists and public acceptance of the theory of human-caused global warming. Revkin pointed to a study published in April by Dr. John Cook and other researchers, which claimed that 97 percent of scientific papers over the last decade “endorsed the consensus” of man-made warming. But is it a failure to communicate the science to the public, or a case of bad science?
A 2010 paper from the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University recommended that advocates for activist climate policies emphasize the dangers to the health of citizens: “Successfully reframing the climate debate in the United States from one based on environmental values to one based on health values...holds great promise to help American society better understand and appreciate the risks of climate change...” So, if Americans fear for their health, then they’ll more readily accept that humans are causing dangerous climate change?
Climate science has smelled for some time. The 2001 Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced “new evidence” claiming that “the increase in temperature in the 20th century was likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years.” This was the famous “Hockey Stick Curve” of Dr. Michael Mann, which became an icon for Climatism, trumpeted to the world and taught in schools across the globe.
But the tree-ring data used by Mann and his research team did not show a temperature rise at the end of the 20th century, so they pasted the thermometer record for the last 50 years onto the 1,000-year curve to provide the alarming hockey stick temperature rise. Later analysis by Stephen McIntyre and Dr. Ross McKitrick found that the Mann algorithm would also produce a hockey stick from input of random noise. The IPCC dropped the Mann Curve from their 2007 Fourth Assessment Report without any explanation.
Then in November 2009 came Climategate, the release of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University. An unidentified hacker or whistle-blower downloaded more than 1,000 documents and e-mails and posted them on a server in Russia. The CRU is the recognized leading keeper of global temperature data, and CRU scientists wrote and edited the core of the IPCC reports.
The Climategate emails showed CRU practices that were seriously at odds with accepted scientific procedure. Evidence of bias, data manipulation, deliberate deletion of emails to avoid sharing of information, evasion of freedom of information requests, and attempts to subvert the peer-review literature process were all used to further the cause of human-made global warming.
Based on model projections, the IPCC First Assessment Report of 1990 told the world to expect a “best estimate” rise of 0.3C per decade in global temperatures, leading to 2025 temperatures that would be 1C higher than 1990 temperatures. The IPCC also projected a “high estimate” and a “low estimate” rise. Today, global temperatures remain well below the IPCC’s low estimate. Contrary to model projections, temperatures have been flat for the last 15 years.
It doesn’t matter if 97 percent or even 100 percent of published papers endorse the consensus of man-made warming. One hundred percent of the world’s top climate models, 44 models in all, projected a rise in global surface temperatures over the last 15 years. And 100 percent of the climate models were wrong. The empirical data does not support the theory of dangerous man-made climate change.
Since global temperatures are not rising, proponents of man-made climate change are now reduced to weather scaremongering. In the best tradition of ambulance chasing, the recent severe tornado in Oklahoma, Hurricane Sandy, and other weather events are blamed on mankind’s relatively small contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide, a trace gas.
But any citizen who can read can learn that today’s weather is not abnormal. Hurricane Sandy was a Category 1 hurricane that made a direct hit on New York City. But according to the National Climatic Data Center, 170 hurricanes made US landfall during the 20th century. Fifty-nine of these were Category 3 or better, with wind speeds much stronger than those of Sandy. So how is a single Category 1 hurricane “evidence” of dangerous climate change? Historical data also shows that the US experienced more strong tornados in the 1960s and 1970s than today.
The reason for lukewarm public acceptance of the theory of man-made warming is not a failure to communicate, but that the science is rotten.
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.