You never fail to amuse, “Eddie”. I’ll give you that.
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I’m happy that you find my posts entertaining.
I have not.
That’s what I said. Publishing climatologists. In so far as we should consider anyone experts in the field of climatology, it would be people who are actively publishing in that field.
I have not.
No. You seem extremely confused.
It would be extremely strange (in fact without precedent in history, in any other scientific field) if the co-hort of scientists who publish papers (wherein no position on anthropogenic global warming is stated) in climatology, nevertheless should end up significantly deviating from the co-hort of scientists who write papers wherein a position on athropogentic global warming is stated. Among other reasons because many of them are the same people, who don’t stuff their conclusions on climate change into every paper they write.
Just like it would be extremely strange if you find the fraction of all papers in evolutionary biology that take a position on the truth of evolution, find that the overwhelming majority endorse the reality that extant biodiversity is the product of evolution, yet that most papers aren’t actually written for that purpose, but simply report results of experiments, models, and so on.
There’s just no reason in logic or science to think there’s some huge co-hort of publishing evolutionary biologists who significantly deviate from anything other than a resounding endorsement of evolution.
I could say all the same things about medical scientists publishing in cancer research, who take a stance on whether smoking causes cancer. Probably the majority of papers in cancer research don’t explicitly state that smoking causes cancer. Yet we can be quite certain virtually everyone agrees that it does.
Please don’t pretend you can’t think this far yourself. Or well, do continue…
Good one.
No. This is done to actually confirm whether the authors really do in fact endorse AGW. They also survey the authors of papers where no position on AGW is stated, and find that these authors actually also endorse AGW
You don’t seem to understand what is meant by that term. Let me help you by just quoting the survey:
3.2. Endorsement percentages from self-ratings
We emailed 8547 authors an invitation to rate their own papers and received 1200 responses (a 14% response rate). After excluding papers that were not peer-reviewed, not climate-related or had no abstract, 2142 papers received self-ratings from 1189 authors. The self-rated levels of endorsement are shown in table 4. Among self-rated papers that stated a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. Among self-rated papers not expressing a position on AGW in the abstract, 53.8% were self-rated as endorsing the consensus. Among respondents who authored a paper expressing a view on AGW, 96.4% endorsed the consensus.
They’re not being asked to “rate their own paper” in the sense you seem to be insinuating, they’re being questioned on what their position is to see if the methods used by the authors of this survey to correctly reflects the opinions(of the papers) written by the scientists being surveyed. They find that in fact most of the papers that they initially scored as not taking a position on AGW, the authors of those papers think their paper is endorsing AGW.
As they write:
A direct comparison of abstract rating versus self-rating endorsement levels for the 2142 papers that received a self-rating is shown in table 5. More than half of the abstracts that we rated as ‘No Position’ or ‘Undecided’ were rated ‘Endorse AGW’ by the paper’s authors.
Good for you. 
Edit: Clarification.
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Surmise, not evidence, and not tight argument. I reject such speculation.
Your parallels are not relevant, because they concern general positions and not details, whereas the debate I was involved in at BioLogos was over details. Yes, most biologists accept evolution, but not all biologists have exactly the same views on the relative weighting of evolutionary mechanisms. Yes, most scientists agree that smoking increases the chance of cancer, but not all agree on how much. It would be unwarranted to say, “97% of all evolutionary biologists agree that 55% of evolutionary change is due to drift and only 45% to natural selection”, and it would be unwarranted to say “97% of all cancer researchers agree that smoking increases the probability of cancer by 271.5%” Neither of those claims should be made without extensive documentation from the actual publications of those scientists.
It may well be that some, or even a majority, of the climatologists who did not offer any opinion on global warming think that human activity plays a significant role. But even if we knew that, it would not justify the inference that all of them believe that the human activity accounts for more than 90% of the warming. For something that specific, one would have to ask the individual authors – and no one did that. Not in this report you are citing, and not on BioLogos. At BioLogos they just grabbed at the 97% number (in most cases completely unaware where it came from) and ran with it.
An unnecessary personal remark. I could reply that it’s unlikely that a lab tech with only a B.S. in biological sciences is able to think even as far, let alone farther, than someone with a Ph.D. in philosophical subjects, but there is no point in engaging in a contest of that kind. Let’s keep the personal out of it and concentrate on the facts.
Well, then, they are using “self-rating” in a non-standard sense. Scientists should learn to communicate better in English. But we knew that already.
Note, however, that even on your interpretation, the 97.1% number falls apart, because the 53.8% number would bring the overall number down. But the folks on BioLogos, of course, simply took the 97.1% number without qualification. So either they hadn’t read this survey, and didn’t note the qualification, or they had read it, but dishonestly ignored the qualification so they could keep the 97% number, for polemical purposes. So either they were crappy researchers or intellectually dishonest. At BioLogos, it was usually the case that both were true.
Which says nothing about whether “Endorse AGW” means “20% of the warming comes from human activity” or “90% of the warming comes from human activity”. Either number, or any other number except 0, is compatible with “endorse AGW”. Again, the debate at BioLogos was over the claim that 97% of all scientists think that over 90% of the warming comes from human activity. Even if they had read this survey, they could not have pulled that number out of it. All they could have pulled out of it was that most of those whose papers were surveyed thought that AGW was a reality – a much more general claim, and not one that I contested.
No, you’re pseudonymous, so any claims of authority or expertise you make are utterly vacuous and should be ignored.
Moreover, your emphasis on didactic training over academic achievement betrays you as someone whose training ended very early.
Yet you never had the intellectual clarity to understand the simple fact that RIBOzymes are made of RIBOnucleic acid, not protein, before arguing that misrepresenting a ribozyme as a protein was a mere error in nomenclature, and not a gross misrepresentation of the strongest evidence supporting the RNA World hypothesis.
In the truly academic scientific fields, all conclusions are provisional; therefore, we ask the question, “Is the hypothesis supported by the evidence?”
Those who avoid examining the evidence have no business pretending that they are seriously addressing such hypotheses.
Anyone who holds up one’s possession of a PhD as the gold standard, instead of one’s academic achievements during and after graduate and postdoctoral training, probably never made academic progress beyond the PhD.
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So the claims of expertise you made under several different pseudonyms, on at least two different websites and probably several more, should also have been ignored. But that wasn’t your tune back then. The double standard is quite obvious.
In any case, your criticism is based on a false premise. I did not appeal to my academic training to settle any point of content. What I wrote was in response to a charge from Rumraket. The exchange went like this:
I responded to Rumraket not to establish any point of fact regarding climate change or any other subject. I responded to Rumraket because he was impugning my motives – either directly, if the “you” was meant to refer to me, or indirectly, if he meant it as a “generic you” but with obvious application (he seemed in context to be saying) to my own intentions. He said that my motive was X, and I said, no, my motive is Y. Mention of my academic training was in connection with that, not to establish any point regarding the reality or degree or causes of climate change.
My academic training is relevant to my motivation. I was trained to always ask, “What exactly is the claim being made here?” A true academic will seek clarity about what is being claimed before debating the truth of the claim. That desire for clarity is a primary part of my motivation for any discussion I participate in. If I ask, “Do all climatologists think that CO2 is 100% of the cause of warming, or are there differences of opinion about the percentage?” that is not to cast doubt on the reality of warming, but to get straight exactly what is being claimed by whom about the causes of warming, the weighting of the causes, and so on. That is my motivation, not the motivation Rumraket imputed to me, and that motivation is a direct product of two things: (1) my own natural desire for clarity, as opposed to muddiness; (2) my academic training, which intensified that natural desire to a high degree.
I certainly have every right to declare my own motivation, when someone misrepresents it. And since my motivation is partly due to my training, it is completely proper to mention my training in that connection.
What would be improper would be to argue, from the fact that I have academic training, that warming has not happened or that CO2 plays only a small role in it, as if the mere fact of my training makes me an authority that people should agree with. But I never made such an argument on this page, as any reader of the exchange with Rumraket can see.
A good question to ask; and a question just as good to ask is: “Is a vast, global assertion about what “97% of scientists” believe or claim documented in the actual published words of 97% of scientists?” And it turned out that not only is there no evidence that 97% of scientists make this claim; not even 97% of climatologists make it. Only 97% of the one-third of climatologists who offered an opinion in one survey made it; and even the “adjusted” results from the desperate follow-up question have only 53% of the remaining 2/3 of climatologists in agreement, with a net number of well under 97% of the total. These are empirical facts from the survey results, confirmed by the survey people themselves.
So the “97% of scientists believe” claim is flushed right down the toilet. That’s what an empirically minded investigator would conclude about the claim.
@ Rumraket.
Footnote: I don’t think that Rumraket is actually trying to defend the specific claim made by BioLogos groupies, but only the more general claim that the majority of climatologists think that CO2 is a very large factor in global warming. (Though of course he has to adjust that phrase to “climate change” to deal with the embarrassing hiatus.) And I haven’t said that this view is wrong. But Rumraket chose to jump into a discussion about very specific claims made by BioLogos groupies some time back, and he should have known from my words that it was those very specific claims that I was objecting to. If he had wanted to distance himself from that debate, he could have easily done so at the outset, by saying something like: “I have no opinion on statements made by commenters on BioLogos years ago, and I’m not defending the claim that 97% of the world’s scientists think that virtually all of global warming is due to human-generated CO2. I do, however, think that most of the scientists (and I don’t insist on 97%, but it’s a majority) who know the most about climate think that CO2 is a very large factor in climate change.” If he had said something along these lines at the start, we could have avoided some unnecessary disagreement. Much of the quarrelling that takes place here is due to people jumping into other people’s debates without knowing the context, and taking a side without first ascertaining exactly what they will be perceived as defending.
“Eddie” has never claimed to have achieved a PhD. He’s just a “highly trained academic” who somehow managed to avoid that despite being so “highly trained.”
That hiatus ended many, many years ago. You seem not to have read the 2021 IPCC report. Or the 2018 Special Report. Or the 2014 AR5 Report.
The fact that you thought that a brief hiatus a decade ago is still meaningful today says a lot about the depth of your knowledge on the subject.
But you’ve always told us that you mostly care that dissenters be treated respectfully, so we can agree on that.
Respectfully,
Chris
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8 is not “many, many”, but I take your point. And I didn’t mean to imply that that hiatus was still in force; what I was suggesting is that the existence of a 15-year hiatus was one of the factors that led to the shift in terminology from “global warming” to “climate change.” If “climate change” rather than “global warming” is regarded as a “crisis”, then the “crisis” can be declared to still exist even in extended periods of relatively flat temperatures. Thus, for example, if next year the world enters into a five-year period of flat temperatures, alarmists will no longer feel the need to prove that there is current warming in order to insist that there is still a “climate crisis.”
Rhetorically, it was a stroke of genius to adopt the new terminology. It basically guarantees that alarmism can continue as a stance no matter what happens to the world’s temperature, indefinitely into the future. As long as climate is “changing” in some way, there is a “crisis”, and the existence of the “crisis” can never be falsified by any empirical observations. (Cf. the “multiverse.”)
And of course, if short-term crises legitimate extreme government action for short periods, then long-term crises legitimate extreme government action for very long periods. Which suits a certain sort of person – especially those most likely to wield extra power during those extended periods – bureaucrats, technocrats, university professors of climate science, politicians, ideological journalists, UN officials – just fine.
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This is flat out historically false. There was no change in terminology, the two terms have always been in use, and the “hiatus” had zero influence on the rate of usage.
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They are very relevant, because they provide a context to understand the vacuity of the reasons you state for your continued denial.
In fact there’s another study on the scope and breadth of the consensus that supports my argument, in fact by making effectively the same one:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002
Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming
John Cook et al 2016 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 048002
Abstract
The consensus that humans are causing recent global warming is shared by 90%–100% of publishing climate scientists according to six independent studies by co-authors of this paper. Those results are consistent with the 97% consensus reported by Cook et al ( Environ. Res. Lett . 8 024024) based on 11 944 abstracts of research papers, of which 4014 took a position on the cause of recent global warming. A survey of authors of those papers ( N = 2412 papers) also supported a 97% consensus. Tol (2016 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 048001) comes to a different conclusion using results from surveys of non-experts such as economic geologists and a self-selected group of those who reject the consensus. We demonstrate that this outcome is not unexpected because the level of consensus correlates with expertise in climate science. At one point, Tol also reduces the apparent consensus by assuming that abstracts that do not explicitly state the cause of global warming (‘no position’) represent non-endorsement, an approach that if applied elsewhere would reject consensus on well-established theories such as plate tectonics. We examine the available studies and conclude that the finding of 97% consensus in published climate research is robust and consistent with other surveys of climate scientists and peer-reviewed studies.
It should also be noted that the self-rating in the paper I linked is partially a test of whether the authors of papers with abstracts that don’t explicitly take a position on AGW should happen to contain a large fraction of rejecters or doubters. No such evidence was found and in fact, the data indicates that co-hort shows similar levels of support.
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Yes, both terms have always been in use, but in public discourse lately, e.g., in the speeches of politicians and advocacy groups, the term “global warming” is much less common (at least, in my neck of the woods) than it was ten years ago, and “climate change” is much more common. I used to read and hear almost daily of the “global warming crisis” or the “warming crisis”, but now it’s almost always the “climate crisis”.
You’re the guy who earlier argued that correlation, given appropriate circumstances, strongly suggested causality. I think it’s a rather amazing coincidence that “climate crisis” has replaced “global warming crisis” in so many speeches, writings, etc. since there has been a general acknowledgment that there can be years of relatively flat temperatures, despite CO2. I can’t prove the causality, however, so if you don’t think there’s a causal link, we’ll just leave it at that.
@Eddie you’re clearly coming to this debate with a lot of baggage, of which the fact that you are a conservative is an obvious and significant part. And I meant what I said earlier, I do think there are co-horts of the extreme left that have done themselves (or the science of climate change) no favors.
But we definitely can’t forget that there are also significant economic interests that have played a large part in propagating the viewpoint that both the idea of man-made climate change and the only possible response to it comes from and is global communism.
The geologist and journalist Peter Hatfield (potholer54) has a two-part video series on this problem, and the reality of possible conservative market solutions to climate change. Both are well worth watching for anyone interested in both the science, economics, and politics of climate change.
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Please demonstrate with data that this replacement has actually taken place. I want to see plots of usage over time where one stops(as in starts going down or tapers off and flattens), and the other takes off, and it’s degree and strength of correlation with the supposed hiatus.
And sources for the data used to create the plots.
The article you are now quoting is as specious in argumentation as the other one, and it’s even less honest, since at least in the other one the authors admitted that of the remaining 2/3, the percentage was only 53%, whereas this study is dishonestly trying to preserve the 97% number at any cost – obviously special pleading.
Further, note that even this article doesn’t say how much of warming is to be attributed to CO2. “Humans are causing recent global warming” is compatible with causing any percentage of global warming from 1 to 100. (I made this point to you before, but it didn’t sink in.) So at best, this article could establish that 97% of scientists think that some portion of global warming is attributable to humans. And the claim I was disputing – you keep ignoring the very clear context I established of an old conversation at BioLogos – was that 97% of “scientists” (not just climate scientists) claimed that all or almost all of global warming, i.e. somewhere around 90%, was due to human activity. So you keep throwing articles at me that don’t establish what you claim they establish, and even if they did, would not address the dispute I had with the drugstore cowboys over at BioLogos.
In any case, both of these studies are going about things entirely the wrong way, trying to use surveys of papers that aren’t explicitly on the topic of AGW as if they were direct polls of opinion. If you want to get a proper poll, then do a proper survey! Mail out a questionnaire to every scientist who has ever published, say, five or more peer-reviewed articles on climate-related subjects, and make the questions very direct, so as to elicit clear opinions. The exact questions would have to be given some thought, but they could include: Do you believe the earth has significantly warmed over the past 150 years? If so, by how much? Do you believe that any increased warming has been caused entirely by natural processes, entirely by human beings, or by a mixture of the two? If by a mixture, what are the relative weights of the human and nonhuman contributions? Etc. The questions could be set up with multiple choice answers if desired, with a final choice “Other (please specify)”. Also, if desired, there could be a final section where people were invited to write a paragraph or two of qualifying comments, caveats, etc. indicating their general concerns both about the setup of the survey and about typical distortions they have found in conversations about global warming. Once all the survey forms were returned, and counted, then, if enough people returned the forms to constitute a representative sample, one would have the directly stated views of climatologists, and would not have to rely on dubious inferences from silence. There would then be no room for doubt about whether the percentage of climatologists was 97 or some other number, and no room for doubt about the range of weights they gave to human contributions to warming.
That’s the way an honest scholar, as opposed to a culture warrior trying to defend a 97% figure at any cost, would try to ascertain what climate scientists thought about AGW. Let me know when someone has done such a direct opinion survey, and where I can get hold of it; I promise to read the results with great interest.
I have no intention of producing a demonstrative study for you. I live here in North America; you don’t. I daily listen to North American politicians, read North American newspapers, listen to the speeches of North American special interest groups, etc. I’m familiar with currents of language here in a way that you aren’t. And my admittedly unscientific conclusion, based on living here, is that the term “warming” is used much less often now (in activist contexts, I mean; I’m not talking about scientific research articles) than ten years ago, and that phrases stressing “climate change” rather than “warming” are now predominant. I can’t prove this to you, and if you don’t believe it, I really couldn’t care less what a Scandinavian who doesn’t have the feel of the culture here thinks. If you are so hung up on proving I’m wrong, do your own survey, and publish it.
As if you have none, and are just the dispassionate, objective scientist! Give me a break!
The problem is that you still have not acknowledged that I’m talking about a particular claim, made by a lot of loudmouth bloggers on BioLogos. That claim, which I repeat for the hard of hearing, is that 97% of “scientists” think that almost all global warming is caused by human beings, specifically by their CO2 emissions. No one of the people who made that claim could document it. They referred to a 97% number but didn’t have a clue where it came from. And nothing you have provided supports their claim. Your articles reference only “climate scientists” as oppose to “scientists” in general, and your articles do not specify what percentage of the warming humans are responsible for. Also, at least one of your two articles can’t get the number of scientists beyond about 67%, by its own admission, and the other one’s insistence on 97% is sustained only by specious BS that would fail Logic 101. You’re wasting your time by repeating the same data and arguments over and over again. If you have even the most elementary reading comprehension of the English language, you should be able to see that the claim made by the BioLogos groupies about “what 97% of scientists believe” was false. I’m not investing any more time clarifying for you what was already clear the first time I said it.
Ffs lol.
Again @Eddie I think you should watch the videos In linked above. A bit of an eye-opener in many respects, to people on both the right and the left of the climate change issue.
That’s a real classy response.
But I have not made any claim on this page about “the climate change issue”. I have discussed only the characterization of scientific opinion on the climate change issue. Our topic here, if you look at the top of the page is not “Is Climate Change Real?” or “Is AGW Real?” Our topic is “consensus science”, and the particular issue I focused on was a case where the “consensus” was inaccurately represented. I focused on whether certain people had accurately described "what climate scientists claim*. You keep wanting to change the topic to whether or not AGW claims are true. I have been contending over a literary question, a reporting question, a sociological question; you keep trying to draw me into a set of questions about warming, CO2, etc. If you want to discuss whether or not climate change is real, whether or not AGW is true, start your own thread specifically on that topic, and pull in whatever commenters you can. I won’t be there.
As one who is highly trained in being an American, I can assure you that Eddie is as out to lunch on this as he is in most things.
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I said “North American” and therefore was including the popular discourse of more than one country. But your unconscious, unreflective imperialism is worthy of note. I wonder how our psychiatrist friend in Toronto (well below latitude 54.40) will respond to it.