Walker Has No College Degree...

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

Do read the entire article, it pretty much proves your contention is a myth.

Fuck that, it's behind a paywall. (It's WSJ, what else?) You can C&P the relevant bits for us.

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

Bullshit, I'm seeing it.

No doubt that is because you are a subscriber.

Here some aspects of the article:

The Myth of the Climate Change '97%'
What is the origin of the false belief—constantly repeated—that almost all scientists agree about global warming?
By JOSEPH BAST And ROY SPENCER
May 26, 2014 7:13 p.m. ET

"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."

Doran's reply:

Stewart is referring to a survey done for the American Geophysical Union in 2009 by researchers for the University of Illinois in Chicago. Peter Doran, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, along with former graduate student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, in 2008 sent a simple survey with nine questions to more than 10,000 experts listed in the 2007 edition of the American Geological Institute’s directory of geoscience departments.

They ended up getting responses from 3,146 scientists, and then publicized the results from two questions: (1) Have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels? (2) Has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?

The results? About 90 percent of the scientists agreed with the first question and 82 percent with the second.

So where does the 98 percent statistic come from? That’s from a subsample of the survey — climate scientists. The survey actually says the result is 97 percent, but Stewart is correct that it represented just a small group of people — 77 out of 79 people.

Generally, with this sample size, one can expect a margin of error of about plus or minus 11 percentage points, or a range of 86 to 100 percent. That’s still a pretty big margin.

Note that Stewart simply said “scientists” — not climate scientists. That makes a difference, as experts who study the climate appear much more convinced that human activity has affected the climate. That’s shown by the survey, which found that less than half of petroleum geologists agreed with the second statement.

But Stewart ignored the main result from the survey of more than 3,000 people — that 82 percent of those surveyed believed human activity was a significant factor in higher global temperatures. That result has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, and so it’s a pretty strong majority.

Still, there have been concerns raised about the study. As Stewart noted, it was an opt-in online survey, and The Fact Checker has raised caution flags in the past about opt-in online polls . You generally cannot draw broad conclusions about such surveys. Critics have also focused on the wording of the questions in the survey, especially the second one. The question did not define the meaning of “significant,” and one scientist might interpret the phrase differently from another.

Professor Murray Goot of Macquarie University in Australia explored some of these issues in a 2011 paper, and he concluded that while questions could be raised about the phrasing of the questions and the methodology of the survey, the results were not significantly different from other surveys of scientists. Over time, such surveys have shown that increasingly large percentages of scientists believed that anthropogenic (human-generated) greenhouse gas emissions affected climate change. He concluded:

Concerns about the sampling and the number of respondents used in the Doran and Zimmerman study are secondary even when they are not misplaced. The key issue has to do with the wording of the questions. While the questions asked in Bray and von Storch [another survey of scientists] aren’t exactly equivalent to the question ‘Do you believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions were the primary factor (50% or more) in the observed mean global temperature increase since the mid-20’th century?’ they are sufficiently close — and the distribution of responses are sufficiently clear — to suggest that the results reported by Doran and Zimmerman are unlikely, in any very material sense, to be misleading.

Doran, in an e-mail, said that Stewart’s reference to the survey in the opinion article was “very misleading.” He said that the 79 climate scientists were “undeniable experts” — who both list climate science as their area of expertise and have published more than 50 percent of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change. He said 75 of 77 individuals, or 97.4 percent, agreed with the second statement; two of the 79 didn’t answer this particular question.

Doran said that “‘significant’ to scientists has clear meaning. It refers to a meaningful relationship — not random. We thought carefully about the exact wording and worked closely with a survey expert to design the questions.” He added:

“There was no bias in picking these people. It was just whoever was listed in the directory which was the best source of contact information for earth scientists we could find. This in itself was no easy task. There is no electronic version of this database, so we cut the spline off the directory and scanned every page, ran the scanned pages through an optical character recognition program, and created a spreadsheet with names and emails that required a lot of cleaning of the raw scans to get to a viable mailing list. Of the >10,000 invitations to participate that went out, over 3,146 scientists responded to the survey. For an online survey of very busy people, this was a fantastic response.”

"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."

John Cook:

John Cook et al., 2013

Cook et al. examined 11,944 abstracts from the peer-reviewed scientific literature from 1991–2011 that matched the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. They found that, while 66.4% of them expressed no position on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), of those that did, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are contributing to global warming. They also invited authors to rate their own papers and found that, while 35.5% rated their paper as expressing no position on AGW, 97.2% of the rest endorsed the consensus. In both cases the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position was marginally increasing over time. They concluded that the number of papers actually rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.[24] Also, a reply to the criticism of the study was published, saying: "[critic] believes that every paper discussing the impacts of climate change should be placed in the 'no opinion' category".[25]

In their discussion of the results in 2007, the authors said that the large proportion of abstracts that state no position on AGW is as expected in a consensus situation,[26] adding that "the fundamental science of AGW is no longer controversial among the publishing science community and the remaining debate in the field has moved on to other topics."[24]

In Science & Education in August 2013 David Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the corpus used by Mr. Cook. In their assessment, "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."

However, as the paper took issue in the definition of consensus, the definition of consensus was split into several levels: In the end, of all the abstracts that took a position on the subject, 22.97% and 72.50% were found to take an explicit but unquantified endorsement position or an implicit endorsement position, respectively. The 0.3% figure represents abstracts taking a position of "Actually endorsing the standard definition" of all the abstracts (1.02% of all position-taking abstracts), where the "standard definition" was juxtaposed with an "unquantified definition" drawn from the 2013 Cook et al. paper as follows:
The unquantified definition: ‘‘The consensus position that humans are causing global warming’’
The standard definition: As stated in their introduction, that ‘‘human activity is very likely causing most of the current warming (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW)’’

Criticism was also subjected to the "arbitrary" disclusion of non-position-taking abstracts as well as other issues of definitions. [27]

Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shaviv and Nils-Axel Mörner, who question the consensus, were cited in a Wall Street Journal article by Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer disputing the 97% figure, as Climate scientists who assert that Cook misrepresented their work.[28]

"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.

Bray & von Storch:

Bray and von Storch, 2008

Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, of the Institute for Coastal Research at the Helmholtz Research Centre in Germany, conducted an online survey in August 2008, of 2,059 climate scientists from 34 different countries, the third survey on this topic by these authors.[12] A web link with a unique identifier was given to each respondent to eliminate multiple responses. A total of 375 responses were received giving an overall response rate of 18%. The climate change consensus results were published by Bray,[13] and another paper has also been published based on the survey.[14]

The survey was composed of 76 questions split into a number of sections. There were sections on the demographics of the respondents, their assessment of the state of climate science, how good the science is, climate change impacts, adaptation and mitigation, their opinion of the IPCC, and how well climate science was being communicated to the public. Most of the answers were on a scale from 1 to 7 from 'not at all' to 'very much'.[12]

In the section on climate change impacts, questions 20 and 21 were relevant to scientific opinion on climate change. Question 20, "How convinced are you that climate change, whether natural or anthropogenic, is occurring now?" Answers: 67.1% very much convinced (7), 26.7% to some large extent (5–6), 6.2% said to some small extent (2–4), none said not at all. Question 21, "How convinced are you that most of recent or near future climate change is, or will be, a result of anthropogenic causes?" Answers: 34.6% very much convinced (7), 48.9% being convinced to a large extent (5–6), 15.1% to a small extent (2–4), and 1.35% not convinced at all (1).[12]

Surveys of meteorologists . . .

Meteorology != climatology.

"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."

. . . What exactly is the objection there? 41 ain't enough? That makes no sense.

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

41 isn't enough to claim 97% consensus, that percentage is a myth as proven in the article I posted, that you're too cheap to read.

41 is quite a reasonable number of authors/editors for any section of an IPCC report, if not too many, and that 97% figure was addressed above under "Doran's reply."

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

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."

Of course it does, if those 79 are climatologists and the other responders are not.

 

[unregistered]

 

[miles]

Tell me, what percentage of 3,146 is 79?

Looks like they've lowered the Mensa admission standards to room temp IQ.

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

Tell me, what percentage of 3,146 is 79?

You are using the wrong numerator and denominator. It is not 79 out of 3,146, it is 75 out of 77 -- 97.4%.

Doran, in an e-mail, said that Stewart’s reference to the survey in the opinion article was “very misleading.” He said that the 79 climate scientists were “undeniable experts” — who both list climate science as their area of expertise and have published more than 50 percent of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change. He said 75 of 77 individuals, or 97.4 percent, agreed with the second statement; two of the 79 didn’t answer this particular question.

That is consensus.

Also:

Note that Stewart simply said “scientists” — not climate scientists. That makes a difference, as experts who study the climate appear much more convinced that human activity has affected the climate. That’s shown by the survey, which found that less than half of petroleum geologists agreed with the second statement.

But Stewart ignored the main result from the survey of more than 3,000 people — that 82 percent of those surveyed believed human activity was a significant factor in higher global temperatures. That result has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, and so it’s a pretty strong majority.