HOW MUCH REINFORCEMENT DOES THE CONSENSUS HAVE?
Plenty, four separate studies that I am aware of all arrive at the same conclusion, namely that 97% of climate scientists are in agreement that humans have caused some degree of warming.
WHENEVER SOMEONE CLAIMS THAT 97% OF CLIMATE SCIENTISTS ACCEPT AGW, SOME "SKEPTIC" WILL ALMOST ALWAYS COUNTER-CLAIM THAT THIS REPRESENTS ONE SURVEY OF 79 SCIENTISTS.
They do. Probably because this is the easiest survey to dismiss given the relatively small number of climate scientists represented. If the sample size runs into the thousands then it’s much harder to dismiss it as a statistical anomaly. Even so, the probability of any significant error is relatively small.
HOW MANY STUDIES, SURVEYS, ETC ARE YOU AWARE OF THAT SHOW SOMETHING ADEQUATELY SIMILAR TO THE 97% CLAIM?
? A study conducted by Peter Doran and Maggie Zimmerman in 2008 polled just over 10,000 earth scientists and received just over 3,000 responses. Amongst those responses were 77 climate scientists of which 75 (97%) stated “yes” to the question “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”
http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Dor...
? A year earlier Harris Interactive conducted a survey of members of the American Met Society and the American Geophysical Union, of the 489 people surveyed “Ninety-seven percent of the climate scientists surveyed believe “global average temperatures have increased” during the past century”.
http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_war...
? In 2010 Naomi Oreskes published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which she examined the work of 1,372 climate researches. The conclusion was that “97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC (Anthropogenic Climate Change) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers”.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/0...
? A recently published paper in Environmental Research Letters looked at 4,014 scientific papers that discussed the subject of global warming and concluded that “Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/...
WHY DO "SKEPTICS" KEEP CLAIMING THAT THE CONSENSUS IS PURELY AND ENTIRELY A RESULT OF ONE SMALL POLL?
Standard response, ignore everything that can’t be dismissed, pretend it doesn’t exist, and focus only on one small piece of a much larger picture.
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SOME ADDED COMMENTS
OTTAWA MIKE: If Obama said “97% of scientists…” then he’s wrong. Climate scientists – yes, scientists in general – no. I don’t know the figure for all scientists but it’s lower, perhaps about 80%. I know that meteorologists and geologists are the lowest at 50-something %.
JIM Z: You may have noticed that the notion of “catastrophic” warming is something the sceptics and alarmist media refer to, very few climate scientists talk in these terms. It’s not something I’ve ever reference as I don’t believe it will be catastrophic. And you must have noticed by now that I don’t advocate government mandated “solutions” and am opposed to tax increases and other financial impediments.
CORRECTION: I originally provided the wrong link for the Oreskes paper (now corrected). She did two studies, one in 2004 and one in 2010. I referenced the 2010 study and linked to the 2004 one.
The 2010 study is outlined above. In 2004 Orsekes looked at the content of 928 climate papers and divided them into six categories (endorsement of GW, impacts, mitigation, methodology, paleoclimate and rejection of GW). 75% fell into the first three categories, 25% into the next two, none rejected GW.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/57...
Apologies for any misunderstanding or inconvenience.
"why do "skeptics" keep claiming that the consensus is purely and entirely a result of one small poll? "
That's not what I claim. I claim the wording of the consensus is twisted by those who wish to wield it like a hammer. Let's look at you first. You say:
"... there is a scientific consensus that global warming is 1. happening, and 2. caused primarily or entirely by humans?"
Here are the two questions from the Doran consensus study:
1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or
remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
So you can see how your 2. does not match. Even worse, President Obama tweeted: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”
"Dangerous" doesn't appear in any consensus study I am aware of. It is just thrown in. And since Obama says it, it can now be repeated in the media.
Again, my claim is that 97% of climate scientists believe it has been warming since the Industrial Revolution and that man has had a significant contribution through not only CO2 emissions but land use change and general urbanization and waste heat energy from industrial activity.
That number includes virtually all skeptics (except for the 3% outliers). You're not going to convince anybody who has any knowledge on this topic that this effort isn't just misinformation.
If more people had these details, the warming side would be in even more trouble than they are now as far as trust goes.
The warmers continuously say to skeptics "That's not what was said or what he/she said" and yet are quite happy to let this confusion about the consensus continue to merrily roll along. Color me not impressed.
Wikipedia is a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveys_of_...
Trevor is close but I think Oreskes (2004) only claimed 75% and Doran and Zimmerman was published in January 2009. He is also right that Doran and Zimmerman is the easiest to debunk. The Environmental Research Letters paper by Cook et al (2013) http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/... actually looked at the abstracts of about 12,000 papers.
Not many surveys actually surveyed the scientists. Most counted papers in some way. So if the sceptic claim is true (see climategate) that the peer review process is being used to suppress the publication of sceptic papers then those results will have a bias towards the alarmist view.
The first point to note is that the question asked is relevant. The Harris survey said: "The survey found 97% agreed that global temperatures have increased during the past 100 years; ..." That would include people like Lindzen, Spencer, Singer and even me. How does that help the warmist argument? More importantly, who were the 3% that think it has not warmed?
The Cook et al (2013) survey found only 65 papers out of about 12,000 that claimed that man was mainly responsible on the other hand a "massive" 78 of abstracts rejected AGW. Don't believe me: check!
Why would all but the brainwashed believe anything that survey claimed? Why was Brandon Shollenberger threatened by the University of Queensland when he tried to investigate the results when using publicly available data? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/18/sh... Why has Professor Tol of Sussex University not been able to get hold of the data for checking?
If you think you should not check the results then I have a survey that shows that 100% of people all agree with me about GW! I may also have a bridge for sale.
I always pick up on this subject because it is a good way of finding out the true sceptics. If you don't bother to look at the papers or read any reviews of them then you are probably not worth believing on other matters either.
There seems to be several pieces of evidence that support this number and virtually nothing that contradicts it. If there was a poll that showed something wildly different from 97%, you would think that the "skeptics" would asked a few thousand questions about it. The only one I've seen is one where they not only include scientists from unrelated fields, they also include engineers.
From personal experience, I've always thought it was somewhat less than that, but still greater than 90%
That's not the right question. Even I believe global warming is happening and humans are substantially to blame. Putting 30 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year is bound to have an effect.
I am skeptical of the claim that warming will be sufficiently large that it will cause major environmental disruption, and only a radical reduction in CO2 will head off catastrophe. I think the scientific community has demonstrated that they really don't understand climate dynamics well enough to make such a prediction.
"why do "skeptics" keep claiming that the consensus is purely and entirely a result of one small poll? "
That's the heart of the matter.
Several times I've heard, "It only takes 1 Einstein to ...."
They're really not interested in anything other than having the government not do anything that doesn't benefit them directly.
That's global warming, welfare, unemployment insurance, minimum wage, etc.
You're not going to get 'em to change.
They not interested in information, or science, or the truth.
They're only interested in themselves.
Themselves, this year.
You just can't fix that.
Consensus? Another attempt at misinformation by alarmist (environmental) science. Dana investigated this matter a while back and found that only 32.6% of all climate scientists adhere to the "alarming aspect" of climate change. Most all of these scientists are environmental zealots looking to profit (not necessarily monetarily) from "changing things" as they currently stand. Most of the rest of the 2/3rds of scientists have no opinion on the "catastrophic" effects of higher CO2 levels.
The 97% figure comes from the actual deniers (man has no effect at all) vs. these environmental zealots (the 32.6%) who claim catastrophes are on the horizon if we don't do anything to mitigate it..
Denialists love to talk about the 31,000 scientists who signed the Petition Project, even though the only qualification to sign the Petition Project was a degree in science.
http://www.petitionproject.org/qualifica...
It is tempting to say that I trust 79 actual experts rather than 31,000 university graduates who may not have set foot in a lab since they discovered that they could make money in business, but in science, the real evidence, is, well, evidence.
Global warming is happening
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010...
And we are causing it
http://c1planetsavecom.wpengine.netdna-c...
The ten warmest years in the instrumental record are 2010, 2005, 2009, 2007, 2002, 1998, 2006, 2003, 2011 and 2012.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs...
The "Denier" and it is "denier" as there is value in actual skepticism, is based on claiming there is some small doubt hence the entire concept is highly in doubt. Indeed science and even scientific community consensus is based on exploring skepticism of concepts presented in peer review journals and aside from the limited polls as all polls are but a sample of the population, the peer review journals represent the contributions of all active researchers. In respected peer review journals, you will not see the "denier" but you will see them cite references from journals that are not respected peer review journals, that tells you more about the scientific population than a poll does and it strongly says the general respected community of active researchers are convinced through explorations of their own skepticism, that global warming is occurring.
Trevor provides a question
“Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”
Notice there isn't word one about catastrophic warming. There isn't word one about the need for the government to mandate all sorts of "solutions" loved by the left. Notice that it doesn't even mention warming. You might think TREVOR writing in capitals might notice those glaring omissions.
Whenever someone claims that 97% of climate scientists accept AGW, some "skeptic" will almost always counter-claim that this represents one survey of 79 scientists.
How many studies, surveys, etc are you aware of that show something adequately similar to the 97% claim? (I'd accept anything substantially over 90%) How much other reinforcement are you aware of for the idea that there is a scientific consensus that global warming is 1. happening, and 2. caused primarily or entirely by humans? And if, as I suspect, you can come up with many other examples, why do "skeptics" keep claiming that the consensus is purely and entirely a result of one small poll?
it's completely ridiculous to assume there is a huge conspiracy going on in the world's scientific community.
Most Deniers are Conservatives and most Conservatives are Conspiracy Freaks
Trevor gives you:
Oreskes, 2004: study of 928 climate science abstracts, zero reject consensus
Doran & Zimmerman, 2008: poll of 77 climate scientists, 97% consensus
STATS survey: poll of 489 scientists, 97% consensus
Cook et al, 2013: study of over 4,000 abstracts written by over 10,000 scientists, 97% consensus
There is also:
Vision Prize: poll of 100-200 scientists, depending on question. About 90% went for human activity is "primary cause" of warming over past 250 years, about 10% went for "secondary cause", 0% went for "no influence". Those choosing "primary cause" had, on average, a h-index of 12, versus those who selected "secondary cause". H-index is a measure of scientist performance.
http://www.visionprize.com/
Anderegg et al: public statements by 1,372 climate scientists. 97-98% consensus. Those who endorsed the consensus were more widely-cited. Generally, being widely-cited is an indicator that your work is better.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/0...
It's difficult to compare sometimes, because they ask different questions. Cook et al asks whether most of the recent global warming is man made, while one of the Vision Prize questions considers warming over 250 years.
EDIT: graphicconception talks about Cook et al. All of the data required to check the study is publicly available. Data that allows personal identification is not required. The 1,300 or so scientists who responded about their own papers did so under an expectation of anonymity, which is typically required for ethics approval in research. This personal data was stolen in a hack by blogger Brandon Schollenberger.
Cook et al. found almost 4,000 studies by over 10,000 scientists that discussed the cause of recent global warming. Over 97% said that it's mostly man-made. It was possible to select 3 different 'levels' of endorsement or rejection, to represent how explicit the statement was. 2,000 papers were also rated by the scientists who wrote the papers. In both cases the result was 97% consensus, but the scientists were much more 'explicit'. In 2,000 papers, the scientists said that over 200 responses for the most-explicit kind of endorsement. This is almost never mentioned by critics of the study, and it shows that the Cook et al. team were 'conservative' in their ratings.
The difference can be explained by how the Cook et al. team looked at the abstracts, or summaries, while the scientists considered the whole paper, which contains more information. Cook et al identified a ~97% consensus among 10,000 scientists, but if the scientists' own responses are representative then there are many more scientists involved, and their research states much more explicitly that recent global warming is man-made.
See trevor. You also can read summaries on wikipedia, climate surveys.
