Myth of "Consensus Science" Explodes, APS reverses stance

[F8L]

Originally Posted by icarus

I still think you are wrong however in your opinion of climate change. I urge you to read "The weathermakers" by Tim Flannery.

Icarus

I'm not sure I'd use Mr. Flannery as a good resource for information. He doesn't have the best reputation for such things if I remember correctly. I could be thinking of someone else though.

[Zythryn]

Tim, honest question here as I am not sure what I remember is correct.
In your research, have you seen what the difference is between the last ice age and now in terms of global temp?
As I recall, it is a relatively small amount.
This begs the question, is even a small temperature difference more significant than you are giving it credit for?
Not saying it is, just wondering if you have considered that angle?

[TimBikes]

Originally Posted by Zythryn

Tim, honest question here as I am not sure what I remember is correct.
In your research, have you seen what the difference is between the last ice age and now in terms of global temp?
As I recall, it is a relatively small amount.
This begs the question, is even a small temperature difference more significant than you are giving it credit for?
Not saying it is, just wondering if you have considered that angle?

I'm not sure it is necessarily relevant in proving / disproving any aspect of AGW. But, I'm not sure if I know what angle you are getting at. Please feel free to comment back / clarify.

[MegansPrius]

Originally Posted by TimBikes

Oh no. Not the 928 papers again. Do we have to debunk that nonsense again?

First of all, Oreskes is a professor in the dept. of History at UCSD, not a climatologist. Secondly, her "paper" was an opinion piece, not a peer reviewed article. Third, "On 15 December 2004, she [Oreskes] admitted that there was indeed a serious mistake in her Science essay." Basically, she missed about 11,000 papers in her "comprehensive search". Fourth, of the 928 papers she did happen to include, "only 13 (or 0.1%) explicitly endorse the 'consensus view'." Looks like maybe she had a problem with the decimal point.

See link.

Do we have to debunk your debunking again? Your link is to a 2005 post about Benny Peiser.

I mean, Benny Peiser.

We did this over a year ago.

But since there is never an end, evidently, to the posting in anti-GW misinformation, I'll repost my reply.


From the ABC Australia Web site:

In fact over the last year and half since Benny Peiser wrote up his results, he's backed away from those claims.
Peiser now admits he didn't check the same articles that Naomi Oreskes used.
"Which is why I no longer maintain this particular criticism. In addition, some of the abstracts that I included in the 34 "reject or doubt" category are very ambiguous and should not have been included."
— Email from Benny Peiser to Media Watch

Read Benny Peiser's response to Media Watch's questions (http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/tra...ep38peiser.pdf)

So how many of the 34 articles does Benny Peiser stand by?

How many really "reject or doubt" the scientific consensus for man-made global warming?

Well when we first contacted him two weeks ago he told us...

"Only [a] few abstracts explicitly reject or doubt the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) consensus which is why I have publicly withdrawn this point of my critique."— Email from Benny Peiser to Media Watch

And when we pressed him to provide the names of the articles, he eventually conceded - there was only one.
(Ad Hoc Committee on Global Climate Issues: Annual report, by Gerhard LC and Hanson BM, AAPG Bulletin 84 (4): 466-471 Apr 2000) <<

By the way, the AAPG bulletin is the publication of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

"I do not think anyone is questioning that we are in a period of global warming. Neither do I doubt that the overwhelming majority of climatologists is agreed that the current warming period is mostly due to human impact."
— Email from Benny Peiser to Media Watch, 12th October, 2006

In the interests of flogging dead horses and putting this to rest, a thorough evaluations of Peiser's study (who, it should be remembered, is a social anthropologist, not a climate scientist) have been done by several other websites and reveals that it did NOT replicate the prior study that it criticized:

From http://norvig.com/oreskes.html:
>>Benny Peiser attempted to replicate the study, and found 34 articles that "reject or doubt" the consensus view--that is, 3% rather than the 0% that Oreskes found in her sample. Note that Peiser has altered Oreskes' original category from "reject" to "reject or doubt" so it is logically possible that both are correct. <<

You can judge for yourself if you're really bored at work and read an entire list of Peiser's "reject or doubt climate change" abstracts in full at http://timlambert.org/2005/05/peiser/

If you don't want to read all 34, consider the one below, which Peiser claims "rejects or doubts" global warming; the abstract clearly "reject(s) or doubt(s)" the idea that greenhouse warming could cause more frequent or more severe hurricanes -- but it explicitly assumes global warming because of CO2. (credit http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/archives/001721.html).

Global Climate-Change and Tropical Cyclones
Lighthill J, Holland G, Gray W, Landsea C, Craig G, Evans J, Kurihara Y, Guard C Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 75 (11): 2147-2157 Nov 1994
Abstract: This paper offers an overview of the authors’ studies during a specialized international symposium (Mexico, 22 November-1 December 1993) where they aimed at making an objective assessment of whether climate changes, consequent on an expected doubling of atmospheric CO2 in the next six or seven decades, are likely to increase significantly the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones (TC). Out of three methodologies available for addressing the question they employ two, discarding the third for reasons set out in the appendix. In the first methodology, the authors enumerate reasons why, in tropical oceans, the increase in sea surface temperature (SST) suggested by climate change models might be expected to affect either (i) TC frequency, because a well-established set of six conditions for TC formation include a condition that SST should exceed 26 degrees C, or (ii) TC intensity, because this is indicated by thermodynamic analysis to depend critically on the temperature at which energy transfer to air near the sea surface takes place. But careful study of both suggestions indicates that the expected effects of increased SST would be largely self-limiting (i) because the other five conditions strictly control how far the band of latitudes for TC formation can be further widened, and (ii) because intense winds at the sea surface may receive their energy input at a temperature significantly depressed by evaporation of spray, and possibly through sea surface cooling. In the second methodology, the authors study available historical records that have very large year-to-year variability in TC statistics. They find practically no consistent statistical relationships with temperature anomalies; also, a thorough analysis of how the El Nino-Southern Oscillation cycle influences the frequency acid distribution of TCs shows any direct effects of local SST changes to be negligible. The authors conclude that, even though the possibility of some minor indirect effects of global warming on TC frequency and intensity cannot be excluded, they must effectively be "swamped" by large natural variability.

For a quick summary: Benny Peiser - SourceWatch
or Benny Peiser | DeSmogBlog


Furthermore, your claim that the Oreskes article is "opinion" is a bit confounding. It was published as an Essay and not under the editorial section of the magazine.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vo...5702/index.dtl

She did not "miss" any articles; there was simply a misprint in the keywords in the article as published, as noted in the correction. (reproduced from the Science website).

ERRATUM

CO R R E C T I O N S A N D C L A R I F I C AT I O N S

Essays: “The scientific consensus on climate change” by N. Oreskes (3 Dec.

2004, p. 1686). The final sentence of the fifth paragraph should read “That hypothesis
was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific
journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the
keywords ‘global climate change’ (9).” The keywords used were “global climate

change,” not “climate change.”

The attacks on Oreskes are, quite simply, weak.
Who 'Framed' Naomi Oreskes? | DeSmogBlog

[Zythryn]

Tim, the reason I ask is that you have stated (paraphrasing here) that you don't know/believe that the amount of warming that is going on is significant.
This is a good question, how much warming would become a significant issue.
So, if we had an example of what magnitude tempereature swing it takes to go from ice age to where we are currently, that could give us a VERY rough idea of how serious the current trend is.
I hesitate to say as my memory isn't the best and I have no idea where I once heard what the temp difference was. I was wondering if you had or had seen this information. My suspiscion is it is not very much.

[TimBikes]

Originally Posted by MegansPrius

Furthermore, your claim that the Oreskes article is "opinion" is a bit confounding. It was published as an Essay and not under the editorial section of the magazine.
Science/AAAS | Table of Contents: 3 December 2004; 306 (5702)

So is her "essay" peer reviewed, Scott? Isn't that your standard?

[TimBikes]

Originally Posted by Zythryn

Tim, the reason I ask is that you have stated (paraphrasing here) that you don't know/believe that the amount of warming that is going on is significant.
This is a good question, how much warming would become a significant issue.
So, if we had an example of what magnitude tempereature swing it takes to go from ice age to where we are currently, that could give us a VERY rough idea of how serious the current trend is.
I hesitate to say as my memory isn't the best and I have no idea where I once heard what the temp difference was. I was wondering if you had or had seen this information. My suspiscion is it is not very much.

I don't have a direct answer to your question - I would have to look.

But keep in mind that during the last 100 years temps rose about 0.6 degrees C, with roughly half of that increase happening before around 1945. So even if you attribute the remaining 0.3 C degrees C entirely to CO2, this is well below what Hansen claims is "Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference". But as NASA/JPL has noted, most of the 1980s and 1990s were a PDO warm phase, so it is quite unlikely that the 0.3 C increase of the 20th century is all - or even mostly, attributable to CO2.

Now, temps could of course rise in the future - it's really anyone's guess. But since we have now entered a PDO cool phase according to NASA, continued temperature increases, at least for the next decade or two that such phases typically last, is unlikely.

For these reasons, among others, I don't believe we are at risk from AGW.

[TimBikes]

Originally Posted by MegansPrius

You can judge for yourself if you're really bored at work and read an entire list of Peiser's "reject or doubt climate change" abstracts in full at http://timlambert.org/2005/05/peiser/

BTW, I find it interesting that the only climatologist that posted on Tim Lambert had this to say:

"Dr. Johnson Says:

1. October 19th, 2005 at 2:48 am The paleoclimatic research does not speak to the current, short term temp and CO2 swings and the theory of human CO2 induced climate chnage because that is not their purpose or theory. But it is obvious that any paleoclimatologist, when asked (and I know many since I are one)would tell you the earth has had numerous swings of large magnitude, and thus the current situation is a tempest in a tea pot, promoted by politically motivated persons, not sound, rigourous science, since the internal data inconsistency is too large and unexplained to have any level of confidence in the cause-effect couplet. If you want to see large swings in CO2 data, go to the IPCC 2001 Technical Summary and look on page 40, there the Vostok ice cores are shown (again fairly recent data) but the longer term data from geochemical analysis of just the past few hundred million years shows the large swings in recent past (please remember the earth is 4.5 billion years old)..."

Thanks for the link.

[MegansPrius]

Originally Posted by TimBikes

So is her "essay" peer reviewed, Scott? Isn't that your standard?

Yes, it is. Again, this information is not hard to find.

Here's a copy of Science magazine's submission guidelines for authors:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/issue_...f/319/5863.pdf
or
Science/AAAS: Science Magazine: About the Journal: Information for Authors: General Information for Authors

By their categories, an "essay" falls into the Education Forum. Only letters go through a different process.

As I sometimes submit scientific manuscripts for my work, I went to Science's website and to access the online submission process so you can see for yourself. If one were to submit an "essay" for the Education Forum, one would see the attached screens. These are the usual things ones sees when submitting a scientific manusript, namely, a list of editors to select from and a place to enter the names of peers to review the work.

[MegansPrius]

post deleted--duplicate