(Hat-tip to Heisenberg’s Revenge via ACE OF SPADES) In this updated “Fact Check” video from the Climate Discussion Nexus, Dr. John Robson investigates the unsound origins and fundamental inaccuracy, even dishonesty, of the claim that 97% of scientists, or “the world’s scientists”, or something agree that climate change is man-made, urgent and dangerous.
THE PIPELINE!….Here’s an excerpt, which examines the sleight of hand at the heart of the “97 percent” claim:
In 2009, a pair of researchers at the University of Illinois sent an online survey to over 10,000 Earth scientists asking two simple questions: Do you agree that global temperatures have generally risen since the pre-1800s? and Do you think that human activity is a significant contributing factor? They asked some other questions too, but didn’t report the questions or results in the publication. They didn’t single out greenhouse gases, they didn’t explain what the term “significant” meant, and they didn’t refer to danger or crisis.
So what was the result? Of the 3,146 responses they received, 90 percent said yes to the first question, that global temperatures had risen since the Little Ice Age, and only 82 percent said yes to the second, that human activity was a significant contributing factor. Interestingly, among meteorologists only 64 percent said yes to the second, meaning a third of the experts in the study of weather patterns who replied didn’t think humans play a significant role in global warming, let alone a dominant one. What got the most media attention was that among the 77 respondents who described themselves as climate experts, 75 said yes to the second question. 75 out of 77 is 97 percent.
OK, it didn’t get any media attention that they took 77 out of 3,146 responses. But that’s the key statistical trick. They found a 97 percent consensus among 2 percent of the survey respondents. And even so it was only that there’d been some warming since the 1800s, which virtually nobody denies, and that humans are partly responsible. These experts didn’t say it was dangerous or urgent, because they weren’t asked.
Furthermore:
Another survey appeared in 2013, by Australian researcher John Cook and his coauthors, in which they claimed to have examined about 12,000 scientific papers related to climate change, and found that 97 percent endorsed the consensus view that greenhouse gases were at least partly responsible for global warming. This study generated headlines around the world, and it was the one to which Obama’s tweet was referring. But here again, appearances were deceiving.
Two-thirds of the papers that Cook and his colleagues examined expressed no view at all on the consensus. Of the remaining 34 percent, the authors claimed that 33 percent endorsed the consensus. Divide 33 by 34 and you get 97 percent. But this result is essentially meaningless, because they set the bar so low. The survey authors didn’t ask if climate change was dangerous or “manmade.” They only asked if a given paper accepted that humans have some effect on the climate, which as already noted is uncontroversial….
So a far better question would be: How many of the studies claimed that humans have caused most of the observed global warming? And oddly, we do know. Because buried in the authors’ data was the answer: A mere 64 out of nearly 12,000 papers! That’s not 97 percent, it’s one half of one percent. It’s one in 200.
97 Percent of scientists believe in catastrophic human caused climate change? Of course not! But far too many believe this ridiculous statement that defies basic logic and observation. (Can you think of any highly-political issue where you could get even 65% agreement?) The 97% Myth has succeeded in fooling many people because the phony number is repeated over and over again by those who have a financial and/or ideological stake in the outcome. By the way, what any scientist “believes’ doesn’t matter anyway. Science is what happens during rigorous and repeated experimentation.
**Regrettably, a graphic error appears on this video from 1:31 to 1:42. The percentage of climate studies that explicitly claim most of the recent warming is manmade was listed as “.03%” when it should have been “.3%”. The narration says “less than one-percent”, which is accurate. While the graphic is incorrect, the point being made is still completely valid. The “97%” mantra is a wildly inaccurate myth being cynically used to scare an unwary public.
The Supreme Court of British Columbia recently dismissed a defamation lawsuit by celebrity climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann against global warming skeptic climatologist Dr. Tim Ball. Mann must pay the full legal costs to the defendant. The ruling is explosive because it means that Ball’s claim that Mann was a scientific fraudster is now supported by the court. (ZERO HEDGE)
A guy named Fred Ricardo will hop on my Facebook Page for this site once in a while and post nonsense… none of it his own, he merely links to items others have written without defending any portion of it. This gives me an opportunity to update an issue (Fred keeps linking to as fact) discussed in the past. That is, the HOCKEY STICK.
The EPOCH TIMES had the best lead up to the decision… but here is a good reckoning by POWERLINE:
Some years ago, Dr. Tim Ball wrote that climate scientist Michael Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn State.” At issue was Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph that purported to show a sudden and unprecedented 20th century warming trend. The hockey stick featured prominently in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001), but has since been shown to be wrong. The question, in my view, is whether it was an innocent mistake or deliberate fraud on Mann’s part. (Mann, I believe, continues to assert the accuracy of his debunked graph.) Mann sued Ball for libel in 2011. Principia Scientific now reports that the court in British Columbia has dismissed Mann’s lawsuit with prejudice, and assessed costs against him.
What happened was that Dr. Ball asserted a truth defense. He argued that the hockey stick was a deliberate fraud, something that could be proved if one had access to the data and calculations, in particular the R2 regression analysis, underlying it. Mann refused to produce these documents. He was ordered to produce them by the court and given a deadline. He still refused to produce them, so the court dismissed his case.
The rules of discovery provide that a litigant must make available to opposing parties documents that reasonably bear on the issues in the case. Here, it is absurd for Mann to sue Ball for libel, and then refuse to produce the documents that would have helped to show whether Ball’s statement about him–he belongs in the state pen–was true or false. The logical inference is that the R2 regression analysis and other materials, if produced, would have supported Ball’s claim that the hockey stick was a deliberate fraud on Mann’s part.
Mann says that his lawyers are considering an appeal. He can appeal to his heart’s content, but there is not a court in North America that will allow a libel case to proceed where the plaintiff refuses to produce the documents that may show whether the statements made about him were true or false.
Mann responded to the dismissal of his lawsuit in typically mean-spirited and dishonest fashion: “The dismissal involved the alleged exercise of a discretion on [sic] the Court to dismiss a lawsuit for delay.” The dismissal was for failure to obey a court order, and the delay went on for eight years……
Other stories regarding this are here:
WUWT: “UPDATE – Dr. Tim Ball wins @MichaelEMann lawsuit – Mann “hides the decline” AGAIN
BREITBART: Michael ‘Hide the Decline’ Mann Loses Defamation Lawsuit
AMERICAN THINKER: Michael Mann, creator of the infamous global warming ‘hockey stick,’ loses lawsuit against climate skeptic, ordered to pay defendant’s costs
CLIMATE DISPATCH: Breaking: Dr. Tim Ball Defeats Michael ‘Hockey Stick’ Mann’s Climate Lawsuit
Yes, that graph has no evidence to support it. And, not only that, but NASA is being challenged legally to review and change their position on the 97% “consensus” often cited (by Fred as well). THE NEWS TALKERS notes the challenge:
“The claim that 97% of climate scientists believe humans are the primary cause of global warming is simply false,” CEI attorney Devin Watkins said in a statement. “That figure was created only by ignoring many climate scientists’ views, including those of undecided scientists. It is time that NASA correct the record and present unbiased figures to the public.”
On Tuesday, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) sent NASA a formal complaint, asking the agency to withdraw the false claim that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that humans are the primary cause of global warming and climate change. The 2013 study purporting to demonstrate that number was fatally flawed and proved no such thing.
“The claim that 97% of climate scientists believe humans are the primary cause of global warming is simply false,” CEI attorney Devin Watkins said in a statement. “That figure was created only by ignoring many climate scientists’ views, including those of undecided scientists. It is time that NASA correct the record and present unbiased figures to the public.”
According to the CEI complaint , NASA’s decision to repeat the false claim violated the Information Quality Act (IQA). Specifically, NASA claimed that “[n]inety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.” The claim appears on the NASA website on the page “Climate Change: How Do We Know?”
….Mann, who poses as a climatologist at Penn State, has had his court case against genuine climate scientist Dr. Tim Ball dismissed, with Mann ordered to pay court costs, for failure to produce supporting evidence to prove his claim that global temperatures took a sharp upward turn when the Industrial Revolution and fossil-fuel use began pouring CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
He didn’t because he can’t, and the fact is that the global warning he speaks of is Mann-made, a fantasy based on a career of perpetrating climate fraud, as indicated by NOAA’s report that there hasn’t been any U.S. warming for nearly a decade and a half and maybe even beyond that.
As noted by James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, in a piece for Real Clear Energy:
When American climate alarmists claim to have witnessed the effects of global warming, they must be referring to a time beyond 14 years ago. That is because there has been no warming in the United States since at least 2005, according to updated data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
In January 2005, NOAA began recording temperatures at its newly built U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). USCRN includes 114 pristinely maintained temperature stations spaced relatively uniformly across the lower 48 states. NOAA selected locations that were far away from urban and land-development impacts that might artificially taint temperature readings…
There is also good reason to believe U.S. temperatures have not warmed at all since the 1930s. Raw temperature readings at the preexisting stations indicate temperatures are the same now as 80 years ago. All of the asserted U.S. warming since 1930 is the product of the controversial adjustments made to the raw data.
The use of properly positioned temperature recording stations coupled with satellite data, a relatively recent innovation that covers the whole Earth, has given us a more realistic picture than computer models that can’t even predict the past and fraudulently manipulate raw data from dubious sources.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts documented the inaccuracy of old weather station data used by NASA on his SurfaceStations.org website.
Watts said that “90 percent of them don’t meet (the government’s) old, simple rule called the ‘100-foot rule” for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence.”
Many of the U.S. stations were in locations such as paved driveways, near rooftop exhaust vents, even near idling jet engines.
In 2016, Mann testified before the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee that actual data didn’t really matter because we could actually see climate change happening.
The Washington Times noted both his appearance and at least one contradiction to his claims based, not on computer models, but on actual empirical observation:
Leading climate doomsayer Michael Mann recently downplayed the importance of climate change science, telling Democrats that data and models “increasingly are unnecessary” because the impact is obvious…
Mr. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, spoke before the committee June 17 in Phoenix… Mr. Mann told the panel that “the signal of climate change is no longer subtle, it is obvious,” citing hurricanes, flooding in Texas and South Carolina, the California drought and “record heat” in Arizona.
Skeptics have hotly challenged the link between rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and “extreme weather” events, noting, for example, that hurricane activity is on the decline.
A nine-year “hurricane drought” of Category 3 storms starting in 2006 beat the previous mark of eight years from 1861-1868, the longest such streak since such recording began in 1851, according to a May 2015 study by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Mann has proven adept over his career at making controversial, no, fraudulent adjustments made to the raw data.
Mann might be remembered as one of the participants in what Investor’s Business Daily dubbed a “tree-ring circus” — the Climategate scandal.
Mann was at the heart of the Climate-gate scandal in 2009, when emails were unearthed from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. In one email sent to Mann and others, CRU director Philip Jones speaks of the “trick” of filling in gaps of data in order to hide evidence of temperature decline:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline (in global temperatures),” the email read.
It was that attempt to “hide the decline” through the manipulation of data that helped bring down the global warming house of cards.
The graph created by professor Mann and his colleagues carefully selected and manipulated tree-ring data to supposedly prove that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts — in a pattern resembling a hockey stick — in the 20th century due to man-made greenhouse gases. Mann et al. performed the neat trick of making the Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850) statistically disappear.
The graph relied on data from trees on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. Here, too, the results were carefully selected. Just 12 trees from the 252 cores in the CRU’s Yamal data set were used. A larger data set of 34 tree cores from the vicinity showed no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages. They were not included.
“Hiding the decline” and any actual evidence that global warming hype was nothing more an attempt by climate change scammers to impose what has become a religion.
MIT Professor Richard Lindzen is quoted in the Daily Caller questioning the tenets of this new religion:
Throughout history, governments have twisted science to suit a political agenda. Global warming is no different, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions,” writes Lindzen in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons…
Lindzen compares global warming to past politicized scientific movements: the eugenics movement in the early 20th Century and Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However, the MIT professor argues that global warming goes even beyond what these past movements in terms of twisting science.
“Global Warming has become a religion,” writes Lindzen. “A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint.”
The goal is to use climate change as a means to increase government power over every aspect of our lives, what we make, how we make it, what energy we use, what cars we drive, even what food we eat…..
“How often do we hear,” Baudet says, “that 97% of scientists agree that humans are the cause of climate change; that this climate change is severe, posing a major threat to the planet; and that we need a drastic reduction in our carbon dioxide emissions.”
“All of this, and I do mean all of it, is false. It’s a blatant lie that 97% of scientists agree with it. In reality, only 1.6% agree with [those] statements,” he goes on, after which he explains that there are major disagreements on this among climatologists, geologists, chemists, physicians, and so on.
“This myth” about the 97% was famously propagated by former U.S. President Barack Obama. “On May 16, 2013, he posted, and I quote,” Baudet explains, “’97 percent of scientists agree, climate change is real, manmade and dangerous.’ With this tweet, Obama referred to a paper published the same year by a man named John Cook.”
And that’s where it goes wrong. Because Cook is a “controversial” climate activist who even runs a ridiculous alarmist website called scepticalscience.com. “In this paper, he aims to demonstrate an overwhelming scientific consensus with the obvious intention of strengthening the environmentalist cause. To do so he analyzed 12,000 articles published in learned journals containing the words ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change.’ He then subdivided these articles into seven different categories.”
…According to the CEI complaint, NASA’s decision to repeat the false claim violated the Information Quality Act (IQA). Specifically, NASA claimed that “[n]inety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.” The claim appears on the NASA website on the page “Climate Change: How Do We Know?”
The study is fundamentally dishonest, as the CEI complaint explains. The study analyzed all published peer-reviewed academic research papers from 1991 to 2011 that use the terms “global warming” or “global climate change.” The study placed the papers into seven categories: explicit endorsement with quantification, saying humans are responsible for 50+ percent of climate change; explicit endorsement without quantification; implicit endorsement; no position or uncertain; implicit rejection; explicit rejection with qualification; and explicit rejection without qualification.
The study found: 64 papers had explicitly endorsed anthropogenic global warming (AGW) with quantification (attributing at least half of climate change to humans); 922 papers had explicitly endorsed AGW without quantifying how much humans contribute; 2,910 papers had implicitly endorsed AGW; 7,930 papers did not state a position and 40 papers were uncertain; 54 papers implicitly rejected AGW by affirming the possibility that natural causes explain climate change; 15 papers explicitly rejected AGW without qualification; and 9 papers explicitly rejected AGW with quantification, saying human contributions to global warming are negligible.
So how did Cook and his team come up with the 97 percent number? They added up the first three categories (3,896 papers), compared them to the last three categories (78 papers) and the papers expressing uncertainty (40 papers), and completely ignored the nearly 8,000 papers that did not state a position.
Of the papers Cook’s team characterized as stating a position, 97 percent (3,896 of the 4,014 papers) favored the idea of man-made global warming.
See the problem? The study completely discounted the majority of the papers it analyzed (66.4 percent — 7,930 of the 11,944 papers analyzed). With those papers included, only 32.6 percent of the papers explicitly or implicitly endorsed AGW (3,896 of 11,944 papers).
But it gets worse. Many of the scientists who wrote the original papers Cooks’ team analyzed complained that this study mischaracterized their research.
The survey “included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral,” complained Dr. Richard Tol, professor of the economics of climate change at Vrije Universiteit.
He argued that of the 112 omitted papers, only 1 strongly endorses man-made global warming.
“That is not an accurate representation of my paper,” wrote geography Ph.D. Craig Idso. “Nope … it is not an accurate representation,” Nir Shaviv, associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote.
Ph.D. physicist Nicola Scafetta complained that “Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AAGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission.”
Cook’s team categorized his paper as one that “explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%.” Scafetta countered, “What my papers say is that the IPCC view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun.”
Even including Scafetta’s incorrectly categorized study, Cook’s team only found 64 papers that explicitly endorsed man-made global warming and attributed more than 50 percent of it to human activity. That represents a minuscule 0.5 percent of the 11,944 papers. Even excluding the 66.4 percent of the papers that did not take a position, the 50 percent plus approach only accounts for 1.6 percent of all papers in the Cook study…..
Here is the previous post… UPDATED last on November, 2018:
NEW VIDEO:
See the quotes of the scientists who’s papers were characterized wrongly at, WATTS UP WITH THAT
It is becoming clear that not only do many scientists dispute the asserted global warming crisis, but these skeptical scientists may indeed form a scientific consensus.
Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.
The survey results show geoscientists (also known as earth scientists) and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.
According to the newly published survey of geoscientists and engineers, merely 36 percent of respondents fit the “Comply with Kyoto” model. The scientists in this group “express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.”…
CLAIM: “Basically, [Marc Morano’s] critique is that the study sample size was too small to make a conclusive determination about the level of expert consensus. That’s a valid point…”
RESPONSE: So Nuccitelli admits my point about “77 anonymous” scientists making up the alleged 97 percent consensus is “a valid point.”
DORAN / ZIMMERMAN
In a recent conversation, a specific study was mentioned as a challenge to me:
1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think 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?
3146 completed the survey (response rate 30.7%). Those who were active publishers in climatologists (n=79) reported the now famous 97%. But 90% of the total active publishers in the field, along with 88% of the general climatologists = consensus.
I merely pointed out the major flaw in the study via WUWT, noting the full questions from the study… and actions taken for question #2 dependent on how #1 is answered:
Q1. When compared with pre-1800’s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
1. Risen 2. Fallen 3. Remained relatively constant 4. No opinion/Don’t know
Q2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures? [This question wasn’t asked if they answered “remained relatively constant” to Q1]
1. Yes 2. No 3. I’m not sure
Now we see why only 77 of those specialist dealing with climate responded. WUWT continues…
That’s obviously why only 77 answers were reported to the second question. Two of their 79 top climate specialists had answered “remained relatively constant” to the first question, and those two were not asked the second question, and were not included in the calculation of the supposed 97.4% agreement.
[In other words… when Doran and Zimmerman state:]
[of] “the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change)… 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question .”
I merely mention then that is a false statement. For more on this and other studies, see, THE FRIEND’S OF SCIENCE PDF. Keep in mind NASA still uses this study that would be laughed out of a 101 level statistical class as part of their 97% defense.
In a discussion with a person online about “consensus,” he list some retorts proving his point. I do not have time to refute everything he posts. So I will only deal with his first link:
This example of a good study is the biggest joke ever. A total of 77 climatologists replied. Seventy-five agreed. Here is the graphic representing this survey:
So where did that famous “consensus” claim that “98% of all scientists believe in global warming” come from? It originated from an endlessly reported 2009 American Geophysical Union (AGU) survey consisting of an intentionally brief two-minute, two question online survey sent to 10,257 earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Of the about 3.000 who responded, 82% answered “yes” to the second question, which like the first, most people I know would also have agreed with.
Then of those, only a small subset, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals, were considered in their survey statistic. That “98% all scientists” referred to a laughably puny number of 75 of those 77 who answered “yes”. That anything-but-scientific survey asked two questions. The first: “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” Few would be expected to dispute this…the planet began thawing out of the “Little Ice Age” in the middle 19th century, predating the Industrial Revolution. (That was the coldest period since the last real Ice Age ended roughly 10,000 years ago.)
The second question asked: “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” So what constitutes “significant”? Does “changing” include both cooling and warming… and for both “better” and “worse”? And which contributions…does this include land use changes, such as agriculture and deforestation?
By the way, from that FORBES article I really liked this part:
Consider the National Academy of Sciences for example. In 2007, Congress appropriated $5,856,000 for NAS to complete a climate change study. The organization subsequently sold its conclusions in three separate report sections at $44 per download.
[….]
What scientific understanding breakthrough did that big taxpayer-financed budget buy? Namely that the Earth’s temperature has risen over the past 100 years, and that human activities have resulted in a steady atmospheric CO2 increase. This is hardly new information, and few scientists are likely to challenge either of these assertions, which essentially prove no link between the two observations. All professional scientists recognize that correlation does not establish causation.
Two things. LOT’S of money is involved in “proving” global warming. Which is unlike the skeptics monetary situation. Also, take note that the jump in logic is connecting Man’s CO2 to rising temperatures. By doing so, politicians get the power to get more power (legislate over peoples actions as well as businesses), and it allows these same politicians to tax people to fund their coffers, and then to pay for more studies. And round-and-round we go. Dr. Richard Lindzen observes that these people are really saying that “…regardless of evidence the answer is predetermined. If government wants carbon control, that is the answer that the Academies will provide.”
Here is a great quick refutation of multiple studies (with the link to a more in-depth PDF). Enjoy:
Friends of Science announce the release of a new report entitled “97% Consensus? No! Global Warming Math Myths and Social Proofs.” Contrary to claims of these most-cited 97% consensus surveys, there is only 1-3% explicitly stated agreement with the IPCC declarations on global warming, and no agreement with a catastrophic view.
“These ‘consensus’ surveys appear to be used as a ‘social proof,’” says Ken Gregory, research director of Friends of Science. “Just because a science paper includes the words ‘global climate change’ this does not define the cause, impact or possible mitigation. The 97% claim is contrived in all cases.”
The Oreskes (2004) study claimed 75% consensus and a “remarkable lack of disagreement” by the other 25% of the abstracts she reviewed. Peiser (2005) re-ran her survey and found major discrepancies. Only 1.2% or 13 scientists out of 1,117 agreed with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) view that human activity is the main cause of global warming since 1950.
Peiser found that 34 scientists rejected or doubted the alleged ‘consensus’ position outright and 44 claimed natural factors as more influential. At least 470 papers expressed no position on Anthropogenic (human-caused) Global Warming (AGW) whatsoever.
Doran & Zimmerman (2009) only assessed 79 scientists out of 3,146 respondents. Many scientists sent them emails protesting the survey design.
The recent Cook et al (2013) began with the broadest possible ‘consensus’ definition – rendering the idea of ‘consensus’ meaningless. Only 0.54% (or 64 scientists) explicitly agreed. Though Cook’s graphics on The Consensus Project website focus on fossil fuels, his study used the 1996 Houghton declaration which includes other human factors like agriculture and land-use change.
Some 7983 scientists or 67% of the ~12,000 papers in the Cook study had no position on climate change. Many scientists publicly denounced Cook for wrongly assessing their work as supporting AGW when it does not.
“The claim of a 97% consensus is mathematical manipulation,” says Gregory. “Unfortunately even the President is swayed by this kind of social proof.”
Dennis Prager plays Chuck Todd and then takes 2019’s first disagreeing call. Dennis starts out the year on point. The WASHINGTON TIMES has a story on Chuck Todd,
NBC News has decided that climate change is no longer an issue that has two sides.
Sunday’s episode of “Meet the Press” with Chuck Todd featured an hour long panel with lawmakers and scientists about the consequences of climate change. But at the start, Mr. Todd said his show is “not going to give time to climate deniers” and went on to inaccurately characterize the nature of the climate debate.
“Just as important as what we are going to do is what we’re not going to do,” he said. “We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it. The earth is getting hotter, and human activity is a major cause. Period.”
“We’re not going to give time to climate deniers,” Mr. Todd added. “The science is settled even if political opinion is not.”
[….]
“We need to stop covering the debate and start covering the story so that people see that this is real, and so that politicians take a more pragmatic approach and find solutions that are actually achievable,” Mr. Curbelo said about the one-sided discussion……..
Also, if you go to my main CLIMATE LINK PAGE — you will find these helpful topics related to the caller and some of the show:
✦ 22 (Two Examples of CO2 Brainwash) ✦ CLIMATE “CONSENSUS” ✦ ECO-FASCISTS! LEADING THE WAY TO DEMOCRAT UTOPIAN IDEALS ✦ Global Warming Good For Island Growth ✦ Hurricane/Tornado Myths ~ The Big Fizzle ✦ SERIES (Part 4) ~ CO2 Not The Demon It Is Made Out To Be ✦ Top MIT Climatologist Slams Consensus ✦ Wind Power Polluting the Beauty and Cleanliness Of Our World With Renewable Energy ✦ Wind and Solar More Harmful To Environment Than Helpful
CLIMATE DISPATCH has the best “skinny” on the matter (emphasis in the original, except last sentence):
The Closing of the American Mind was Allan Bloom’s groundbreaking critique of “absolute understanding” in academia and the way that it undermines critical thinking.
If Bloom were with us today, we could imagine him writing a sequel devoted to the way the climate change industry has sought to silence dissent.
Chuck Todd gave a stunning example of the phenomenon this morning in his introduction of a Meet the Press special edition on climate change.
Todd quite literally announced that dissent would not be tolerated. Here was Todd:
“Just as important as what we are going to do this hour is what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it. The Earth is getting hotter, and human activity is a major cause. Period. We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.”
Quick: someone check—are we still in the USA? Or did “democracy die in darkness” and certain positions are verboten from public speech?….
By the 1970’s scientists were predicting a new ice age, and had 60 theories to explain it:
Here is the CONSENSUS then:
Leonard Nemoy narrates this classic “consensus” of an ice-age. Included is older footage of a Walter Cronkite excerpt regarding this all-too-common scare tactic and then back to Nemoy and the Late Dr. Steven Schneider (1978 – Global Cooling alarmism) compared to his 2008 Global Warming alarmism. Enjoy (disappeared from LiveLeak).
Larry Elder notes Dean Baquet’s, executive editor of the New York Times (the top position in the newsroom), admission to the Left not wanting to hear thoughtful responses to issues from a counter viewpoint. Here is NEWSBUSTERS comments on the issue:
Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller harped on something New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet said Wednesday at the Recode conference in California. In discussing the Times editorial pages — and the liberal reader anger over signing up right-leaning columnist Bret Stephens from The Wall Street Journal — he used the royal “We” in describing the Left, until he caught himself, and “I’m not ‘we,’ I’m a journalist.”
Recode’s Peter Kafka brought up a New York magazine article by Rebecca Traister reporting Hillary Clinton being angry about the Stephens hire: “Why… would… you… do… that?…66 million people voted for me, plus, you know, the crazy third-party people. So there’s a lot of people who would actually appreciate stronger arguments on behalf of the most existential challenges facing our country and the world, climate change being one of them!”
Baquet insisted Stephens is not a “climate denier,” but that he thinks climate activists have turned their crusade into a “religion that brooks no disagreement.” Baquet liked having a “thoughtful voice” like this in the paper. Kafka shot back “One of the arguments that people have is, look, there’s plenty of places to find news from ‘climate skeptics,’ if you want to call them that,” and if the Times wanted to stand for something, they should “embrace the left side” of the spectrum. Baquet insisted the editorial pages were meant to have more than one side.
Here is the link to the other articles referenced in the above audio:
(Above video description) Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin on how bureaucrats spin scientific data.
Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin told The Wall Street Journal Monday that bureaucrats within former President Barack Obama’s administration spun scientific data to manipulate public opinion.
“What you saw coming out of the press releases about climate data, climate analysis, was, I’d say, misleading, sometimes just wrong,” Koonin said, referring to elements within the Obama administration he said were responsible for manipulating climate data.
He pointed to a National Climate Assessment in 2014 showing hurricane activity has increased from 1980 as an illustration of how federal agencies fudged climate data. Koonin said the NCA’s assessment was technically incorrect.
“What they forgot to tell you, and you don’t know until you read all the way into the fine print is that it actually decreased in the decades before that,” he said.
Levin was responding to a report by The Daily Caller‘s Chris White, who highlighted an admission by a former Obama Energy Department official earlier in the week that the administration deliberately presented “misleading” and “sometimes just wrong” climate data. Here’s an excerpt from the report (second hyperlink added): AUDIO IS GONE :cry: The original article is HERE!
“We are very far from the knowledge needed to make good climate policy,” writes leading scientist Steven E. Koonin
The idea that “Climate science is settled” runs through today’s popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.
My training as a computational physicist—together with a 40-year career of scientific research, advising and management in academia, government and the private sector—has afforded me an extended, up-close perspective on climate science. Detailed technical discussions during the past year with leading climate scientists have given me an even better sense of what we know, and don’t know, about climate. I have come to appreciate the daunting scientific challenge of answering the questions that policy makers and the public are asking.
The crucial scientific question for policy isn’t whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: The climate has always changed and always will. Geological and historical records show the occurrence of major climate shifts, sometimes over only a few decades. We know, for instance, that during the 20th century the Earth’s global average surface temperature rose 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax: There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. There is also little doubt that the carbon dioxide will persist in the atmosphere for several centuries. The impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself.
Rather, the crucial, unsettled scientific question for policy is, “How will the climate change over the next century under both natural and human influences?” Answers to that question at the global and regional levels, as well as to equally complex questions of how ecosystems and human activities will be affected, should inform our choices about energy and infrastructure.
But—here’s the catch—those questions are the hardest ones to answer. They challenge, in a fundamental way, what science can tell us about future climates.
Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.
[….]
We often hear that there is a “scientific consensus” about climate change. But as far as the computer models go, there isn’t a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing human influences.
[….]
Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future. Recognizing those limits, rather than ignoring them, will lead to a more sober and ultimately more productive discussion of climate change and climate policies. To do otherwise is a great disservice to climate science itself.
“The idea that ‘Climate science is settled’ runs through today’s popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.” ~ Steven E. Koonin, Undersecretary of Energy for Science under Obama.
My resource on throwing deniers in jail is the best online:
A great site bringing together the professional as well as the media’s critique of the 97% consensus can be found HERE: 97 Articles Refuting The “97% Consensus” This really the bottom line:
…The “97 percent” figure in the Zimmerman/Doran survey represents the views of only 79 respondents who listed climate science as an area of expertise and said they published more than half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change. Seventy-nine scientists—of the 3,146 who responded to the survey—does not a consensus make.
In 2010, William R. Love Anderegg, then a student at Stanford University, used Google Scholar to identify the views of the most prolific writers on climate change. His findingswere published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. Mr. Love Anderegg found that 97% to 98% of the 200 most prolific writers on climate change believe “anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for ‘most’ of the ‘unequivocal’ warming.” There was no mention of how dangerous this climate change might be; and, of course, 200 researchers out of the thousands who have contributed to the climate science debate is not evidence of consensus.
In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Mr. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.
Mr. Cook’s work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found “only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse” the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shavivand Nils- Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.
Rigorous international surveys conducted by German scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch—most recently published in Environmental Science & Policy in 2010—have found that most climate scientists disagree with the consensus on key issues such as the reliability of climate data and computer models. They do not believe that climate processes such as cloud formation and precipitation are sufficiently understood to predict future climate change.
Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus. Only 39.5% of 1,854 American Meteorological Society members who responded to a survey in 2012 said man-made global warming is dangerous.
Finally, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—which claims to speak for more than 2,500 scientists—is probably the most frequently cited source for the consensus. Its latest report claims that “human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems.” Yet relatively few have either written on or reviewed research having to do with the key question: How much of the temperature increase and other climate changes observed in the 20th century was caused by man-made greenhouse-gas emissions? The IPCC lists only 41 authors and editors of the relevant chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report addressing “anthropogenic and natural radiative forcing.”…
Cook misquoted papers (the one’s he included… not the 8,000 he excluded) as representing consensus… the original post by Popular Technology is HERE, but FORBES did a good job on explaining the discrepancies as stated by the “consensus scientists/specialists.”
…When Popular Technology asked physicist Nicola Scafetta whether Cook and his colleagues accurately classified one of his peer-reviewed papers as supporting the ‘consensus’ position, Scafetta similarly criticized the Skeptical Science classification.
“Cook et al. (2013) is based on a straw man argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission,” Scafetta responded. “What my papers say is that the IPCC [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun.”
“What it is observed right now is utter dishonesty by the IPCC advocates. … They are gradually engaging into a metamorphosis process to save face. … And in this way they will get the credit that they do not merit, and continue in defaming critics like me that actually demonstrated such a fact since 2005/2006,” Scafetta added.
Astrophysicist Nir Shaviv similarly objected to Cook and colleagues claiming he explicitly supported the ‘consensus’ position about human-induced global warming. Asked if Cook and colleagues accurately represented his paper, Shaviv responded, “Nope… it is not an accurate representation. The paper shows that if cosmic rays are included in empirical climate sensitivity analyses, then one finds that different time scales consistently give a low climate sensitivity. i.e., it supports the idea that cosmic rays affect the climate and that climate sensitivity is low. This means that part of the 20th century [warming] should be attributed to the increased solar activity and that 21st century warming under a business as usual scenario should be low (about 1°C).”
“I couldn’t write these things more explicitly in the paper because of the refereeing, however, you don’t have to be a genius to reach these conclusions from the paper,” Shaviv added.
To manufacture their misleading asserted consensus, Cook and his colleagues also misclassified various papers as taking “no position” on human-caused global warming. When Cook and his colleagues determined a paper took no position on the issue, they simply pretended, for the purpose of their 97-percent claim, that the paper did not exist.
Morner, a sea level scientist, told Popular Technology that Cook classifying one of his papers as “no position” was “Certainly not correct and certainly misleading. The paper is strongly against AGW [anthropogenic global warming], and documents its absence in the sea level observational facts. Also, it invalidates the mode of sea level handling by the IPCC.”
Soon, an astrophysicist, similarly objected to Cook classifying his paper as “no position.”
“I am sure that this rating of no position on AGW by CO2 is nowhere accurate nor correct,” said Soon.
“I hope my scientific views and conclusions are clear to anyone that will spend time reading our papers. Cook et al. (2013) is not the study to read if you want to find out about what we say and conclude in our own scientific works,” Soon emphasized…
Here are some visuals… and note that if 75 climatologists are a consensus, or 0.5% is a consensus, then how bout this very short list of specialists rejecting the issue in some form… what kind of consensus is that?
I bet many make the point that these specialists do not count. Let me get this straight… they counted when used to promote consensus but do not now that they say their works were misquoted/misused? Forbes and the Wall Street Journal or leading climatologists/physicists (like top-notch persons in their field like Richard Lindzen or Freeman Dyson as examples — or these 1,000 scientists, or these 3,805 scientists trained in specialties directly related to the physical environment of the Earth and the past and current phenomena that affect that environment and 5,812 scientists trained in the fundamental physical and molecular properties of gases, liquids, and solid, which are essential to understanding the physical properties of the atmosphere and Earth.) aren’t enough… how bout this PEER REVIEWED PAPER delving into the consensus in an in-depth manner. Here is the abstract… followed by some visuals:
Agnotology is the study of how ignorance arises via circulation of misinformation calculated to mislead. Legates et al. (Sci Educ 22:2007–2017, 2013) had questioned the applicability of agnotology to politically-charged debates. In their reply, Bedford and Cook (Sci Educ 22:2019–2030, 2013), seeking to apply agnotology to climate science, asserted that fossil-fuel interests had promoted doubt about a climate consensus. Their definition of climate ‘misinformation’ was contingent upon the post-modernist assumptions that scientific truth is discernible by measuring a consensus among experts, and that a near unanimous consensus exists. However, inspection of a claim by Cook et al. (Environ Res Lett 8:024024, 2013) of 97.1 % consensus, heavily relied upon by Bedford and Cook, shows just 0.3 % endorsement of the standard definition of consensus: that most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic. Agnotology, then, is a two-edged sword since either side in a debate may claim that general ignorance arises from misinformation allegedly circulated by the other. Significant questions about anthropogenic influences on climate remain. Therefore, Legates et al. appropriately asserted that partisan presentations of controversies stifle debate and have no place in education.
Continuing…
He mentioned most of the experts KNOW how CO2 affects climate. He says he does not and doesn’t think they do either. This has nothing to do with the supposed “consensus” of experts — 97% — who “say” it is driven by mankind. This is known as anthropogenic global warming, of AGW. The myth of the 97% started with ONLY 75-out-of-77 climatologists saying they believe man is the primary cause.
Yes, you heard me correctly, seventy-five.
Another study has undergrads and non-specialists (bloggers) search through many articles in peer reviewed journals, and noting that a large majority supported the AGW position. The problem was that they were not specialized in the field of science… AND… they only read the abstracts, not the peer reviewed paper itself. Many of the scientists behind the papers “said” to support AGW rejected that idea. So the specialists THEMSELVES said their papers cannot be read to support the AGW position.
Another study (pictured in the graph above) tries to save an earlier one with tainted information based on abstracts — a very UNSCIENTIFIC way to get to consensus (that is, relying on abstracts). Not only was this study based on abstracts, again, non specialists categorized them. Yet another study was merely based on search parameters/results. Here is more info (mainly links) for the not-faint-of-heart.
In reality, nearly half of specialists in the fields related reject man causing climates change.
And a good portion of those that do reject the claim that it is detrimental to our planet.
Only 13% saw relatively little danger (ratings of 1 to 3 on a 10-point scale); the rest were about evenly split between the 44% who see moderate to high danger (ratings of 4 to 7) and 41% who see very high or grave danger (ratings of 8 to 10). (Forbes)
Here is a list of scientists with varying views on the cause of “Climate Change,” and here is a list of 31,000 who stand against man as the primary cause.
AGAIN, to be clear, and to quote the post by STEVEN CROWDER:
…Also, this is kind of inconvenient, but needs to be said. The “97% of Climate Scientists Agree” meme all the climate-change robots harp on and on about is actually a load of pure organic manure, better left to grow your weed than fuel your global warming climate change passions.
In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Mr. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.
Mr. Cook’s work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found “only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse” the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shaviv and Nils- Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.
In other words:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” ~ Joseph Goebbels (Adolf Hitler’s Propagandist)
Put that in your hookah and smoke it. Remember that little tidbit when you insist unborn babies are not humans, especially when you refuse to look at any evidence. Tell me again about how much you respect science.
Also good to remember anytime somebody is pushing anything on you? Follow the money. ‘Cause guess what, kids? There’s a lot of money in saying the Earth is warming and it’s totes our fault…
FromThe National Review: In truth, the overwhelming majority of climate-research funding comes from the federal government and left-wing foundations. And while the energy industry funds both sides of the climate debate, the government/foundation monies go only toward research that advances the warming regulatory agenda. With a clear public-policy outcome in mind, the government/foundation gravy train is a much greater threat to scientific integrity.
And here are some more points from Obama’s man:
For the latest IPCC report (September 2013), its Working Group I, which focuses on physical science, uses an ensemble of some 55 different models. Although most of these models are tuned to reproduce the gross features of the Earth’s climate, the marked differences in their details and projections reflect all of the limitations that I have described. For example:
The models differ in their descriptions of the past century’s global average surface temperature by more than three times the entire warming recorded during that time. Such mismatches are also present in many other basic climate factors, including rainfall, which is fundamental to the atmosphere’s energy balance. As a result, the models give widely varying descriptions of the climate’s inner workings. Since they disagree so markedly, no more than one of them can be right.
Although the Earth’s average surface temperature rose sharply by 0.9 degree Fahrenheit during the last quarter of the 20th century, it has increased much more slowly for the past 16 years, even as the human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by some 25%. This surprising fact demonstrates directly that natural influences and variability are powerful enough to counteract the present warming influence exerted by human activity.
Yet the models famously fail to capture this slowing in the temperature rise. Several dozen different explanations for this failure have been offered, with ocean variability most likely playing a major role. But the whole episode continues to highlight the limits of our modeling.
The models roughly describe the shrinking extent of Arctic sea ice observed over the past two decades, but they fail to describe the comparable growth of Antarctic sea ice, which is now at a record high.
The models predict that the lower atmosphere in the tropics will absorb much of the heat of the warming atmosphere. But that “hot spot” has not been confidently observed, casting doubt on our understanding of the crucial feedback of water vapor on temperature.
Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today—about one foot per century.
A crucial measure of our knowledge of feedbacks is climate sensitivity—that is, the warming induced by a hypothetical doubling of carbon-dioxide concentration. Today’s best estimate of the sensitivity (between 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite an heroic research effort costing billions of dollars.
BREITBART adds to the idea of the “Cooked” Cook paper with a real survey:
Nearly six in ten climate scientists don’t adhere to the so-called “consensus” on man-made climate change, a new study by the Dutch government has found. The results contradict the oft-cited claim that there is a 97 percent consensus amongst climate scientists that humans are responsible for global warming.
The study, by the PBL Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency, a government body, invited 6550 scientists working in climate related fields, including climate physics, climate impact, and mitigation, to take part in a survey on their views of climate science.
Of the 1868 who responded, just 43 percent agreed with the IPCC that “It is extremely likely {95%+ certainty} that more than half of [global warming] from 1951 to 2010 was caused by [human activity]”. Even with the “don’t knows” removed that figure increases only to 47 percent, still leaving a majority of climate scientists who do not subscribe to the IPCC’s statement.
The findings directly contradict the claim that 97 percent of climate scientists endorse the view that humans are responsible for global warming, as first made by Cook et al in a paper published in Environment Research Letters.
Cook’s paper has since been extremely widely debunked, yet so ingrained has the 97 percent consensus claim become that The Guardian has an entire section named after it, and President Obama has cited it on Twitter.
Commenting on the new study, Australian climate blogger Joanne Nova said: “Finally there is a decent survey on the topic, and it shows that less than half of what we would call “climate scientists” who research the topic and for the most part, publish in the peer reviewed literature, would agree with the IPCC’s main conclusions. Only 43% of climate scientists agree with the IPCC “97%” certainty.”…
No matter what you think of the following long and short lists… the bottom line is this, WAY more than 75-Climatologists think that man is either not the main contributor to global warming at all, or that global warming is not a catastrophe waiting to happen:
In a discussion with a person online about “consensus,” he list some retorts proving his point. I do not have time to refute everything he posts. So I will onle dea with his first link:
This example of a good study is the biggest joke ever. A total of 77 climatologists replied. Seventy-five agreed. Here is the graphic representing this survey:
Larry Bell asks this of that “consensus” survey:
By Larry Bell
So where did that famous “consensus” claim that “98% of all scientists believe in global warming” come from? It originated from an endlessly reported 2009 American Geophysical Union (AGU) survey consisting of an intentionally brief two-minute, two question online survey sent to 10,257 earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Of the about 3.000 who responded, 82% answered “yes” to the second question, which like the first, most people I know would also have agreed with.
Then of those, only a small subset, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals, were considered in their survey statistic. That “98% all scientists” referred to a laughably puny number of 75 of those 77 who answered “yes”. That anything-but-scientific survey asked two questions. The first: “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” Few would be expected to dispute this…the planet began thawing out of the “Little Ice Age” in the middle 19th century, predating the Industrial Revolution. (That was the coldest period since the last real Ice Age ended roughly 10,000 years ago.)
The second question asked: “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” So what constitutes “significant”? Does “changing” include both cooling and warming… and for both “better” and “worse”? And which contributions…does this include land use changes, such as agriculture and deforestation?
By the way, from that FORBES article I really liked this part:
Consider the National Academy of Sciences for example. In 2007, Congress appropriated $5,856,000 for NAS to complete a climate change study. The organization subsequently sold its conclusions in three separate report sections at $44 per download.
[….]
What scientific understanding breakthrough did that big taxpayer-financed budget buy? Namely that the Earth’s temperature has risen over the past 100 years, and that human activities have resulted in a steady atmospheric CO2 increase. This is hardly new information, and few scientists are likely to challenge either of these assertions, which essentially prove no link between the two observations. All professional scientists recognize that correlation does not establish causation.
Two things. LOT’S of money is involved in “proving” global warming. Which is unlike the skeptics monetary situation. Also, take note that the jump in logic is connecting Man’s CO2 to rising temperatures. By doing so, politicians get the power to get more power (legislate over peoples actions as well as businesses), and it allows these same politicians to tax people to fund their coffers, and then to pay for more studies. And round-and-round we go. Dr. Richard Lindzen observes that these people are really saying that “…regardless of evidence the answer is predetermined. If government wants carbon control, that is the answer that the Academies will provide.”
…What the president was referring to was a 2013 paper by the University of Queensland’s John Cook. In his research, Cook studied 11,994 papers published between 1991 and 2011 that mentioned the search words “global warming” and “global climate change.”
Guess what Cook found? Only 32.6% of the papers endorsed the view of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. But of that group, 97% said that “recent warming is mostly man-made.”
And so, by a nice sleight-of-hand obfuscation, the great “97% consensus” was born.
Don’t believe me? Check out the actual paper, or the abstract, or the original article. In fact, let’s just say thank goodness that the originals are still posted online. Typically, when someone pulls off a con of such massive, world-wide proportions, they subsequently burn the evidence to cover their tracks.
Still don’t believe me? Here’s the actual, posted statement:
We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
Bottom line: In the actual study in question, only one-third of the 11,994 academic papers studied could be construed as arguing for man-made warming. Possibly the other two-thirds were more focused on the unprecedented increase in solar activity seen over the past century.
More below, including Bernie Sanders:
Top MIT Climate Scientist HATES the “consensus ‘lie,'” via The Daily Caller:
Dr. Richard Lindzen is sick and tired of the media repeating the so-called “97 percent consensus” statistic to show just how strong the global warming agreement is among climate scientists. It’s purely “propaganda,” argues Lindzen….
…Lindzen if referring to the often cited statistic among environmentalists and liberal politicians that 97 percent of climate scientists agree human activities are causing the planet to warm. This sort of argument has been around for decades, but recent use of the statistic can be traced to a 2013 report by Australian researcher John Cook.
Cook’s paper found of the scientific study “abstracts expressing a position on [manmade global warming], 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” But Cook’s assertion has been heavily criticized by researchers carefully examining his methodology.
A paper by five leading climatologists published in the journal Science and Education found only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate studies examined in Cook’s study explicitly stated mankind has caused most of the warming since 1950 — meaning the actual consensus is 0.3 percent.
“It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when on the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%,” said Dr. David Legates, a geology professor at the University of Delaware and the study’s lead author….
The myth of the 97% started with ONLY 75-out-of-77 climatologists saying they believe man is the primary cause.
Breitbart adds to the idea of the “Cooked” Cook paper with a real survey:
Nearly six in ten climate scientists don’t adhere to the so-called “consensus” on man-made climate change, a new study by the Dutch government has found. The results contradict the oft-cited claim that there is a 97 percent consensus amongst climate scientists that humans are responsible for global warming.
The study, by the PBL Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency, a government body, invited 6550 scientists working in climate related fields, including climate physics, climate impact, and mitigation, to take part in a survey on their views of climate science.
Of the 1868 who responded, just 43 percent agreed with the IPCC that “It is extremely likely {95%+ certainty} that more than half of [global warming] from 1951 to 2010 was caused by [human activity]”. Even with the “don’t knows” removed that figure increases only to 47 percent, still leaving a majority of climate scientists who do not subscribe to the IPCC’s statement.
The findings directly contradict the claim that 97 percent of climate scientists endorse the view that humans are responsible for global warming, as first made by Cook et al in a paper published in Environment Research Letters.
Cook’s paper has since been extremely widely debunked, yet so ingrained has the 97 percent consensus claim become that The Guardian has an entire section named after it, and President Obama has cited it on Twitter.
Commenting on the new study, Australian climate blogger Joanne Nova said: “Finally there is a decent survey on the topic, and it shows that less than half of what we would call “climate scientists” who research the topic and for the most part, publish in the peer reviewed literature, would agree with the IPCC’s main conclusions. Only 43% of climate scientists agree with the IPCC “97%” certainty.”…
This grew from a discussion with an acquaintance from work. It is not meant as a slam but as an opportunity to see if one’s accepted beliefs can withstand the heat.
A person I dig, would love to see play the banjo, and generally support gives me articles from time-to-time. The above is one of them (click to enlarge). While I like tremendously the person, his biases are so evident that it never ceases to amaze me he accepts one position without knowing the opposition to such a belief. And it is a belief — mind you — based on what the person accepts from “authoritities”… which is, the legacy media. Or better yet, what makes it to the front-page of a paper and not what is the op-ed portions of the paper which typically offer debate. Because merely accepting a position without critical thinking is the worse kind of faith there is. Even if of the Christian faith:
“I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought. But if God in whom they believe created them with intellectual and rational powers, that imposes upon them the duty to try to understand the creed of their religion. Not to do so is to verge on superstition.”
I was going to refute point-for-point the above article, however, I will concentrate mainly on the conversation that ensued over the article. I will, however, deal merely with one paragraph at the end of this post, and it is this one:
THIS MAY SEEM ODD BECAUSE, AS OBAMA’S NEW National Climate Assessment makes clear, the U.S. is already feeling the effects of global warming. The first 13 years of the 21st century were among the 14 hottest on record. California is enduring a historic drought. Wildfires are getting worse throughout the West. And while it’s premature to blame climate change for any particular storm—that stock phrase seemed to appear in every story about Superstorm Sandy—our weird weather trends are consistent with expectations for a warmer world.
I will return to this later. Continuing.
Chit-chat over the above article provided context on what exactly my friend knew (or didn’t know), and is yet another example of his bias hand-fed to him by headlines. The topic of global warming “stalling” (LA Times words: Global warming ‘hiatus’ puts climate change scientists on the spot) over the last 17-years (almost 18 years now) was unknown to him. The LA Times article states that it may last 30-years.
Truth be told, they have NO IDEA. Why? Because they rely on computer models, not the actual climate.
Computer Models?
Yes, most of the headlines we read are driven by computer models or cherry-picking from one data set and not taking ACTUAL temperatures into account. For instance:
Roy W. Spencer received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Dr. Spencer’s work with NASA continues as the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has provided congressional testimony several times on the subject of global warming.
Dr. Spencer’s research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies: NASA, NOAA, and DOE. He has never been asked by any oil company to perform any kind of service. Not even Exxon-Mobil.
(CNSNEWS) Global temperatures collected in five official databases confirm that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the past 17 years, according to Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH).
Christy’s findings are contrary to predictions made by 73 computer models cited in the United Nation’s latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (5AR).
Christy told CNSNews that he analyzed all 73 models used in the 5AR and not one accurately predicted that the Earth’s temperature would remain flat since Oct. 1, 1996. (See Temperatures v Predictions 1976-2013.pdf)
“I compared the models with observations in the key area – the tropics – where the climate models showed a real impact of greenhouse gases,” Christy explained. “I wanted to compare the real world temperatures with the models in a place where the impact would be very clear.” (See Tropical Mid-Troposphere Graph.pdf)
Using datasets of actual temperatures recorded by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS), the United Kingdom’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the University of East Anglia (Hadley-CRU), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), satellites measuring atmospheric and deep oceanic temperatures, and a remote sensor system in California, Christy found that “all show a lack of warming over the past 17 years.”
“All 73 models’ predictions were on average three to four times what occurred in the real world,” Christy pointed out. “The closest was a Russian model that predicted a one-degree increase.”
German meteorologist Dominik Jung writes at wetter.net that the first preliminary forecast for Central Europe for the upcoming summer issued by the NOAA does not look very favorable. Expect a “grisly summer”, he writes.
He writes that over the last 10 years spring has generally been on the warm and sunny side, but that Central Europeans have had to pay a price for that by having to put up with wet and variable summer weather.
Models wrong 11 out of 12 years!….
… more on this later. One thing you will notice in reading the LA Times article, every pro anthropogenic [man-caused] global warming person named has a professor, or scientist in front of their name or description. Those who disagree with “man-caused” global warming are merely described as skeptics. ALTHOUGH, you at least get this:
Climate scientists, meanwhile, have had a different response. Although most view the pause as a temporary interruption in a long-term warming trend, some disagree and say it has revealed serious flaws in the deliberative processes of the IPCC.
One of the most prominent of these critics is Judith Curry, a climatologist who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was involved in the third IPCC assessment, which was published in 2001. But now she accuses the organization of intellectual arrogance and bias…
In case you are out of the loop, no warming has occurred in 16-years from when this article appeared in the Mail Online:
✦ The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures
✦ This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years….
There will always be those who cannot admit the obvious, for obvious reasons (CFACT):
1. The concentration of CO2 in the global atmosphere is lower today, even including human emissions, than it has been during most of the existence of life on Earth.
2. The global climate has been much warmer than it is today during most of the existence of life on Earth. Today we are in an interglacial period of the Pleistocene Ice Age that began 2.5 million years ago and has not ended.
3. There was an Ice Age 450 million years ago when CO2 was about 10 times higher than it is today.
4. Humans evolved in the tropics near the equator. We are a tropical species and can only survive in colder climates due to fire, clothing and shelter.
5. CO2 is the most important food for all life on earth. All green plants use CO2 to produce the sugars that provide energy for their growth and our growth. Without CO2 in the atmosphere carbon-based life could never have evolved.
6. The optimum CO2 level for most plants is about 1600 parts per million, four times higher than the level today. This is why greenhouse growers purposely inject the CO2-rich exhaust from their gas and wood-fired heaters into the greenhouse, resulting in a 40-80 per cent increase in growth.
7. If human emissions of CO2 do end up causing significant warming (which is not certain) it may be possible to grow food crops in northern Canada and Russia, vast areas that are now too cold for agriculture.
8. Whether increased CO2 levels cause significant warming or not, the increased CO2 levels themselves will result in considerable increases in the growth rate of plants, including our food crops and forests.
9. There has been no further global warming for nearly 18 years during which time about 25 per cent of all the CO2 ever emitted by humans has been added to the atmosphere.
I doubt it.
Here is a Patrick Moore quote that shows how the left has politicised the issues we are dealing with above and below:
“I now find that many environmental groups have drifted into self-serving cliques with narrow vision and rigid ideology…. many environmentalists are showing signs of elitism, left-wingism, and downright eco-fascism. The once politically centrist, science-based vision of environmentalism has been largely replaced with extremist rhetoric. Science and logic have been abandoned and the movement is often used to promote other causes such as class struggle and anti-corporatism. The public is left trying to figure out what is reasonable and what is not.”
BIAS
Lets address this BIAS issue, as it came up in discussion. I made the point that in the media you have a culture that is committed to this idea that the earth is getting warmer-and-warmer. In the scientific community however… it has turned into a machine that feeds off the government payroll. Not just our government payroll but the schillings ($$) the U.N. funds such ideas with, and doesn’t fund others with. For instance, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lead author, Dr. Richard Tol admits no global warming for 17 years ~ rips bias in ipcc ~ the U.N’s “inbuilt alarmism made me step down.” By the time the report was finished, however, it hadn’t warmed for 17 years. In the report we find items like this:
….The report also illustrates just how outmoded the IPCC has become since it was founded in 1988. Its reports are written over a period of three years, and finished months before publication.
When preparations started on AR5, the world hadn’t warmed for 13 years. That is a bit odd, if you believe the models, but not odd enough to merit a lot of attention.
By the time the report was finished, however, it hadn’t warmed for 17 years. That is decidedly odd, but hard to accommodate in a near-final draft that has been through three rounds of review.
After the report was finalized, but before it was published, a number of papers appeared with hypotheses about the pause in warming. AR5 was out of date before it was released.
The IPCC model… is broken.
[….]
Authors who want to see their long hours of IPCC work recognized should thus present their impact as worse than the next one.
It was this inbuilt alarmism that made me step down from the team that drafted the Summary for Policy Makers of Working Group 2. And indeed, the report was greeted by the four horsemen of the apocalypse: famine, pestilence, war, death all made headlines.
Now, Dr. Tol is not a “climatologist” per-se, but thought of as important enough to contribute to the most recent release of the IPCC report that the Obama admin pumps out Executive Orders over. But here is a small sampling of others who dissent:
“We’re not scientifically there yet. Despite what you may have heard in the media, there is nothing like a consensus of scientific opinion that this is a problem. Because there is natural variability in the weather, you cannot statistically know for another 150 years.” — UN IPCC’s Tom Tripp, a member of the UN IPCC since 2004 and listed as one of the lead authors and serves as the Director of Technical Services & Development for U.S. Magnesium.
“Any reasonable scientific analysis must conclude the basic theory wrong!!” — NASA Scientist Dr. Leonard Weinstein who worked 35 years at the NASA Langley Research Center and finished his career there as a Senior Research Scientist. Weinstein is presently a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace.
“Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself — Climate is beyond our power to control…Earth doesn’t care about governments or their legislation. You can’t find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. Climate change is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” — Nobel Prize-Winning Stanford University Physicist Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1998, and was formerly a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“In essence, the jig is up. The whole thing is a fraud. And even the fraudsters that fudged data are admitting to temperature history that they used to say didn’t happen…Perhaps what has doomed the Climategate fraudsters the most was their brazenness in fudging the data” — Dr. Christopher J. Kobus, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Oakland University, specializes in alternative energy, thermal transport phenomena, two-phase flow and fluid and thermal energy systems.
“The energy mankind generates is so small compared to that overall energy budget that it simply cannot affect the climate…The planet’s climate is doing its own thing, but we cannot pinpoint significant trends in changes to it because it dates back millions of years while the study of it began only recently. We are children of the Sun; we simply lack data to draw the proper conclusions.” — Russian Scientist Dr. Anatoly Levitin, the head of geomagnetic variations laboratory at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiowave Propagation of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“Hundreds of billion dollars have been wasted with the attempt of imposing a Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory that is not supported by physical world evidences…AGW has been forcefully imposed by means of a barrage of scare stories and indoctrination that begins in the elementary school textbooks.” — Brazilian Geologist Geraldo Luís Lino, who authored the 2009 book “The Global Warming Fraud: How a Natural Phenomenon Was Converted into a False World Emergency.”
“I am an environmentalist,” but “I must disagree with Mr. Gore” — Chemistry Professor Dr. Mary Mumper, the chair of the Chemistry Department at Frostburg State University in Maryland, during her presentation titled “Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming, the Skeptic’s View.”
“I am ashamed of what climate science has become today.” The science “community is relying on an inadequate model to blame CO2 and innocent citizens for global warming in order to generate funding and to gain attention. If this is what ‘science’ has become today, I, as a scientist, am ashamed.” — Research Chemist William C. Gilbert published a study in August 2010 in the journal Energy & Environment titled “The thermodynamic relationship between surface temperature and water vapor concentration in the troposphere” and he published a paper in August 2009 titled “Atmospheric Temperature Distribution in a Gravitational Field.” [Update December 9, 2010]
“The dysfunctional nature of the climate sciences is nothing short of a scandal. Science is too important for our society to be misused in the way it has been done within the Climate Science Community.” The global warming establishment “has actively suppressed research results presented by researchers that do not comply with the dogma of the IPCC.” — Swedish Climatologist Dr. Hans Jelbring, of the Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics Unit at Stockholm University. [Updated December 9, 2010. Corrects Jelbring’s quote.]
“Those who call themselves ‘Green planet advocates’ should be arguing for a CO2- fertilized atmosphere, not a CO2-starved atmosphere…Diversity increases when the planet was warm AND had high CO2 atmospheric content…Al Gore’s personal behavior supports a green planet – his enormous energy use with his 4 homes and his bizjet, does indeed help make the planet greener. Kudos, Al for doing your part to save the planet.” — Renowned engineer and aviation/space pioneer Burt Rutan, who was named “100 most influential people in the world, 2004″ by Time Magazine and Newsweek called him “the man responsible for more innovations in modern aviation than any living engineer.”
“Global warming is the central tenet of this new belief system in much the same way that the Resurrection is the central tenet of Christianity. Al Gore has taken a role corresponding to that of St Paul in proselytizing the new faith…My skepticism about AGW arises from the fact that as a physicist who has worked in closely related areas, I know how poor the underlying science is. In effect the scientific method has been abandoned in this field.” — Atmospheric Physicist Dr. John Reid, who worked with Australia’s CSIRO’s (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) Division of Oceanography and worked in surface gravity waves (ocean waves) research.
“We maintain there is no reason whatsoever to worry about man-made climate change, because there is no evidence whatsoever that such a thing is happening.” — Greek Earth scientists Antonis Christofides and Nikos Mamassis of the National Technical University of Athens’ Department of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering.
“There are clear cycles during which both temperature and salinity rise and fall. These cyclesare related to solar activity…In my opinion and that of our institute, the problems connected to the current stage of warming are being exaggerated. What we are dealing with is not a global warming of the atmosphere or of the oceans.” — Biologist Pavel Makarevich of the Biological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“Because the greenhouse effect is temporary rather than permanent, predictions of significant global warming in the 21st century by IPCC are not supported by the data.” — Hebrew University Professor Dr. Michael Beenstock an honorary fellow with Institute for Economic Affairs who published a study challenging man-made global warming claims titled “Polynomial Cointegration Tests of the Anthropogenic Theory of Global Warming.”
“The whole idea of anthropogenic global warming is completely unfounded. There appears to have been money gained by Michael Mann, Al Gore and UN IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri as a consequence of this deception, so it’s fraud.” — South African astrophysicist Hilton Ratcliffe, a member of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa (ASSA) and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and a Fellow of the British Institute of Physics.
Dr. Tol has been smeared though in what many call “climate McCarthyism.” Why? Because the “architects of such policies know they have failed, but they have no alternative except more of the same. Maybe it’s because their argument is weak that they resort to climate McCarthyism. The cost, apart from higher energy bills, is to democracy, and free speech” (Green ‘smear campaign’ against professor who dared to disown ‘sexed up’ UN climate dossier). Even if you believe man is throwing harmful gases into the air, the question becomes this: Can naturally occurring processes selectively buffer the full brunt of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities?
Science Daily answers ~ Yes, find researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Johns Hopkins University in the US and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
This doesn’t matter to the left… it is “settled science” — or — “the debate is over”
SETTLED?
PowerLine knocks another this out of the park! ~ “‘The debate is over’ Is A Core Progressive Tenet”
Joel Kotkin writes about the spread of “debate is over” syndrome. It’s a good article, but marred by the author’s surprise that this “embrace homogeneity of viewpoint” finds expression by the American left, “the same people who historically have identified themselves with open-mindedness and the defense of free speech.”
Actually, “debate is over” syndrome expresses a core tenet of American progressivism, and one that has been present from the beginning. It stems from the historicism of the German philosopher Hegel.
Hegel maintained that history unfolds through a “dialectical” process, in which each stage is the product of the contradictions inherent in the ideas that defined the preceding one. Within these tensions and contradictions, Hegel believed, the philosopher can discern a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity. He called that unity “the absolute idea.”
History consists of an inevitable and progressive march to that idea. The modern State is the final fruit of that progressive march.
It is natural for a Hegelian to pronounce a debate “over” even as it continues to rage. Having discerned the comprehensive rational unity — the absolute idea — positions contrary to that idea can be written off as things of the past.
Hegel’s place in Marxist thought is well known. But if anything, the German holds an even more central position in American Progressive thought, thanks mainly to Woodrow Wilson, the intellectual father of American Progressivism. (Theodore Roosevelt was also influenced by the German philosophy of Hegel’s day, as Jean Yarbrough has shown).
Ronald Pestritto demonstrated the connection in his book Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, which Scott Johnson and I discussed in this Weekly Standard article. Hegel’s historicism was irresistible to Wilson, who wrote, “the philosophy of any time is, as Hegel says, ‘nothing but the spirit of the time expressed in abstract thought.’”
Wilson took Hegel so much to heart that, in a love letter to his future wife, he observed that “Hegel used to search for–and in most cases find, it seems to me–the fundamental psychological facts of society.” And Wilson’s writing about the State, about administration, and about the U.S. Constitution all are founded in Hegel’s historicism.
As Scott and I argued, one can draw a straight line from Wilson’s Hegelianism to liberal constitutional theory. Wilson endorsed the emerging, Darwinian-inspired theory of a “living Constitution” under which that document’s original meaning must take a back seat whenever it stands in the way of the march of History.
Sound familiar?….
A great article by Charles “the Hammer” Krauthammer, can be found over at the Washington Post. In it, Krauthammer shows that science advances… and really… science is screaming at the climate deniers (the anthropogenic global warming crowd) to “advance.”
…”The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist in chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for free, no less) or be subject to termination.
Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast cancer deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary radiation, chemo or surgery.
So much for settledness. And climate is less well understood than breast cancer. If climate science is settled, why do its predictions keep changing? And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken?
They deal with the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans, argues Dyson, ignoring the effect of biology, i.e., vegetation and topsoil. Further, their predictions rest on models they fall in love with: “You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as being real.” Not surprisingly, these models have been “consistently and spectacularly wrong” in their predictions, write atmospheric scientists Richard McNider and John Christy — and always, amazingly, in the same direction.
Settled? Even Britain’s national weather service concedes there’s been no change — delicately called a “pause” — in global temperature in 15 years. If even the raw data is recalcitrant, let alone the assumptions and underlying models, how settled is the science?
But even worse than the pretense of settledness is the cynical attribution of any politically convenient natural disaster to climate change, a clever term that allows you to attribute anything — warming and cooling, drought and flood — to man’s sinful carbon burning.
Accordingly, Obama ostentatiously visited drought-stricken California last Friday. Surprise! He blamed climate change. Here even the New York Times gagged, pointing out that far from being supported by the evidence, “the most recent computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier, in the winter.” ….
“The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders…. Dr. Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furor over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.” (David Rose, The Daily Mail, January 24, 2010)
David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), [FN] 161.
Uncovered emails show not merely a bias but a guided attempt to disseminate falsehood in order to push a political agenda. A good synopsis of this “Climate-Gate” comes from Conservapedia, I will include the footnotes as well for people to follow them and read the source material for this synopsis:
The Climategate scandal erupted on November 19, 2009, when a collection of email messages, data files and data processing programs were leaked from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU) located in the UK, revealing scientific fraud and data manipulation by scientists concerning the Global Warming Theory.[1] The scandal that the suffix –gate implies is the state of climate science over the past decade, revealed by more than a thousand emails, documents, and computer code sets between various prominent scientists.[2] The released information is evidence of deceit by climate scientists, which was kept a secret or hidden from the public until the data was leaked from the CRU. The CRU’s apparent obstruction of freedom-of-information requests, as revealed by the leaks, was only the tip of the iceberg.[3] Climategate is said to have revealed the biggest scientific hoax in world history as the worst scandal of this generation.[4][5]
Despite the significance of the scandal and its impact on the theory suggesting humans cause climate change, in a profoundly bizarre situation the Mainstream media attempted to bury the Climategate story.[11] At the same time, liberal Wikipedia quickly censored Climategate and referred to it as an illegal “incident,” as the work of computer hackers stealing data — contrary to Freedom of Information Act requests. In spite of the liberal media’sbias attempt to hide the scandal, news of Climategate quickly spread because many other more notable sources of media covered the story. Commentators and others in the media covered news on Climategate, many of which outlined important takeaways about specific information valuable to the public.[12]
↑ Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released, Watts Up With That?, November 19, 2009.
↑ 2.02.1 Iain Murray. Three Things You Absolutely Must Know About Climategate, Pajamas Media, November 24, 2009.
↑ The global-warming scandal is bigger than one email leak. The Tip of the Climategate Iceberg, Wall Street Journal, December 08, 2009.
↑ Christopher Booker. Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation, Telegraph.co.uk, November 28, 2009.
↑ Glenn Beck. The Biggest Scam In History (Video), The Glenn Beck Program, December 01, 2009.
↑ James Delingpole. Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?, Telegraph.co.uk, November 20, 2009.
↑ Rush Limbaugh. Universe of Lies: Big Warmers Try to Whitewash ClimateGate Fraud, RushLimbaugh.com, November 30, 2009.
↑ Marc Sheppard. CRU’s Source Code: Climategate Uncovered, American Thinker, November 25, 2009.
↑ Steve McIntyre. Yamal: A “Divergence” Problem, climateaudit.org, September 27, 2009.
↑ Andrew Orlowski. One Of The Scandals In The CRU Emails, Sweetness & Light, September 29, 2009.
↑ Allie Duzett. Media Ignore Climate Science Scandal, Accuracy In Media, November 23, 2009.
↑ Larrey Anderson. Revenge of the Computer Nerds, American Thinker, December 09, 2009.
There was a “Climate-Gate 2.0,” where more emails showed strong collusion to fool the public. The Daily Mail in the UK says this in their headline:
5,000 leaked emails reveal scientists deleted evidence that cast doubt on claims climate change was man-made
Experts were under orders from US and UK officials to come up with a ‘strong message’
Critics claim: ‘The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering’
Scientist asks, ‘What if they find that climate change is a natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us all’
More than 5,000 documents have been leaked online purporting to be the correspondence of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia who were previously accused of ‘massaging’ evidence of man-made climate change.
Following on from the original ‘climategate’ emails of 2009, the new package appears to show systematic suppression of evidence, and even publication of reports that scientists knew to to be based on flawed approaches.
And not only do the emails paint a picture of scientists manipulating data, government employees at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are also implicated.
One message appeared to show a member of Defra staff telling colleagues working on climate science to give the government a ‘strong message’. The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information….
I will venture a guess that my friend has never heard about this either. Why? Bias… collusion… culture… money from government… on and on. But the above is always swept away with monikers like “extreme view,” “deniers,” “climate-skeptics,” etc.
Here is Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, explaining the issue with Climate-Gate:
If its not in Time or other sources considered to be the “Legacy-Media,” it must be extreme. (“Extremism” will conclude this rather long post.) To wit, lets deal with two claims from that paragraph from Times near the top. The first one (topic a) I wish to deal with is the statement that “our weird weather trends are consistent with expectations for a warmer world.” The author sorta rejected Superstorm Sandy as being caused by global warming but then attributed it to a warming world. A few things about this.
TOPIC A
First, we haven’t been warming. A simple enough fact.
Secondly, weather, especially tornadoes and hurricanes have lessened over the years. In other words, if Michael Grunwald (the author of the Time article) says weird weather is a indicator, an evidence for, that warming weather is something we should be fearful of and act on, what is normalizing weather and no warming suppose to indicate… OTHER THAN the whole premise of the article in a major magazine is undermined.
The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as “proof” of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way.
Warmist claims of a severe increase in hurricane activity go back to 2005 and Hurricane Katrina. The cover of Al Gore’s 2009 book, “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis,” even features a satellite image of the globe with four major hurricanes superimposed.
Yet the evidence to the contrary was there all along. Back in 2005 I and others reviewed the entire hurricane record, which goes back over a century, and found no increase of any kind. Yes, we sometimes get bad storms — but no more frequently now than in the past. The advocates simply ignored that evidence — then repeated their false claims after Hurricane Sandy last year.
And the media play along. For example, it somehow wasn’t front-page news that committed believers in man-made global warming recently admitted there’s been no surface global warming for well over a decade and maybe none for decades more. Nor did we see warmists conceding that their explanation is essentially a confession that the previous warming may not have been man-made at all.
That admission came in a new paper by prominent warmists in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics. They not only conceded that average global surface temperatures stopped warming a full 15 years ago, but that this “pause” could extend into the 2030s.
But keep in mind, our total Co2 (carbon) emissions is no laughing matter:
Even the IPCC and British Meteorological Office now recognize that average global temperatures haven’t budged in almost 17 years. Little evidence suggests that sea level rise, storms, droughts, polar ice and temperatures or other weather and climate events and trends display any statistically significant difference from what Earth and mankind have experienced over the last 100-plus years…
Besides the Global Warming crowd blaming everything on it (even the violence in the “arab spring“!), its failed predictions about no ice in the north-pole, no more snow in europe, islands drowning, polar bear numbers, and the like… Al Gore’s claims about Hurricanes is [again], laughable, to wit: when you even lose Jeraldo Rivera, your leftist stance may be very laughable:
Al Gore was recently taken to task for exaggerating claims involving the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. The latest weather news makes his misrepresentations look all the more ridiculous.
For the first time since 2002, this year there will be no hurricane activity before September 1.
Reports indicate this is only the 25th time in 161 years that has happened.
The first hurricane of the season has formed on or after September 1 only 25 times in the past 161 years. Since the satellite era began in the mid-1960s, there have only been five years without a hurricane by August 31. The last time a hurricane failed to form before September 1 was in 2002 when Hurricane Gustav formed on September 11.
It would be foolish to make fun of anything involving such potentially dangerous storms and it’s also possible we could still see many late developing storms. However, given all the misleading information passed off on the topic by Gore, his allies and a fawning media, hopefully any lack of serious storm activity won’t be buried by the media for political reasons.
Eight tornadoes hit the United States last month, tying the record for the fewest tornadoes in March, according to preliminary data from the Storm Prediction Center.
The last time there were so few tornadoes in March was in 1969, said Greg Carbin, a meteorologist with the prediction center in Norman, Okla. Accurate tornado records began in 1950.
A typical March sees about 80 twisters in the United States, the National Climatic Data Center said.
The only notable outbreak of tornadoes this March was last week, when several twisters formed in Oklahoma and Arkansas, killing one person in Tulsa. That’s the only tornado death this year.
Overall, it’s been a rather quiet year so far for tornadoes, with just 30 hitting the United States. Again, 1969 is the only year that was calmer, when 16 twisters were reported in January, February and March, Carbin said…..
….Figure 1 [top] shows all tornadoes above EF1. (See here, why EF1’s are excluded.) The 10-Year Trend is significantly below the level consistently seen up to 1991, although the high totals in 2011 have inevitably caused a small upwards blip.
We see a similar pattern with the stronger EF3+ tornadoes.
I do not claim to know what will happen to tornado numbers in coming years. And anyone who does is lying.
Does “global warming” cause tornadoes? No. Thunderstorms do. The harder question may be, “Will climate change influence tornado occurrence?” The best answer is: We don’t know….
Another indicator the main premise of the theory is wrong.
So I will restate more clearly: C02 follows temperature change… it doesn’t lead it. That big giant ball-o’-flame in the sky has much more to do with climate change than Exxon… who has less impact on the enviro than volcanic activity (mankind that is). Below is another recent advancement in understanding out climate (more here):
The next issue I want to challenge is the idea that the 21st century has been the hottest string of years on record. It has not. Take this two sets of data that many reporters and the general public draw from (to the right).
Even the Wall Street Journal chose the higher temperature reading to say that July of 2012 was July was the “hottest month in the contiguous U.S. since records began in 1895.” WUWT found this on accident and it has led to quite a few other revelations as we will see. Here is description in part of what we looking at:
Glaring inconsistencies found between State of the Climate (SOTC) reports sent to the press and public and the “official” climate database record for the United States. Using NCDC’s own data, July 2012 can no longer be claimed to be the “hottest month on record”.
[….]
I initially thought this was just some simple arithmetic error or reporting error, a one-off event, but then I began to find it in other months when I compared the output from the NCDC climate database plotter. Here is a table of the differences I found for the last two years between claims made in the SOTC report and the NCDC database output.
[….]
In almost every instance dating back to the inception of the CONUS Tavg value being reported in the SOTC report, there’s a difference. Some are quite significant. In most cases, the database value is cooler than the claim made in the SOTC report. Clearly, it is a systemic issue that spans over two years of reporting to the press and to the public.
It suggests that claims made by NCDC when they send out these SOTC reports aren’t credible because there are such differences between the data. Clearly, NCDC means for the plotter output they link to, to be an official representation to the public, so there cannot be a claim of me using some “not fit for purpose” method to get that data….
The Wall Street Journal made a graph showing this record setting month (left). The more accurate temperature for July likewise is shown in the same graph (right):
This looking at the data sets chosen and what is used and isn’t used to support an idea that fails in every way. Combine this obvious cherry-picking with the bias, collusion, and charges against the report that the President used to route Congress, all show we have a problem Houston! But this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It seems the NOAA has been skewing these temps for some time. Why? Because the left uses this as a way to promote an ever growing government and the scientists get more-and-more funding. This data fudging story is newer, and it is evolving quickley, including this newest post via Real Science where Steve Goddard notes that More Than 40% Of USHCN Station Data Is Fabricated. Here is Dr. Judith carry’s synopsis (excerpted), in which she critiques a bit Goddard’s post… but then bows to the evidence:
OK, acknowledging that Goddard made some analysis errors, I am still left with some uneasiness about the actual data, and why it keeps changing. For example, Jennifer Marohasy has been writing about Corrupting Australian’s temperature record.
In the midst of preparing this blog post, I received an email from Anthony Watts, suggesting that I hold off on my post since there is some breaking news. Watts pointed me to a post by Paul Homewood entitled Massive Temperature Adjustments At Luling, Texas. Excerpt:
So, I thought it might be worth looking in more detail at a few stations, to see what is going on. In Steve’s post, mentioned above, he links to the USHCN Final dataset for monthly temperatures, making the point that approx 40% of these monthly readings are “estimated”, as there is no raw data.
From this dataset, I picked the one at the top of the list, (which appears to be totally random), Station number 415429, which is Luling, Texas.
Taking last year as an example, we can see that ten of the twelve months are tagged as “E”, i.e estimated. It is understandable that a station might be a month, or even two, late in reporting, but it is not conceivable that readings from last year are late. (The other two months, Jan/Feb are marked “a”, indicating missing days).
But, the mystery thickens. Each state produces a monthly and annual State Climatological Report, which among other things includes a list of monthly mean temperatures by station. If we look at the 2013 annual report for Texas, we can see these monthly temperatures for Luling.
Where an “M” appears after the temperature, this indicates some days are missing, i.e Jan, Feb, Oct and Nov. (Detailed daily data shows just one missing day’s minimum temperature for each of these months).
Yet, according to the USHCN dataset, all ten months from March to December are “Estimated”. Why, when there is full data available?
But it gets worse. The table below compares the actual station data with what USHCN describe as “the bias-adjusted temperature”. The results are shocking.
In other words, the adjustments have added an astonishing 1.35C to the annual temperature for 2013. Note also that I have included the same figures for 1934, which show that the adjustment has reduced temperatures that year by 0.91C. So, the net effect of the adjustments between 1934 and 2013 has been to add 2.26C of warming.
Note as well, that the largest adjustments are for the estimated months of March – December. This is something that Steve Goddard has been emphasising.
It is plain that these adjustments made are not justifiable in any way. It is also clear that the number of “Estimated” measurements made are not justified either, as the real data is there, present and correct.
Watts appears in the comments, stating that he has contacted John Nielsen-Gammon (Texas State Climatologist) about this issue. Nick Stokes also appears in the comments, and one commenter finds a similar problem for another Texas station.
Homewood’s post sheds light on Goddard’s original claim regarding the data drop out (not just stations that are no longer reporting, but reporting stations that are ‘estimated’). I infer from this that there seems to be a real problem with the USHCN data set, or at least with some of the stations. Maybe it is a tempest in a teacup, but it looks like something that requires NOAA’s attention. As far as I can tell, NOAA has not responded to Goddard’s allegations. Now, with Homewood’s explanation/clarification, NOAA really needs to respond….
So here is a post of mine [from last week] that shows the outcome of correcting the information WITH THEIR OWN DATA!
The NASA US historical temperature record has changed significantly since 1999, to create the appearance of warming. Previously the NASA records showed the US cooling since the 1930s.
When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century….
Which is why this will be known as the hoax of the century:
UNLESS, that is, the masses believe more-and-more that climate skepticism is truly evil, as David Suzuki believes, jail will soon await:
Richard Tol, Leslie Woodcock, James Lovelock, and others all feel the sting of the machinethey were a part of. A part of because these and other men-and-women specialists have abandoned what they previously supported as being true. But this machine they helped build has a way of growing too large to fail. And it is biting them in the ass!
This comes way of WUWT, and highlights the tendency of the Left towards totalitarian thinking in order to make their vision “work.
Scientists who don’t believe in catastrophic man-made global warming should be put in prison, a US philosophy professor argues on a website funded by the UK government.
Lawrence Torcello – assistant professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, writes in an essay at The Conversation that climate scientists who fail to communicate the correct message about “global warming” should face trial for “criminal negligence”. (H/T Bishop Hill)
What are we to make of those behind the well documented corporate funding of global warming denial? Those who purposefully strive to make sure “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” is given to the public? I believe we understand them correctly when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems accordingly.
What next, numbers tattooed on our arms because we hold an opinion different from Torcello?
Reason.org ends with a great commentary on this freedom restricting idea of the above lunatic:
In 2012, in a proceeding straight out of the Inquisition, an Italian court convicted six scientists for providing “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” in the lead-up to the earthquake. Now, a philosophy professor says that case may provide a worthwhile example for the treatment of scientific dissenters—specifically, “climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.”…
…He ultimately allows that he wouldn’t actually criminalize poor scientific communication—just anybody who might support dissenting scientists, or receive such support.
If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus findings of seismology, and for that reason no preparations were made, then many of us would agree that the financiers of the denialist campaign were criminally responsible for the consequences of that campaign. I submit that this is just what is happening with the current, well documented funding of global warming denialism….
We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.
If you’re trying to figure out how that doesn’t threaten the free exercise of speech, Torcello assures us, “We must make the critical distinction between the protected voicing of one’s unpopular beliefs, and the funding of a strategically organized campaign to undermine the public’s ability to develop and voice informed opinions.”
So…You can voice a dissenting opinion, so long as you don’t benefit from it or help dissenters benefit in any way?
By the way, according to RIT, Torcello researches “the moral implications of global warming denialism, as well as other forms of science denialism.” Presumably, his job is a paid one. But this is OK, because…the majority of scientists agree with his views on the issue?
Let’s allow that they do—and that a majority of scientists agree about man-made climate change and a host of other issues. Just when does the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition meet to decide what is still subject to debate, and what is now holy writ? And is an effort to “undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus” always criminally negligent?…
Below is another item we spoke of, and it is that of “consensus.” I have previously posted on it, of which a portion of what is below is from THAT post, which was born from a debate via FaceBook. But I also recommend the Wall Street Journal article by Dr. Roy Spencer [remember his bio was up this page a bit] as well as WUWT topic on the matter. Climate Depot has a list of his posts as well.
(Click Graph To See Previously Hidden Data)
We’ve all been subjected to the incessant “97% of scientists agree …global warming…blah blah” meme, which is nothing more than another statistical fabrication by John Cook and his collection of “anything for the cause” zealots. As has been previously pointed out on WUWT, when you look at the methodology used to reach that number, the veracity of the result falls apart, badly. You see, it turns out that Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers, rather than letting all authors of the papers rate their own work (Note: many authors weren’t even contacted and their papers wrongly rated, see here). The result was that the “97% consensus” was a survey of the SkS raters beliefs and interpretations, rather than a survey of the authors opinions of their own science abstracts. Essentially it was pal-review by an activist group with a strong bias towards a particular outcome as demonstrated by the name “the consensus project”.
Look at the views in column 1, then look at the % in the rightmost column: 52% state the the warming since 1850 is mostly anthropogenic. One common categorization would categorize the other 48% as ‘deniers’.
So, the inconvenient truth here is that about half of the world’s largest organization of meteorological and climate professionals don’t think humans are “mostly” the cause of Anthropogenic Global Warming the rest will probably get smeared as “deniers”
I wish to note, that, the truth was not a 97% consensus, but that about half disagreed with man causing it. Which is about the same percentage Dr. Happer says on CNBC:
Warming has stopped longer than that! About 17-years. So, Sen. Inhofe asked the EPA for any stats to back up this claim… the predictable outcome is seen below, and shows how the reasoning displayed by politicians in this debate are circular
Not only is the consensus wrong, and even the EPA cannot answer simple questions to defend Obama’s statement that the earth has warmed at an alarming rate over the past decade when it has “stalled” or cooled over more than a decade. But below (linked in the cartoon) are peer reviewed counter claims or challenges to the consensus that the 97% claim ignored.
† The list has been cited by Scientists (1, 2) and Professors (3)
“Wow, the list is pretty impressive …It’s Oreskes done right.”
– Luboš Motl, Ph.D. Theoretical Physics
“I really appreciate your important effort in compiling the list.”
– Willie Soon, Ph.D. Astrophysicist and Geoscientist
“A tour de force list of scientific papers…”
– Robert M. Carter, Ph.D. Palaeontology
“…it’s a very useful resource. Thanks to the pop tech team.”
– Joanne Nova, Author of The Skeptics Handbook
“I do confess a degree of fascination with Poptech’s list…”
– John Cook, Skeptical Science
A BAD DREAM
WASHINGTON (WNB) – As radical Islamic forces continue to rapidly overtake Iraq, Secretary of State John Kerry gave an impassioned speech today about the dire threat facing the world.
“Our country and the world must take immediate and decisive action to safeguard the lives and welfare of literally millions of people,” said Kerry. “At the rate we’re going, climate change could conceivably raise the temperature of the oceans to a point where the additional sweat from overheating fish will make the oceans too salty to sustain life. We must act – now.”
Later, when asked about the situation in Iraq, Kerry replied, “We’re closely monitoring the effect on the climate and fish in the area.”
