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At a glance - Climate scientists would make more money in other careers

Moonwatcher at 08:39 AM on 31 October, 2023

The statement that

There are many much easier ways for an intelligent and literate person to make money. If money was the motive, they'd be in another career.

is highly misleading. Those who were educated as scientists simply would not qualify for other careers, except possibly in one-in-a-million exceptions where a rich uncle, for example, was willing to take him/her in and get them up-to-speed. Normally, they are simply told that they don't have the right background for the job.

It is true that while employed, scientists can make a respectable but certainly not extravavent living. With the gross over-supply of scientists and enginners, however, their careers are always tenuous at best. I know because I have been there and have been in contact with others in the same boat.

Now consider the fact that there is already well over $5 trillion (USD) invested in the climate change industry (ie. businesses whose success depends on the general belief in AGW). Put yourself in the shoes of one of the financiers investing that money. Would you tend to grant funds to scientists who speak unfavorably about the AGW theory, thereby jepardizing their clients investments? And, with the gross over-supply of qualified scientists, there will always be some willing to sing to the same sheet of music as the financiers. These are the scientists that we call successful, but are certainly not rich. They do, however, keep their jobs (hopefully!), and are the ones that are polled in establishing consensus figures.

From this relatively small pool of successful scientists, a few climb the ladder to prestigious positions such as scientific advisors to various political, entrepreneurial, and military celebrities. These are the only scientists that come close to being "rich" by most peoples standards.

There is no consensus

RicardoB at 23:13 PM on 10 September, 2023

Eclectic @951:

Thank you for you comments.

You stated: "Dr Jordan Peterson shows how little he knows about climate matters ~ fair enough ~ but why is he choosing to boost Dr Curry?"

He chooses to boost Curry as he chooses to boost many other prominent "climate narrative contrarians" that he "interviews" in that same channel, like Robert Bryce, Steven Koonin, Richard Lindzen and Alex Epstein.

Dr. Peterson main point of view on the "climate debate" seems to come from his strong belief (?!) that the political measures that are being enforced by governments (to tackle global warming) will lead to mass impoverishment and starvation via the rise of the energy bill. In his words: "People can't care about environmental concerns when they are so desperate they are worried about tonight's shelter and the next meal." He frequently rages about "the consensus" and the "hysteria" that are leading to these political choices.

Hence, he deliberately chooses to debate the topic only with "specialists" from the "contrarian side" - champions for the carbon industry agenda. It suffices to say that these interviews function not as debates or means to get to the truth (by now, Dr. Peterson seems mostly uninterested in the cientific truth), but as opportunities both to let these "specialists" voice their cherry-picked concerns and attack established comprehensive scientific bases, and to not get himself confronted/debunked on his opinions. There's no debating; there's only agreeing.

Ice age predicted in the 70s

michael sweet at 00:36 AM on 19 August, 2023

Don Williams:

The "hiatus" papers do not show what you are claiming. Yes, Mann et al claimed that the "pause" was statistically significant. You can quote that paper. But in science it is not individual papers that count, it is the conclusions that count.

Foster and Ramsdorf replied to the Mann et al paper and claimed that the Mann et al paper had made calculation errors that invalidated their result. Foster et al claimed that there was no statistical significance. The scientific method is to exchange peer reviewed papers to debate facts. After several papers were exchanged, Mann et al conceded that they had made a mistake in their calculations and the "pause" was not statistically significant. It was magnificent to watch top scientists debate a fact and reach a consensus on what the true result was.

The scientific consensus is that the "pause" was simply random variation and not a change in the warmng pattern. Data collected since then have conclusively confirmed that the climate did not stop warming as demonstrated by the escalator. The Mann et al scientists agree with the consensus.

Mann and his collaborators are great scientists. Sometimes everyone makes mistakes. The difference between scientists and deniers is that when data shows that a scientist made a mistake they learn from the experience and move on. Deniers just regurgitate the same old debunked "pause" claims after everyone informed has moved on.

Ice age predicted in the 70s

MA Rodger at 00:33 AM on 19 August, 2023

Don Williamson @133 & others,
Discussion of the early 21st century SAT/SST record is hardily on-topic for this comment thread. The handful of years showing a reduced rate of warming surface tempertures did not lead to a reversal of warming but to an increased rate of warming, so any linkage to 1970's ideas of a coming ice age is entirely absent, despite an attempted linkage @108 up-thread. (And for the record, the take-away from the SciAm article referenced @133 is the ascribed response fro 'researchers' to all the 'hiatus' nonsense:-

"Picking a period of a decade or so where one part of the Earth's climate system fails to warm and using it to discredit all of climate science is a fallacious argument, and one driven by those with an agenda to discredit climate scientists."

Don Williamson, you have up-thread referenced Oreskes in the discussion of the 1970's idea of a coming ice age and insist there is some missing argument that gives continuing credibility to this 1970's idea (which are also ideas of earlier times according to Oreskes. "Throughout most of the history of science, geologists and geophysicists believed that Earth history was characterized by progressive, steady, cooling.") Do note the referenced pre-print conference paper does not constitute proof of a 'missing argument'. And were one sought, perhaps Oreskes (2007) 'The scientific consensus on climate change: How do we know we're not wrong?' can provide it.

Ice age predicted in the 70s

Rob Honeycutt at 11:56 AM on 17 August, 2023

Don @123...

"One of the main thrusts of Ms Oresekes' article was the reversal of the dominant view - whether contrarians picked up on it or not."

And as I've attempted to explain repeatedly, there was a "reversal" because there was a "reversal" in the temperature trend. When it was cooling, the dominant position was that it was cooling. When the trend changed to warming, the dominant position "reversed" to warming.

I'm not sure why this fact escapes you.

"Why wouldn't 'this abrupt about-face—from cooling to warming' create doubt?"

Because it has nothing to do with any changes in the scientific understanding of forcings on the climate system that produce warming or cooling.

"A few years after the new consensus was formed - the hiatus made it's unfortunate debut."

Which was much ado about nothing. There's a "hiatus" after every major el nino event.

"I think I understand why people are interested in finding out why the abrupt about-face more than 'just accept the consensus because it's a consensus and we really mean it this time'"

Think about this:

We've known since the mid-1800's that CO2 is the primary radiatively active gas in the atmosphere. We've known since the early 1900's pretty much the amount of warming we'd see from a doubling of CO2 concentratations. Nothing has changed about that concensus, in fact it's only become vastly better understood since then.

The consensus that doubling CO2 would significantly warm the planet hasn't altered a bit. What Dr. Oreskes is speaking about is what was known about the temperature trend at the time, not the underlying physics of what was and is occurring.

Ice age predicted in the 70s

Eclectic at 10:39 AM on 17 August, 2023

Don Williamson @123 and prior :

To put things in a more realistic perspective : the Ocean Heat Content continued to rise during the so-called Hiatus of atmospheric temperatures. So there was actually no real Hiatus ~ it was just an interesting talking-point. The globe was continuing to warm.

Yes, we can discuss "the hiatus" as an abstract concept or as a propaganda topic ~ but we are wasting our time if we tie ourselves into a pretzel trying to argue about consensus or scientific opinion regarding a physical non-event in overall global warming.

Propaganda point: Yes . . . a real scientific point: No

However, the 1945-1975 "cooling pause" was definitely real.

Ice age predicted in the 70s

Bob Loblaw at 13:31 PM on 16 August, 2023

Don:

Please first do me the courtesy of getting my name right. It's Bob, not Rob. You have repeated this several times, and it makes me think you are not reading carefully.

Not all geologists are the same. I am a physical geographer, and my specialty was climate (and more specifically, microclimate). You can read more about my background in the "Team" menu option under "About" (beneath the main masthead).

Other physical geographers specialized in topics such as geomorphology, hydrology, etc., and within those sub-disciplines they may have specialized in coastal geomorphology, glacial geomorphology, etc. And after they finish PhDs, they spend years continuing to learn (I would hope) that would allow them to become specialists in areas peripheral from their early studies. Although I am very familiar with many of these other sides of physical geography (which overlaps with geology in many cases), it does not mean that I am an expert in coastal geomorphology.

Unfortunately, your position in #105 that Michael Mann has a background in geology means that all geologists can be considered to be "climatologists" only demonstrates your lack of understanding of the discipline. Only a very small subset of geologists learn the processes that drive climate and can be considered to be climatologists.

As the saying goes, cats have four legs, and dogs have four legs, but cats are not dogs.

Your comment in #106 about Oreskes using awkward wording is only evidence of your desire to read something into it that isn't there. And your devolution into "undermine the consensus argument" only demonstrates where your true bias rests. You are seeing this as a battle between two camps, rather than a scientific discussion.

Most of the rest of your posts are exposing your bias: you have your talking points that represent "our side" (that is, your side). You think that your misrepresentations expose some nefarious intent on the part of a group you think of as your opponents. This is most unfortunate, as it makes it very difficult to have a constructive discussion with you.

Ice age predicted in the 70s

Don Williamson at 12:30 PM on 16 August, 2023

Here's a great argument from Oreskes in her 2007 paper on the consensus.

"might the scientific consensus be wrong? If the history of science teaches anything, it’s humility. There are numerous historical examples where expert opinion turned out to be wrong"

The "cooling" was obviously in the data (some say cooling from the 1920s, some say cooling from the 1940s) but the warming eventually came to the forefront as Oreske stated in her 2004 article.

Will the warming continue? That can get into a very complex discussion about the hiatus - where many diverse opinions were offered. Some of the same scientists disputed and supported the reality of hiatus. Can cooling start again despite CO₂? We really don't know so locking in only one direction for temperatures leaves an opening for contrarians to pounce when it's not warming and they took advantage of that with the so-called hiatus. Some well known climate scientists were on both sides and that wasn't very helpful.

Ice age predicted in the 70s

Don Williamson at 07:06 AM on 16 August, 2023

To Rob Honeycutt

To say that the Oreskes article as a draft is an incorrect interpretation.

It was a pre-print and never published in scientific literature but she did present these views in a European meteorology conference in Germany

link: LINK

I can't fathom why an American professor of her status would travel overseas to a conference and present her article is she wasn't aligning herself to the opinions as stated in the article.

She offered no rebuttal in her article so one must assume that it stood on its own merits. And to encourage contrarians to exploit the reversal, that's a very powerful argument that the contrarians cooling era argument has merit ~ whether we want to admit it or not.

Why not acknowledge the 'dominant view' was wrong and science coalesced into a new consensus?

To assert that a scientific consensus can't be wrong is a foolhardy position to take, I'm sure you'll agree.

Science moves forward but is dismissing the pov from a science historian as esteemed as Prof Oresekes is - the best way to move forward?

At a glance - The tricks employed by the flawed OISM Petition Project to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on climate change

nigelj at 08:05 AM on 9 August, 2023

"How the OISM Petition Project casts doubt on the scientific consensus on climate change......Do you think that a lot of scientists reject the idea that human-caused carbon emissions are responsible for climate change - and is that because you once read about a petition signed by them to that effect? If the answer is yes, then this is for you."

It is well known that plenty of people only read the headline or first paragraph, or half of articles, and here you are stating in the headline that a petition casts doubt on the consensus on climate change, and the very first paragraph states that lots of scientists reject that human emissions cause climate change. With not even a mention of how flawed the oregon petiton was in the first paragraph.

Is this the impression you wanted to leave those readers with? It looks self defeating to me.

It's not urgent

PollutionMonster at 18:07 PM on 29 July, 2023

I used the tactic of asking for a source rather then trying to debate an incoherent argument.

Denier link heritage

This seems very similar to the other arguments they make usually focusing on how expensive and infeasible renewable energy is. Certainly more subtle than other deniers who deny the 97% scientific consensus.

97% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven

BaerbelW at 15:32 PM on 5 July, 2023

Duran3d @75

You may want to read the explanation about a scientific consensus - which is after all what this rebuttal is all about:

https://sks.to/consensus-explainer

97% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven

Eclectic at 11:07 AM on 5 July, 2023

Duran3d @75 ~ the short version is that Rob Honeycutt is correct. The long version is that Rob Honeycutt is still correct. [See also: Bob Loblaw @77 ]

In derivation, the word consensus has a (narrow) range of meanings . . . but the meaning which you wish to use is nowadays an extreme outlier (used by hardly anyone). Over decades, the meaning of a word can gradually drift in one direction ~ and the drift does occur by consensus ;-)

Consensus does not mean merely a majority, or even a supermajority [indeed some sources claim "over 75%" agreement is a consensus ~ but that is far too weak for expressing consensus among scientists]. And some people try to gild the lily by going all mathematical: e.g. in year 2010 the consensus among scientists was >97% about the human cause of modern Global Warming . . . a figure which has now risen to >99% agreement (at time of writing). # But that sort of thing is unnecessary, because the overall evidence (of AGW) is so overwhelming, that it is a justifiable short-hand to use the simple word consensus.

Duran3d , you may be pleased to hear that one of the range of meanings of consensus used by the Ancient Romans . . . included a situation involving "plotting together". That fact could be joyous news to current climate-science-denying contrarians & Conspiracy Theorists ! Though I think most of that group are not really interested in meanings or facts.

As an aside ~ the word consensus is attacked by one of the (current) U.S. Presidential candidates [RFK.Jr] who uses his lawyerly skills to advocate the Anti-vaxxer cause. But coming from him, it is all just a torrent of words intended to convince the already-convinced intransigent Anti-vaxxers. He continually demands "scientific evidence in controlled studies" while also continually ignoring the bleeding-obvious evidence which already exists as a huge mountain. He is a true Denialist.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #25 2023

One Planet Only Forever at 03:03 AM on 24 June, 2023

As an engineer with an MBA I am interested in new information and feedback that helps me understand how to limit harm done.

The weekly Skeptical Science New Research listing continues to be a helpful resource for increased awareness and improved understanding, especially the category of ‘Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change’.

Politics can be understood to be the system for influencing/governing/controlling/delaying the development of social and economic systems and understanding. There is a parallel to engineering which develops new things and changes (improves and corrects) existing things.

Imagine if the engineering of things was significantly influenced, was allowed to be compromised, by disinformation developed by pursuers of status/success in competition for popularity or profit. Now imagine the more massively damaging results if political leadership was influenced/compromised that way (no need to imagine it – just become more aware of today’s developed reality).

Anyone concerned about the harm done by pursuers of personal benefit from disinformation, and the related harmful spin-offs of unjustified sharing of misinformation and the potential related unjustified fear, anger and hatred (which includes the development of hatred for people who try to increase awareness and improve understanding of climate science and the required corrections of popular and profitable developments), would benefit from reading "Our Common Agenda Policy Brief 8 Information Integrity on Digital Platforms, United Nations" (same link as the second item listed in the ‘Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change’).

The document is fairly easy to read. And there are only about 16 pages of text in the 29 page document.

The following excerpt, from the section titled “What harm is being caused by online mis- and disinformation and hate speech?”, captures the nature of the challenge/threat and the importance of effective collective limits on the success of people who pursue benefit from disinformation and the related lack of increased awareness and lack of improved understanding of the harm being done:

Similarly, mis- and disinformation about the climate emergency are delaying urgently needed action to ensure a liveable future for the planet. Climate mis- and disinformation can be understood as false or misleading content that undercuts the scientifically agreed basis for the existence of human-induced climate change, its causes and impacts. Coordinated campaigns are seeking to deny, minimize or distract from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientific consensus and derail urgent action to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. A small but vocal minority of climate science denialists³⁰ continue to reject the consensus position and command an outsized presence on some digital platforms. For example, in 2022, random simulations by civil society organizations revealed that Facebook’s algorithm was recommending climate denialist content at the expense of climate science.³¹ On Twitter, uses of the hashtag #climatescam shot up from fewer than 2,700 a month in the first half of 2022 to 80,000 in July and 199,000 in January 2023. The phrase was also featured by the platform among the top results in the search for “climate”.³² In February 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called out climate disinformation for the first time, stating that a “deliberate undermining of science” was contributing to “misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, disregarded risk and urgency, and dissent”.³³

Some fossil fuel companies commonly deploy a strategy of “greenwashing”, misleading the public into believing that a company or entity is doing more to protect the environment, and less to harm it, than it is. The companies are not acting alone. Efforts to confuse the public and divert attention away from the responsibility of the fossil fuel industry are enabled and supported by advertising and public relations providers, advertising tech companies, news outlets and digital platforms.³⁴ Advertising and public relations firms that create greenwashing content and third parties that distribute it are collectively earning billions from these efforts to shield the fossil fuel industry from scrutiny and accountability. Public relations firms have run hundreds of campaigns for coal, oil and gas companies.³⁵

Mis- and disinformation are having a profound impact on democracy, weakening trust in democratic institutions and independent media, and dampening participation in political and public affairs. Throughout the electoral cycle, exposure to false and misleading information can rob voters of the chance to make informed choices. The spread of mis- and disinformation can undermine public trust in electoral institutions and the electoral process itself – such as voter registration, polling and results – and potentially result in voter apathy or rejection of credible election results. States and political leaders have proved to be potent sources of disinformation, deliberately and strategically spreading falsehoods to maintain or secure power, or undermine democratic processes in other countries.³⁶

Hopefully this UN effort will help reduce the damaging success of disinformation. And hopefully it will be more effective more rapidly than the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)”.

The powerful ability to benefit from disinformation and its spin-offs of popularity of misinformation and hate requires a significant correction of the developed political systems and the resulting social and economic developments and corrections.

Climate scientists, likely unwittingly, were a significant factor in exposing the problem and forcing the increased awareness and understanding of the need to correct a lot of what has developed, especially the abuse of disinformation by political game players.

Cranky Uncle: a game building resilience against climate misinformation

Eclectic at 10:10 AM on 17 June, 2023

@13 , thank you, Peppers, you raise some very general points ~ which might be allowably on-topic in this Cranky Uncle thread. (And please forgive my overly formal usage of a capital P in your moniker ~ since even our impersonal friend ChatGPT gets awarded an initial capital C . )

Rob H. is being too tactful to hint at the conjunction of Veritas with an excess of vinum.

Peppers, you are using false logic when you suggest that all newer scientific understandings (e.g. Einstein's relativity) are entirely replacing (and invalidating) the previous consensus position (e.g. Newton's views). Quite false, to assert that such "progress" does imply that Einstein is also wrong & will in turn be thrust into the dustbin.

Peppers, I also take issue with you on the infant mortality argument that you use. There are still parts of the world where infant & maternal mortality/morbidity are appallingly high. And even in parts of the USA, too. The solution to these problems is essentially non-scientific ~ it is political [includes attitudinal ]. The problem is: too many Cranky Uncles in this world, with their bad attitude/ their illogic/ their uncompassion & uncharitableness. [ is "uncompassion" a ChatGPT neologism? ]

# John Hartz's comment (today, in the News Roundup #23) quotes George Monbiot on climate science denial and the current rising level of antisocial fascist behaviour. That is a thread, Peppers, where you might well continue your Chatty musings !

The little-known, massive advantage that renewables hold over coal

michael sweet at 02:01 AM on 11 June, 2023

David-acct,

So no analysis to respond to the scientific consensus that renewable energy can powe r the entire economy for about half ote cost of fossil fuels, including any storage needed. There are a great many scientific papers, written by specialists with actual experience and data to support their conclusions, that analyze this issue in great depth and you respond with "look at this website with no analysis".

Fwiw, NERC is a legacy organization run by utilities who have a vested interest in not changing the profitable status quo.

10 year anniversary of 97% consensus study

Bob Loblaw at 00:20 AM on 18 May, 2023

To borrow a contrarian meme, "one more nail in the coffin" of Gordon's quest "to find out what percentage of climate scientists believe that global warming will be catastrophic."

The study referenced in the OP is not a survey of "what scientists believe". Skeptical Science has a longer post on the 97% consensus theme. The Cook et al (2013) study is just one of the papers discussed there, and this is how it is described (including a link to the paper itself):

A Skeptical Science-based analysis of over 12,000 peer-reviewed abstracts on the subject 'global climate change' and 'global warming', published between 1991 and 2011, found that over 97% of the papers taking a position on the subject agreed with the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of the project, the scientist authors were emailed and rated over 2,000 of their own papers. Once again, over 97% of the papers taking a position on the cause of global warming agreed that humans are causing it

Note that the study looked at the abstracts of published papers. And in a second phase, the study did not ask scientists "what they believed" - they asked authors of papers to rate the papers they had written.

That Gordon confuses reading the literature with "asking what someone believes" tells us more about Gordon than we probably need to know.

If Gordon seriously wants an answer to his "catastrophic" question, along the lines of the study done by Cook et al (2013), there is an obvious solution:

Read the scientific literature

There is no consensus

Rob Honeycutt at 09:25 AM on 22 April, 2023

Okay, let's go over this again, Albert.

The premise of the paper is as stated in the introduction.

We examined a large sample of the scientific literature on global CC, published over a 21 year period, in order to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW).

Do you honestly not see the words: human activity is very likely causing most of the current AGW?

That statement creates the fundamental basis of papers that either endorse or minimize that position.

If you're telling me that most "skeptics" agree that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW... hey! We're good!

"It is a clear indication that only 1.6% of the papers thought that humans were causing most of warming."

Nope, precisely because categories 1, 2 and 3 all endorse the idea that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW.

"...AMS in 2016 and it explicitly asked members if they vpbelieved humans were responsible for the majority of warming and 67% said yes."

And they also explain that most of their members were NOT experts in climate science and do not publish climate research. The greater their expertise, the greater their level of agreement, with the highest level of expertise also demonstrating ~97% agreement with the idea that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW.

"...why Cook went to considerable lengths to hide the category numbers."

He didn't.

"I am passionate about truth in science..."

Clearly, quite the opposite.

"...I have an open mind on all matters..."

As Carl Sagan used to say, "It's good to keep an open mind, but not so much that your brain falls out." I think that perfectly describes your position in this matter.

"In the sixteenth century, 99.9% of scientists believed the Sun orbited the Earth."

No, it was 16th century scientists who were explaining to people the earth orbited the sun. Once presented within a scientific/mathematical structure, scientists of the day readily accepted this fact.

"i Won't be commenting on this thread again."

We are relieved.

There is no consensus

Rob Honeycutt at 15:18 PM on 20 April, 2023

If one thinks about how Albert is trying to frame this, it makes no sense. I've heard the same tripe from other deniers over the years; he's not the first to come up with this.

He's trying to re-frame the question from "in order to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW" into "in order to determine the percentage of research papers that endorse and quantify human contribution to GW as >50%."

It's quite a nonsensical and pointless framing of his (their) own creation that bears no relevance to anything that would have the least bit of interest to anyone.

Once again, it is fascinating to watch such entrenched, intractable displays like this.

There is no consensus

Albert at 08:54 AM on 20 April, 2023

"We examined a large sample of the scientific literature on global CC, published over a 21 year period, in order to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW). [emphasis added]"

And category 1 fits that definition perfectly.

And just 64 out of the 4000 explicitly said that human activity was the main cause of global warning.

There is no consensus

Rob Honeycutt at 05:23 AM on 20 April, 2023

In order to come to the conclusions he is, Albert has to completely ignore this important statement in the introduction of the Cook paper.

We examined a large sample of the scientific literature on global CC, published over a 21 year period, in order to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW). [emphasis added]

This is the fundamental premise of the research. This explains why there are endorse vs minimize categories. Albert is laser focused on a misinterpretation of only one sentence in the paper, to the exclusion of all else, in order to confirm his priors.

As I've pointed out innumerable times over the decade since the publication of Cook, the "skeptics" are more than welcome to do the exact same research and see what results they get. And in that decade none of them have taken up that challenge, more often than not coming up with lame excuses why they can't or won't.

There is no consensus

Rob Honeycutt at 01:28 AM on 20 April, 2023

@923... I'd agree with BL that the last sentence there is a quantification of >50%. But it's a moot point. Whether one were to put it in category 1 or 2 matters not, since both of those categories are endorsements of the idea that humans are the primary cause of modern warming.

So, one more time, the entire exercise this paper engages in is to separate research that endorses the position that humans are primarily responsible for warming and papers that minimize human responsibility. That is the very structure of the rating system. That is the fundamental premise stated in the title of the paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature.

Papers either endorse AGW or they minimize it. If a paper claims that the direct effects of CO2 are too small compared to other natural factors that is a minimization of the anthropogenic element of global warming.

Science and its Pretenders: Pseudoscience and Science Denial

One Planet Only Forever at 14:20 PM on 13 April, 2023

EddieEvans,

Thanks for pointing to the Stanford University page. It is a great supplement to the Thinking is Power item reposted here on SkS.

I note that the list of criteria in 'Section 4. Alternative demarcation criteria; Sub-section 4.6 Multi-criterial approaches' starts with the following criteria identifying the practice of Pseudoscience:

"Belief in authority: It is contended that some person or persons have a special ability to determine what is true or false. Others have to accept their judgments."

Note that many believers of Pseudoscience that is professed by their "Identified Authority (Authoritarian ruler on the matter that they have passionate beliefs about)" often claim that a 'presenter of the developed consensus understanding regarding climate science and the resulting need to rapidly end the harm of fossil fuel use' is claiming to be 'the authority that others must accept the judgments of'.

The fact that the original Stanford document was published in 2008 appears to indicate that something is causing a powerful resistance to leadership learning the Truth about Pseudoscience, and not just regarding the climate impact case.

It appears that the powerful problem is harmful Populist political players as described in the detail in the National Endowment for Democracy's Democracy Digest item "Has populism won the war on liberal democracy".

The book "Has Populism Won? The war on liberal democracy", by Daniel Drache and Marc D. Froese, presents the diversity of Populists. Example of that diversity is Lula and Bolsonaro of Brazil both being Populists, as are Trump and Sanders in the USA. A common point about all Populists is their selling of different versions of a Big Lie that emotionally triggers support by making misleading, overly simple, claims about things. However, populists can be 'harmful or helpful'. Being misleading is not good. But it can temporarily reduce harm ... unless the 'helpful' Big Lie is 'seen through'.

Also note that the harmful Populists love to benefit from the promotion of Pseudoscience through the 'scientifically developed' power of misleading targeted marketing. Helpful Populists would be less likely to do that. The climate science case identifies the more harmful, less helpful, Populists.

A final point. Being scientific, and scientific developments, are no guarantee that harm is being reduced. What is chosen to be researched and how that learning is employed can be helpful or harmful. The science of marketing is an example. Nuclear weapons also prove that point. But misleading marketing is potentially a far more harmful scientifically developed thing.

The Big Picture

BaerbelW at 04:35 AM on 17 March, 2023

A question for those who seem to at least somewhat doubt the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change: did you notice the glossary entry for that and follow the link to the explainer? If not, here is the direct link https://sks.to/consensus-explainer. Perhaps read that before commenting again.

The Big Picture

Philippe Chantreau at 03:26 AM on 17 March, 2023

I see all of the familiar red flags of BS with Jason's posts. Attempting to present "the science" as something vague and abstract is a major one.

The science is as far from a metaphysical concept as can be. It is composed of a very large numbers of scientific studies and articles, peer-reviewed and published in science publications, with methods, data and results. All of these, when considered as a big picture, point in a definite direction. The scientific consensus, as I have remarked many times before is not just agreement between experts' opinions. It is mostly a convergence of scientific research results, that experts are familiar with because they are experts. From there, major principles can be established, that are no longer a matter of debate, or not to the extent that would have major consequences.

The attempt at establishing "factions" has for objective to give the appearance that reality is dependent on what camp we think we belong to. That is the ultimate fraud. This is the reason why there has been a push for a "blue team-read team" approach by some, using what is essentially lawyers' skills to make a case where there is not one at all. They know they can manipulate an audience effectively and make them not just believe that down is up but even fight for it. Heck these days, the AI bots mentioned higher could possibly do this even more effectively than sleazy lawyers, they only would have to have access to all the mind manipulating techniques used by advertisers, marketers and said lawyers to fool people.

The Big Picture

Rob Honeycutt at 01:46 AM on 17 March, 2023

Jason @14... "That means pulling up above the canopy to a point of view where we can see the consensus faction and their beliefs alongside the other major factions and their beliefs."

The consensus is precisely an act of "pulling up above the canopy..."

The entire point of a scientific consensus is to measure the broad assessments of a wide range of experts. You know, people who have PhD's and study the subject matter every day of their working lives? Those people overwhelmingly accept that, it's real, it's us, it's bad, we need to act rapidly to fix it, and it's not "game over."

If you want to be inclusive of the minority position that this could all be wrong, that's fine. You know, the standard treatments for cancer could also be wrong and herbal medicine just might save Uncle Bob from an early grave. You can never fully eliminate that possibility.

There are definitely people out there who are going to vigorously try to convince your uncle to use herbs and not listen to his oncologist. They are non-experts in oncology. They have strong opinions on oncology. Bob is more that welcome to risk taking their advice. At the end of the day, the likelihood of the oncologist being wrong are substantially lower than the herbalist.

I peg you as the angry herbalist in this analogy.

The Big Picture

John Mason at 17:59 PM on 16 March, 2023

Jason, that last post contradicts itself. If there's a scientific consensus about something, that means people doing the science have long stopped arguing about the core principles. There may be other "factions" outside of science, for example creationists who dispute evolution. But once you look at the evidence, their views are simply opinion, not evidence-based. That is an important distinction. Evidence is not about belief: it's a hard factual record of the physical world that can be deciphered, with varying degrees of difficulty.

The Big Picture

Rob Honeycutt at 11:16 AM on 16 March, 2023

JasonChen @5... Where do you come to the conclusion that any of this is based on "[an] institutional consensus has formed that higher CO2 will cause higher temperatures"?

That higher levels of CO2 will cause the planet to warm is just basic physics. The scientific consensus is merely the result of a high level of confidence in that physics.

The connection between Hurricane Sandy and global warming

stranger1548 at 10:05 AM on 29 January, 2023

Sorry, this is the only reference I could find to hurricanes. My question is that it seems I've for read for years that there is no scientific consensus on increasing numbers of hurricanes but that there is consensus on growing intensity. Exchanging posts with a skeptic I failed to back the statement on hurricane intensity. The studies I've looked use modeling the future but as we know the word modeling only receives derision from climate skeptics. I couldn't find any actual proof that hurricanes have intensified. I couldn’t find any climate signals that support the premise.

Publishing a long overdue explainer about a scientific consensus

BaerbelW at 04:37 AM on 15 January, 2023

To add another option to share this explainer, I created an audio version and put it up on Youtube: https://youtu.be/CQIowIu0yoc

This might come in handy whenever trying to explain a scientific consensus in YouTube comments where links to other videos work, but - at least for me - comments with links to other websites make them disappear immediately.

P.S.: Thanks to EddieEvans for giving me the idea to do this recording!

We’ll keep tweeting (for now) but have also started tooting.

nigelj at 08:20 AM on 25 December, 2022

Peppers @40

"The definition of what is a harmful misunderstanding from one people, one culture, one gender, class standing, etc., to another cannot be defined to concluded that all should be and think and do only as you do. "
I disagree. Harmful misunderstandings are defined where there is good scientific evidence and consensus. Science is also a universal language that cuts across cultures.

However I do think people should still be allowed to challenge all consensus scientific positions, and other views, in the public realm like websites and in the scientific literature.

Censorship of opinion and information worries me, (with very limited exceptions like inciting violence, defamation law, etc, etc) because a well intended process can so easily be abused and go terribly wrong, and you would need a huge army of people trying to enforce it. People should read George Orwells 1984.

2022 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46

One Planet Only Forever at 09:52 AM on 5 December, 2022

wilddouglascounty @4,

I agree that a diversity of actions are required to increase the number of people who change their mind to abandon harmful Beliefs by improving their Knowledge regarding how to be less harmful and more helpful. And that includes recognizing that not all people in a 'category of people' are harmfully selfish even if the majority in that category are.

I think that the best thing would be for people to use their connections and methods of connecting with others to be more helpful including:

raise awareness and improve understanding about the harm of fossil fuels and the harmful actions of people trying to maximize their benefit from fossil fuels as harmfully as they can get away with.

correct harmful misunderstandings or misleading claims when they encounter them (don't be a by-stander)

Unlike 'more on-line interactive' people like Eddie Evans who have the potential to reach a broader audience, I am not a Social Media participant. My interactions are more direct encounters with people in my many diverse groups of acquaintances. I do not bring up topics like climate change. But whenever a misunderstanding is raised I try to improve the understanding ... with mixed results. I live in Alberta. So I interact with many people who are powerfully motivated to misunderstand a topic like the harmful climate change impacts of fossil fuel use.

I have made a more expansive comment about this regarding the added challenge of the 'recent changes by Twitter' on the 2022 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #48. The recent SkS post "Publishing a long overdue explainer about a scientific consensus" is also related to the problem.

2022 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #48

One Planet Only Forever at 08:03 AM on 5 December, 2022

Developing improvements for humanity is almost certain to be harmed by Twitter allowing and excusing, and as a result promoting with relative impunity, harmful misunderstandings and harmfully misleading comments (note: Some misunderstanding and misleading can be neutral or even be helpful. It is less important to correct or limit the influence of neutral or helpful misunderstanding).

It is important to differentiate between Knowledge and Beliefs. Belief can be anything. Knowledge is limited to reasoned or evidence-based understanding. Beliefs can be entrenched dogma. Knowledge is constantly improving. Belief and Knowledge have a history of conflict.

There is now ample evidence, and robust reasoning related to the evidence, that ‘people being freer to believe, comment, and act however they wish without effective governing of harm done’ will lead to a failure of humanity developing sustainable improvements. The climate science case is one of the most significant examples. Thirty years after the development of a robust evidence-based and well-reasoned understanding that fossil fuel use is unsustainable and very harmful there continue to be people trying to resist that learning becoming the ‘significantly more’ common sense. (Note that climate science is not the only case of harmful results due to people being freer to believe and do as they please in competition for personal benefits and status).

Constantly improving consensus understanding of what is harmful and how to effectively limit harm done is essential to the development of sustainable improvements for humanity (refer to the SkS Explainer regarding Scientific Consensus but extend it to other reasoned or evidence-based understanding). Constantly improving the ‘common sense about harm and the need to limit harm done’ is especially important for correcting harmful unsustainable human development and developing sustainable improvements.

Free speech is important. But, like most things, Free Speech can be helpful or harmful. To limit its harmfulness, Free Speech needs to be governed by the pursuit of increased awareness and improved understanding of what is harmful. Helpful learning and education about harm to effectively limit harm done is critical. The most important application of critical thinking is learning to limit harm done (that involves learning that may reduce developed perceptions of status or opportunities for benefit).

It would be great if everyone diligently learned and self-governed their Free Speech to be as harmless as possible and strive to be helpful. But that is unlikely to ever be the reality for humanity. Some people will probably always try to benefit from harmful Free Speech (or other Freedoms). There will probably always be a need for prompt effective correction of harmful misunderstanding or misleading claims. And, in the worst cases, it will be necessary to ‘cancel’ the ‘sharing of very harmful misunderstanding’ and effectively block the influence of the most harmful repeat offenders (the ones who resist learning to be less harmful and more helpful).

Repeatedly harmful people, people resisting helpful harm reducing correction, are traditionally penalized or kept from harmfully influencing things. That tradition needs to govern the ‘sharing of beliefs’.

Publishing a long overdue explainer about a scientific consensus

EddieEvans at 22:26 PM on 3 December, 2022

This a really helpful reader for a non-specialist like myself. I suggest a tone-down, common language version and placing it on Wikipedia. At least on Wikipedia, its subject becomes documented for posterity. Besides, it's ready to go as is.

Search on Wikipedia

Publishing a long overdue explainer about a scientific consensus

EddieEvans at 20:01 PM on 3 December, 2022

I have only one recommendation for this important subject, use a heavier font style for webpage publication. Even with the typeface enlarged with the browser tool, it's still less than easily read by the visually impaired and older folks like myself.

myself. Link to the Credible Hulk article

Publishing a long overdue explainer about a scientific consensus

One Planet Only Forever at 10:19 AM on 3 December, 2022

This is indeed a helpful presentation.

A related thought would be that science is about education/learning, which is the pursuit of increased awareness and improved understanding. The consensus understanding is always being improved. However, the following quote from the “explainer” exposes how some scientific pursuits may impede the development and improvement of a consensus:

“Given the combative nature of science it’s highly unlikely that any scientist sets out to become part of a consensus.”

The “competition” between scientists can be helpful or harmful. Open collaboration is clearly the better way to pursue learning. Combative competition for wealth or status can produce negative results in many ways including:

reducing openness (selective sharing of information, hiding disliked results)

influencing what is chosen to be investigated, especially ‘not choosing’ to investigate the potential harm done by potentially beneficial activities.

misleading presentations on an issue, especially using selected evidence (knowing better, but not sharing the better understanding)

A related understanding is that a very important sub-set of learning is "learning about what is harmful and the ways to limit harm done". Learning (science) aligned with the pursuit of limiting harm done is more sustainable. That is essentially the basis for the developed consensus understanding, open to continued improvement, of the Sustainable Development Goals.

That understanding leads to awareness that not everybody cares to govern their learning by the sub-set objective of limiting harm done. Other objectives can lead people to argue against a 'developing consensus understanding' in their pursuit ways to prolong or increase their ability to benefit from understandably harmful beliefs and actions.

New reports spell out climate urgency, shortfalls, needed actions

One Planet Only Forever at 07:36 AM on 18 November, 2022

prove we are smart,

Nicely selected trio of items.

A major root of the problem is the ability of misleading marketing to be popular and excuse understandably harmful unsustainable pursuits of benefit. It can cause people to demand the freedom to be more harmful and less helpful.

That harmful unjustified popularity can compromise (contaminate) politics to the point where even leadership contenders who want to do more to limit harm done justifiably fear losing the ability to be influential if they are 'too honestly helpful'.

As an example, Danielle Smith just won the leadership contest for the UCP in Alberta. Since the UCP are already the majority (the next election is next year), she is now Premier of Alberta (like the way that Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak became PM of the UK). An unnerving thing about Danielle Smith becoming a powerful person is that she believes 'conspiracy theory nonsense' (about COVID, Global Warming, and many other matters). And in a recent interview she essentially said that she would question any developing consensus understanding, especially a scientific one (can't seem to find a link to the interview or a report that clearly mentions it, but an internet search of "Danielle Smith misleading" finds plenty of examples to ponder).

The powerful popularity of the science of marketing abused to promote harmful misunderstanding develops damaging, hard to correct, results.

2022 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #42

nigelj at 06:13 AM on 1 November, 2022

scvblwxq1

"I've been through the Global Warming movement in the 80s that said that the world would be very hot by now and here it is 40 years later still saying it will be very hot sometime in the future. I'm skeptical."

Please provide a link to back up your claims and precisely what you mean by very hot. There might have been some environmental activists and a couple of scientists thinking the world would be very hot by now , ( meaning I assume at least 2 or 3 degrees of warming above preindustrial?), but there was no consensus of climate scientists back in 1980s predicting such a thing.

The first IPCC report was released in 1990. It reviewed the scientific work of thousands of scientists and concluded we could have several degrees of warming by the end of this century, and that warming between 1990 and 2025 would be about 1 degree C. Warming has been about 0.75 deg C over that period so not far off. And bear in mind the modelling back then was not very advanced. This is from the 1990 summary for policy makers:

"Under the IPC C Business-as-Usual (Scenario A ) emissions of greenhouse gases, a rate of increase of global-mean temperature during the next century of about 0.3°C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2°C to 0.5°C per decade); this is greater than thaat seen over the past 10,000 years. This will result in a likely increase in global-mean temperature of about 1°C above the present value by 2025 and 3°C before the end of the next century. The rise will not be steady because of the influence of other factors"

www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_assessments_far_wg_I_spm.pdf

The full 1990 report is here:

www.ipcc.ch/report/climate-change-the-ipcc-1990-and-1992-assessments/

You basically dont know what you are talking about.

Cranky Uncle: a game building resilience against climate misinformation

Doug Bostrom at 17:08 PM on 26 August, 2022

Whoa there, Jason. We're still stuck at your first question. You've started a discussion— don't scurry away now.

You asked "does it work?" You were shown where that question is answered. You say you've read those cites, and to have found your question unaddressed.

So in a nutshell, you're saying that Cook is making unsupported claims.

Specifically, how are Cook's assertions "Inoculation has been found to be effective in neutralizing misinformation casting doubt on the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming [2, 6]. Inoculation messages are also long lasting [8]" unfounded?

Cranky Uncle: a game building resilience against climate misinformation

Doug Bostrom at 02:48 AM on 26 August, 2022

"...no benefits."

I suppose you're thinking of tangible, material personal benefits that sit in a driveway or a bank account, Jason.

There are other benefits we can seek, such as not embarassing ourselves by being gullible chumps, soft putty in the hands of demagogues etc.

Does it work? That begs another question: did you read the article?

Inoculation has been found to be effective in neutralizing misinformation casting doubt on the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming [2, 6]. Inoculation messages are also long lasting [8]

Those numbers are called "citations," and they lead to "references," foundational support for claims of which we may not be familiar. Here the complete list of references accompanies the article directly inline.

As you become more familiar with scientific literature, you'll understand the value of citations and references. Here you can practice by actually reading Cook's article. When you run into something not plainly obvious to a reader versed in a paper's topic discipline (for the rest of us such as "the sun rises in the east") there'll generally be a supporting citation.

If you see a claim made that is controversial or in doubt and is not supported or that a citation is misapplied, that's when things become potentially interesting, assuming you can articulate the problem.

There's no tropospheric hot spot

MA Rodger at 19:23 PM on 23 August, 2022

Cedders @33,

And having had a read of that PDF...

Cedders @33,
Having examined the PDF (16 pages not 24), it is quite evident that it is a pile of utter nonsense, a "welcome to the lunatic asylum" message and not anything in any way scientifically-based.

The author is Piers Corbyn, a well-kown denialist and an elder brother of Jeremy Corbyn (a long-serving left-wing Labour MP who bizarrely gained the heady position of Leader of the Labour Party for 4½ years).

Piers Corbyn is described in Wikithing as "an English weather forecaster, businessman, anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist" and does feature here at SkS being (1) Cited within a spot of denialism of 2015 in the Daily Express tabloid/comic, (2) The main source of a pile of climate nonsense of 2013 from the then Mayor of London Alexander Boris von Pfiffle Johnson, a man now renowned throughout the known world for not being particularly truthful, (3) Listed here at SkS as a denialsit with zero peer-reviewed writings.

The 16 page thesis linked up-thread @33 is a 2019 thesis presented to the Reading University Debating Journal and sitting at the top of a list of 24 such theses posted 2018-19, top of the list because it is the most recent (the journal lasted less than a year), a list which addresses such important topics as 'Why Self-Service Checkouts are the Invention of the Devil' and 'The Great University of Reading Catering Con: Man Shall Not Live off Sandwiches Alone' and an anonymous piece 'Why I Support the Conservatives: The Most Successful Party in British History'.

The Piers Corbyn thesis begins by citing David Legates' dismissal of the 97% AGW consensus before dismissing that because "it is about facts; and no Global-Warming Inquisition is going to prevent me exposing their nonsensical theories."

Corbyn then kicks off by asserting anthropogenic CO2 comprises 4% of atmospheric CO2 (thus confusing FF carbon with naturally-cycled carbon) and that CO2 is not the main controller of global temperature (here presenting a graphic which confuses the US temperature with global temperature - shown below in this comment).
A further assertion is then presented, that CO2 is the result of warming oceans with six references/notes provided in support which seem to all point back to crazy denialist Murry Salby.

So, a la Salby, the present rise in CO2 is claimed to result from the good old Medieval Warm Period. A graphic is presented comparing a denialist 1,000y temperature record (based on the schematic FAR Fig 7c) with the much-confirmed scientifically-based Hockey Stick graph.
This brings us to the halfway page of Corbyn's denialist rant.

The thesis continues with pageful of misunderstanding of how the GH-effect works, ending with accusations that this misunderstood 'theory' breaks the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (or it does if you misinterpret the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics).
Happily, this misunderstanding is considered to be not supported by "better scientists" who consider the lapse rate. And this indeed is a 'better' consideration. But here Corbyn perhaps confuses the tropical 'hot spot' (which is caused by increased tropical rainfall transporting more latent up into the troposphere) with some CO2 effect. (The 'hot spot' results from a warmer tropics and not per se any enhanced GH-effect.) And he fails to address the reasons why there is difficulty detecting this tropical 'hot spot'. Indeed he brands it as a 'coldspot' that he seems to say is caused by "more CO2 & other GHGs" which cause a diurnal fluctuation in the IR "heat-exit height" to become greater and, due to the 4th-power in the SB equation, this causes cooling. Whether such a phenomenon extends beyond the tropics (thus globally more-than negating the 'hot spot') is not properly explained but, due to the lapse rate this phenomenon can apparently also negate "the original expected surface warming."

A first graphic box is presented with three unsubstantiated bullet points explaining "Why CO2 theory does not work" alongside two similar "apart from"s.
A second graphic box also titled "Why CO2 theory does not work" states:-

In the real atmosphere there are day/night temperature fluctuations (eg in upper atmosphere). They are larger with more CO₂ because CO₂ (infra red absorber / emitter) gains & loses heat easier than N₂ & O₂ and so enables all the air to adjust quicker.

This is a fundamentally different explanation from the previous fluctuation in IR "heat-exit height" explanation described earlier, and it is still wrong.
(A packet of air with X concentrations of CO2 will both emit and absorb an IR photons of quantity P. With absorb=emit, it is thus in equilibrium. Add CO2 so the concentration is doubled to 2X, and the emitting photons will double to 2P and the absorbed photons will also double to 2P so absorb=emit and the same equilibrium is maintained. The main result is that twice the level if IR emission has half the pathlength before absorption so at any point the IR flux remains unchanged. And CO2 does not "gain & lose heat easier than N₂ & O₂" when it remains thermally coupled to the N₂ & O₂. )
The remainder of this second graphic box on PDF page 9 is a little too confused to rebut with any confidence. A diurnal range of "about 5 or 6 deg" is given which is apparently a temperature range yet whatever “deg” means (presumably Kelvin), the bulk of the troposphere has a far smaller diurnal range than even 5ºF. The mechanism for the enhanced cooling from the "heat-exit height" is presented as due to a fluctuating temperature losing more heat (by radiating IR) than a constant temperature (which is true). A rather dodgy-looking equation is followed by the note "Detail subject under research" but no reference is given and three-years-on there is no sign of such "research."
And a third graphic box is shown on the next page also titled "Why CO2 theory does not work," this third such graphic mainly presenting a pair of images from Australian denialist David M. W. Evans who has his own SkS page of climate misinformation.

The thesis then turns to the proposition that it is not CO2 but solar forces that "rules climate temperature" with the dotted line on the graphic below described as such a ruling influence. It apparently shows how the "9.3yr lunar-nodal crossing & the full 22yr solar magnetic cycle" allegedly shift the jet stream and "many circulation patterns." The graphic's 60-yr periodicity is less than convincing,being fitted to US rather than global temperature which, when extended beyond the 1895-2008 period shows itself to be simple curve-fitting (eg the Berkeley Earth US temperature record 1820-2020 does not show it, even to a blind man). The graphic was presented by Corbyn at the Heartland Institute's 2009 conflab in NY in which Corbyn [audio] insists other findings demonstrate “something is going on” but why it is this graphic being reused in this 2019 thesis is not clear – perhaps the forecast of world temperature dropping to 1970s levels by 2030 is too evident on other slides he used in that Heartland presentation.
To support his thesis Corbyn mentions an alleged cover-up by the likes of the BBC in reporting only global warming when the 'true' data shows cooling, the reported support for all this Piers Corbyn craziness from oil companies who shy away only because they want to use AGW to "make higher profits" and how these AGW-inspired mitigation agendas are already directly responsible for needlessly killing "millions" annually.
The thesis ends with a challenge:-

It is for this reason that I, Piers Corbyn, challenge whoever is willing in Reading University or other appropriate institutions to a debate on the failed Global warming scam vs evidence-based science.

So I interpret the thesis as a "welcome to the lunatic asylum" message from Piers Corbyn.
Piers Corbyn graphic

It's cooling

scaddenp at 06:40 AM on 20 July, 2022

Rationalise - "Dr Tom" is just another anonymous person on the internet. It would correct to be very skeptical about such pronouncements. It is another story however when looking peer-reviewed scientific papers and another again when looking at a strong scientific consensus. The IPCC reports try to capture that consensus in their reports. If you want to see what that consensus is on impacts, then look at WG2. It is sobering enough.

How to inoculate yourself against misinformation

Philippe Chantreau at 05:06 AM on 3 July, 2022

David-acct,

Your argument failed on multiple points.

You postulate the future discovery of an unknown forcing. Then you jump on to the hypothesis that said forcing would automatically be labeled as misinformation. Why would that be? If serious scientific work confirms the existence of such a forcing, with multiple converging lines of evidence and multiple research teams obtaining similar results through various methods, nobody in the scientific world will call it misinformation. That is, unless the work is misrepresented and its significance conveyed to the public in a way not supported by the research.

Further, you equate the future discovery of a hypothetical forcing that would be real to the hyping of phenomena that do not constitute forcings. When such phenomena, currently known, identified, and properly investigated, are misrepresented as forcings, it is entirely correct to call that misinformation.

Next point: you argue that stifling misinformation impairs the advancement of knowledge. In fact, it is exactly the opposite that happens. The rapid spread and wide reach of misinformation is a colossal obstacle to the advancement of knowledge. It skews public perception and makes everyone less able to understand a given issue. It distracts, diverting attention and resources away. It has also many other side effects, insidious, and extremely detrimental to long term societal balance.

Finally, you make the ridiculous claim that it is "forbidden to question the consensus." That is a straw man big enough to go vacation at the Burning Man festival. All scientific work that is of quality is welcome in the litterature. Of course, it has to meet certain standards. No work should be given a pass for just questioning anything. In fact, it will likely attract higher scrutiny for doing so, which is entirely reasonable and to be expected in any scientific area. I will reiterate again that what is called the consensus, is not just a consensus of expert opinion. It is a consensus of research results, a convergence of multiple lines of enquiry from multiple teams, using multiple methods. A big picture emerges from that. That big picture is the consensus.

It is good to remind everyone that a common pseudo-skeptic lie is that there is no consensus. When corrected, they jump on to attacking the consensus. The dishonesty of the overall approach will not escape the attentive reader.

It is also necessary to remind everyone that no dissenter's freedom of speech is under attack. This site exists because the public space has been swamped with misinformation, and because the sources of it are loud, aggressive, doing everything possible to drown quality information, attacking people personally, trying to weaponize the justice system against scientists whose message they don't like.

We live in the macroscopic world. There is such a thing as reality. Allowing any and all BS to be on the same plane of validity as legitimate information is wrong, detrimental, dangerous. People who try to convince others that the Earth is flat must called what they are.

How to inoculate yourself against misinformation

David-acct at 11:45 AM on 2 July, 2022

Nigle at 12

I have to agree with petra regarding the free exchange of information even if misleading. What happens in a decade or so if scientists discover a forcing that is a greater factor than co2 as the primary driver of warming. The censorship of that discovery as "misinformation " stiffles further advancement of knowledge ( note that I am not saying co2 is not the primary driver ) - just using that example of the danger of forclosing further scientific inquiry simply because it forboden to question the approved consensus.

Nigel - you mention covid ( an i like dont like the covid deniers). the being said, the CDC has been one of the prime movers of misleading and deceptive studies on covid, ranging from the effectiveness of masking, effectiveness of vaccines, boosters, etc. The CDC has lost a tremendous amount of credibility when they are supposed to be the experts.

When the experts try to label scientific inquiries as misinformation, they come across as trying to hide something

In summary everyone loses when attempts are made to stiffle "misinformation" . In the case of covid, much of what was labeled misinformation has turned out to be true.

Antarctica is gaining ice

Eclectic at 10:55 AM on 20 June, 2022

Philippe Chantreau , the Antarctic study mentioned by AndrewLB was not only an outlier (and is now obsolete) from the main group of studies of Antarctic ice loss : but at the time (2015) the author Dr Zwally himself commented that he expected to see further reduction of ice mass within 20-30 years (owing to continued global warming). That comment of his was personal opinion I gather, rather than a scientific projection. But it fits in with overall consensus.

AndrewLB , the political ideas you mentioned (@522) are not science, and so do not get discussed in this thread. However, I can refer you to the blog WattsUpWithThat , where you can find plenty of discussion of wacky paranoid conspiracy theories including contrail chemical poisons, Gatesian mind-control vaccine microchips, Jewish Space Lasers, and Soros machinations for World Marxism.

True, the WUWT conversations are rather one-sided, but if you wish to discuss those sorts of topics, then WUWT is a good entry point for you. (Take a torch with you ~ the rabbit hole is very deep.)

Skeptical Science tackles 'discourses of climate delay' and 'solutions denial'

Doug Bostrom at 17:54 PM on 19 June, 2022

Thanks for your thoughts so far.

As they're statistically quite reliable (like fissioning atoms*), can be processed to identify consensus and over time have proven supremely helpful in leading to where we to go— consilience, collective decisions and action thereby-- we'll be sticking with peer reviewed research as foundational primary sources.

We won't be able to effectively answer value questions. How many more or less permanent radioactive blotches vs. heaps of dead bats & birds on the ground are acceptable as trades for climate mitigation isn't the type of question we can satisfactorily answer. We can look at research on attitudes and beliefs about thse things, but we can't conclude or suggest "right" decisions between such choices. They fall in the bucket of "it depends."

Scientific research can and does identify dependencies and help to improve our collective thinking about how "it depends" unpacks, provide a basis of facts underpinning agreements that will be thrashed out elsewhere in the marketplace of ideas and ideologies. Helping to maintain attachment of discussion and deliberation to useful basic facts is our chosen means of productive activity, the less-duplicative contribution we can make as a practical matter.

Thinking of nuclear power since it's a dominant theme in discussion on this thread, research helps to tell us about the plausibility of borehole disposal of high level waste, in a way that is responsive to differences in toleration of of hazard and risk. We can connect readers to that. Research doesn't help much in telling us whether centralized nuclear power generation is a exploitative tool of rent-seeking capitalists or a opportunity for an efficiently run public utility to plug a difficult gap, because the answer to that is "maybe" for both, a matter wandering into ineffability. We can't contribute to resolving this difference here.

*_{No U-235 atom is perfectly reliable, yet we can with statistical certainty fission U-235 to liberate power and do work. That's quite adequate.}

What role for small modular nuclear reactors in combating climate change?

macquigg at 04:04 AM on 15 June, 2022

Michael, I have said nothing about the scientific consensus on nuclear power. Please stop trying to make me your strawman. This debate is not about me. I am here to collect critiques for the Discussion pages on some articles in Citizendium. To avoid long, inconclusive debates we are summarizing the best statement from each side, focusing on just one issue at a time. If you want to raise new issues, like “no long term repositories exist”, please make that a separate issue. I will add it to our numbered list.

5) Lyman's statement about all MSRs requiring on-site processing. See my last statement on this issue at post 27. I did NOT claim that generally means all. Another strawman.
I will assume from your response at post 34 that we agree, the quote from Lyman’s paper is complete, accurate and not taken out-of-context, and that the response from ThorCon’s engineer is factually correct.
https://citizendium.org/wiki/Talk:ThorCon_nuclear_reactor#Risk_of_proliferation
We disagree on how to interpret Lyman’s words “All MSRs chemically treat the fuel”, and “generally require on-site chemical plants”.
Even if we alter the quote, changing “all” to “generally”, the ThorCon response is still correct: “ThorCon does no chemical processing online to remove fission products or anything else.” Also, I think the altered quote would still be untrue. I am familiar with three MSRs (ThorCon, Elysium’s FC-MSR, and LFTR). Only LFTR uses on-site chemical processing. I think we should leave the quote on Citizendium as is, and let the reader decide what it really means.

2) Non-fuel waste
https://citizendium.org/wiki/Talk:ThorCon_nuclear_reactor#What_about_non-fuel_waste
I have just added this:
Answer from World Nuclear Association discussion of Recycling and reuse of materials from decommissioning:
Decommissioned steam generators from Bruce Power in Canada
"These steam generators were each 12m long and 2.5m diameter, with mass 100 tonnes, and contained some 4g of radionuclides with about 340 GBq of activity. Exposure was 0.08 mSv/hr at one metre." This compares to a chest x-ray (0.02 mSv) or the minimum exposure to show a measurable increase in cancer risk (100 mSv) XKCD Radiation Chart

I am still trying to get numbers on the ThorCon reactor. I have talked to engineers at ThoCon and one who was in charge of decommissioning a big PWR. They tell me that the irradiated steel is not a big problem. Cutting is done underwater, and the pieces are handled the same as spent fuel. Nobody is being evasive here. We just can’t get experienced nuclear engineers to jump only a few days after kerfuffle in academia.

You said I “cannot find anyone who can contradict [the Krall] paper in the PNAS written and peer reviewed by experts with over 200 years of experience designing reactors.” I gave you two links in comments 9 and 10 above. Here is another:
https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Letter-to-PNAS-22-06-03-final2.pdf - response from David LeBlanc, Chief Technology Officer, Terrestrial Energy; “IMSR’s actual predicted thermal neutron flux at the reactor vessel is over 1,000 times lower.” than Krall assumes.

Who are these reactor designers you say reviewed the paper? Apparently not the engineers familiar with the designs. The reviews are still rolling in, and Dan Yurman is updating his webpage:
Stanford's Questionable Study on Spent Nuclear Fuel for SMRs | Neutron Bytes

4) Material resources. I have posted your question on beryllium to our Discussion page. On the hafnium question, do we really need to worry about this? Do you really think reactors can't be built with some other material in the control rods? Are you aware that some MSRs don't even have control rods? Helium is not an issue for this reactor.
Uranium supply should be a whole separate issue. WNA has a section on Uranium Resources: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources.aspx

6) The NuScale controversy. Looks to me like a miscommunication over an issue that doesn't really matter. They are arguing about maybe a factor of two at most in a small volume of waste that is easily managed. Let’s put this question aside until we resolve #2, and let’s stop calling people dishonest.

Breaking Through Twitter's Spiral of Silence with the #ClimateDaily Pledge

Doug Bostrom at 10:10 AM on 21 May, 2022

Climate silence is climate surrender.

It's worth noting that many people won't talk about climate change in online venues (or standing at a vista in a national park for that matter) because what stands for discourse around climate change is often dominated by ovewrought, highly emotional people expressing their fear of climate change, climate mitigation and climate adaptation as dismissal of the fairly simple handful of basic principles governing the climate. These few make talking about climate change extremely unpleasant.

So, one must either swallow one's feelings of repugnance for the process of dealing with such folks, or clam up. It's of course far easier to do the latter. Particularly, everybody has limits of patience, and repeatedly dealing with the same fundamentally misguided and flawed opinions expressed in heated and often personal expressions becomes boring and hence exhausting.

In short , anybody with a significant number of followers and committing to daily climate change reminders is going to encounter some tiresome crap.

"Be a Marine" and deal with it. But here are a few tips to keep help things centered and most importantly useful.

The audience for disagreement is not those who are talking but those who are only reading. Write for the bystander. Make it easier for bystanders to understand what they're truly learning by witnessing disagreement, namely that there is no actual basis for disagreement and that disagreement is not only not rooted in what we know about climate systems but rather in matters having nothing to do with climate science itself.

Ad hominem remarks are a means to change the subject. Don't let the subject be changed— stick with the topic of climate change, remind bystanders of the purpose of ad hominem remarks (whether directed to yourself, other individuals or entire classes of persons).

Any remark dismissing or disagreeing with consensus agreement among the actual scientific community on matters of climate change -must- be accompanied by a citation to published research. Insist on this. Keep reminding the interlocutor of their deficiency until this is accomplished, or their energy is sapped.

Aside from a small handful of professionals, folks popping up to disagree with common sense are expressing their fear of something else. Remind them (and bystanders) of this.

You will be challenged to explain why fringe theories are wrong, or engage in discussion over quibbles. Don't waste your time on this when the work of doing that has already been accomplished. As Steve says, lean on others; there are no new counter-arguments to scientific consensus left to explore, and more or less all of them are covered here at Skeptical Science. You won't change your interlocutor's mind but pushing a link to correction provides a service to bystanders.

In short, educating bystanders is the only useful purpose for engaging with disagreement on climate change in any public forum. Exploit opportunities to the fullest extent possible— which is not complicated.

New resource: myth deconstructions as animated GIFs

BaerbelW at 05:42 AM on 25 March, 2022

The initial 9 animated myth deconstructions have now been added as notes to the related rebuttals:

Does cold weather disprove global warming?

Are glaciers growing or retreating?

CO2 lags temperature - what does it mean?

How reliable are climate models?

How the OISM Petition Project casts doubt on the scientific consensus on climate change

What does past climate change tell us about global warming?

Plants cannot live on CO2 alone

Sun & climate: moving in opposite directions

Do volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans?

SkS Analogy 1 - Speed Kills: How fast can we slow down?

BaerbelW at 16:22 PM on 21 February, 2022

@Santalives #80

"I have always thought rather than just endless debates 2 steps removed on these websites, why not a TV show where the best climate scientist debate against best deniers on these topics."

This would be a fake debate because both "sides" are not equal when there is a scientific consensus on a topic. It just paints a very wrong and misleading picture for people watching such a fake debate on what is basically settled science. This is explained in The Consensus Handbook on pages 8 and 9 and in this sketch from John Oliver's Last Week Tonight show which is as true today as when it came out in 2014!

SkS Analogy 1 - Speed Kills: How fast can we slow down?

Eclectic at 11:49 AM on 20 February, 2022

Santalives , perhaps I can give you some helpful hints :

If you wish to discover some major flaw in the conventional climate science ~ something which will overthrow the consensus ~ then you will really need to sit down and put on your Thinking Cap.

Since no-one yet has managed to discover any major error in today's climate science, then obviously it will need you to achieve a huge stroke of inspired genius. You will need to think outside the box. Some thunderbolt of deep insightful & groundbreaking discovery about physics will be necessary. Just like Einstein had, when riding that tram in Vienna.

Achieve that, Santalives , and fame and fortune will fall into your lap. The Nobel Committee will award you a small fortune of cash, and the world's fossil fuel companies will give you much bigger bucketloads of money. Very nice !

Yes, it is a bit daunting that for the past 125 years or so, no-one at all has achieved what you are looking for. But that is why you need to make a completely novel approach to such a quest.

Needless to say, you would be wasting your time in searching through the old, established scientific papers . . . or searching through WattsUpWithThat and all the other denialist/contrarian blogs & videos. They have never found anything ~ otherwise, they would already have received all those awards I mentioned. No, you need a fresh start, entirely based on your own stroke of genius.

(btw, if you are successful, then please consider a small ex-gratia payment to me.)

SkS Analogy 1 - Speed Kills: How fast can we slow down?

BaerbelW at 22:17 PM on 19 February, 2022

@Santalives #44

Just because a paper is peer-reviewed doesn't make it correct and others have already explained what is at the very least questionable in Seim & Olson (2020). There unfortunately are publishers out there who are more interested in making a (quick) buck than in publishing properly peer-reviewed articles. There however is a list with potentially predatory journals called Beall's List and Scientific Research (SCRIP) does make an appearance there, which is a warning flag about how much weight to give their publications.

Another such red flag is that scrolling through the paper you link to, I don't quickly see the somewhat customary information about the timeline from manuscript "received" via "accepted" to "published". For properly peer-revieved papers this tends to span several months at least but you often see it happening within a few weeks (if not days) for predatory journals. I might well have missed it for the paper in question but if not, does failing to disclose this important information increase or decrease your confidence in the publication? It sure decreases mine!

In addition, here is a link to a short article published recently by Yale Climate Connections titled "Scientists agree: Climate change is real and caused by people". It starts with this:

"The scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that it is human-caused is strong. Scientific investigation of global warming began in the 19th century, and by the early 2000s, this research began to coalesce into confidence about the reality, causes, and general range of adverse effects of global warming. This conclusion was drawn from studying air and ocean temperatures, the atmosphere’s composition, satellite records, ice cores, modeling, and more."

Last but not least, let me repeat my invitation to join our MOOC Denial101x. It explains - among other things - why a lot more than a questionable paper would be involved to overturn the scientific consensus explained in the Yale article.

SkS Analogy 1 - Speed Kills: How fast can we slow down?

Eclectic at 18:00 PM on 18 February, 2022

Santalives @32 . . . yes, very droll.

And yes, I have already noticed that those NTZ papers do not show any evidence which overthrows the consensus climate science. Despite their speleothem isotopes and strontium/calcium ratios.

Strike One, against you.

Is there any evidence ~ any at all ~ that you can produce to show that all the climate scientists are wrong? Well, it shouldn't take you more than a day or so to produce . . . for yourself, as a maven of published scientific papers !

The smart money is on : Strike Two, against you.

Let's look ahead to Ball Three (which the Moderators may suggest you play on a thread more appropriate to such discussions). And while you are having a few practice swings at home . . . I will remind you that no climate scientist has stated the world is going to end in 2030.

And remind you that your "1 minute to midnight" reference actually applied to pending nuclear warfare [readers at a later date will ~ I hope ~ have largely forgotten about the current brinkmanship of the Ukraine crisis].

But first, Santalives , you need to define what is meant by "climate crises" [unquote].

SkS Analogy 1 - Speed Kills: How fast can we slow down?

Eclectic at 15:07 PM on 18 February, 2022

Santalives @25 ,

. . . as Evan says, you seem to be getting yourself bogged down with words & definitions. If the term "settled science" is something that sticks in your craw ~ then simply look at the science itself. Look at what is happening in the physical world of atoms, molecules, radiations and temperatures. The real world ~ not the rhetorical world of the propagandists & science-deniers.

# And thank you for the link to the list of papers provided by the notrickszone website (usually referred to as "NTZ").

From time to time, NTZ does come out with lists of 100's of papers, which NTZ alleges do overthrow the mainstream climate science. It is the "shotgun" approach, intended to impress the hell out of the layman who will never read anything more than the titles of the papers (if even that much). The layman who wishes to believe that all those 10,000+ scientists (worldwide) are massively wrong. The layman who doesn't wish to do some thinking (and legwork) for himself. This is very much the target audience for NTZ.

So, Santalives , please have a look in detail at about half-a-dozen of those NTZ papers, and get back to the readers here at SkS when you have identified one or two "killer arguments" from the papers (arguments or lines of evidence that the consensus climate science is wrong in some major way).

It is fair to warn you that NTZ has a track record of complete failure in this regard. (NTZ loves to "cherry-pick" ~ pick out a tree or two, while ignoring the forest.)

# Santalives , if you are not keen on doing a lot of climate reading (as is my impression so far) then you might enjoy viewing some YouTube videos by science reporter PotHoler54 who is a very knowledgeable guy ~ he debunks a lot of junk science & "fake media". His climate series (now 58 videos) range from 5 - 30 minutes. You could comfortably do one a day, and get up to speed about the climate controversies. All of the videos are informative, and most of them are amusingly humorous in parts !

One of the PotHoler54 videos from 2017 is titled: "Have 400 papers just DEBUNKED global warming?" And you guessed it ~ unsurprisingly the list of 400 papers comes via NTZ .

Another of his videos debunks Christopher Monckton's spurious claims about scientific papers regarding the Medieval Warm Period (MWP).

You will find PH54 very informative on the misrepresentations and deceptions practised by science-deniers such as Monckton, Heller, and others.

SkS Analogy 1 - Speed Kills: How fast can we slow down?

Eclectic at 15:19 PM on 17 February, 2022

(continued from @15 ~ and please excuse the typo double negative at one point. The intended meaning is nevertheless quite clear.)

Santalives @11 , I agree with you that the media show a great deal of puff pieces and exaggerated alarmism. But that is not the actual climate science. The science clearly shows that there are big problems approaching us: kind of like a slow-moving freight train. But going into denial and closing one's eyes, is not the intelligent way of dealing with the situation.

Santalives , you seem rather unfamiliar with the blogsite WattsUpWithThat. I visit it daily ~ and I can assure you that there is extremely little debate on published peer reviewed climate science. Extracts from reputable journals are scoffed at and ranted at (inbetween the extremist political rants, and the repetitive rants about the "non-existent" Greenhouse Effect). But I live in hope that someday, some year, WUWT will uncover some killer evidence that the mainstream climate scientists are wrong.

There are a few - very few - intelligent & well-informed posters on WUWT. Istvan and Tillman come to mind ~ but they all have an Achilles Heel. They do not have the insight to recognise the emotional poison that is spreading all the way up from their heel, and is distorting (via motivated reasoning) their rational processes. A great pity. But please note I am not here referring to the small number of rational genuine scientist - Nick Stokes is a prominent example - who all-too-rarely pop in to the WUWT comments columns . . . where their scientific accuracy & common sense produce infuriated responses from the denialists.

Sadly, even a recent paper by Happer & Wijngaarden , is quite misunderstood / misrepresented by the WUWT-ites. It simply does not overthrow the scientific consensus.

There is no consensus

One Planet Only Forever at 14:03 PM on 18 January, 2022

In response to Star-affinity @#900:

Comprehensive responses to the question about the magnitude of consensus regarding human induced global warming and resulting climate changes have been provided by others.

My initial supplement is: Rather than debating the magnitude of consensus for the theory that “significant anthropogenic climate change is occurring” ask for an evaluation of the level of consensus for the theory that “No anthropogenic climate change impacts are occurring”.

Increased atmospheric CO2 is unquestionably due to human activity. And increased CO2, along with other human impacts, unquestionably produce global warming and significant, hard to precisely identify, but unquestionably harmful climate changes from the conditions that human civilization developed in through the past several thousand years.

However, there is more to consider. It is important to be aligned on the context/objectives for a 'debate'. Without objective alignment the result can be a waste of time.

My primary objective is to try to help develop a sustainable improving future for humanity. Increased awareness and improved understanding of what is going on is essential to sustainable improvement of the future of humanity. And increased awareness of what is harmful and learning how to limit harm done is key, with climate change impacts of human activity being a significant sub-set of concern.

Science questions things with the objective of increasing awareness and improving the understanding of what is really going on in a way that develops “improved common sense”. It is important for that “common sense” to help improve the future of humanity.

Note that not all science or application of science is helpful. Misleading marketing is a good example of harmful scientific investigation and application. It can develop cult-like groups of believers with nonsense as “their common sense”.

Every individual’s perception of what is going on is their reality. All understandings of what is going on are individual beliefs. And everyone has biases regarding what they learn. Everyone develops their understanding based on their experiences in the socioeconomic-political environment they grow up in. In many cases people develop a fondness for, or addiction to, harmful unsustainable developments (systems and beliefs) and resist correction of harm done that they benefit from or hope to benefit from.

Getting alignment on the objective of “reducing harm done to the future of humanity and developing lasting improvements for humanity” is essential. Without that alignment the discussion can be a competition with the different sides having different sets of rules about how the game is played or judged/refereed. That can be a waste of time.

Debating details about the level of consensus of understanding that human activity is causing harmful rapid climate change impacts is one of those waste of time games. Establishing that there is significant consensus is important. However, questioning a well developed understanding of the level of consensus is a game being played to delay and distract from the important discussions of how to identify and most effectively limit the harmful impacts of the many developed unsustainable activities that cause climate change impacts.

One of the most harmful activities is misleading marketing. Always keep in mind that popularity and profitability have no reason to be aligned with limiting harm done. They are measures that are indifferent to harm done . Being more popular or profitable does not mean something is less harmful. In fact, getting away with being more harmful or misleading can be a competitive advantage in games of popularity and profit. And being more popular and profitable can make harmful beliefs and actions harder to correct (the persistence of climate science denial is one of many cases proving that point).

There is no consensus

Eclectic at 08:03 AM on 17 January, 2022

Thank you, Bob, for showing the ingenious Project Steve.

The vonStorch survey [referred to, above] may not have many Steves, but it is a good survey - in the sense that it has a suitable first filter. It contacts many thousands of appropriately qualified scientists.

Unfortunately, the low 7% return rate is the first weakness. It would have been better (but at much greater expense) for expert interviewers to personally meet with a truly random selection of perhaps 200 of the scientists . . . and gently hound them for their views, allowing no-one to drop out or excuse himself!

At 7% return , there is the reasonable fear that the respondents include a relatively high proportion of "extremists" (from either end of the spectrum). For example, in one of the questions, 2.5% of respondents replied that they were "not at all" convinced that AGW existed. And this 2.5% is an amazingly high percentage, in view of the accumulated overwhelming evidence that the 2.5 percenters are flat wrong.

In such extreme cases, one suspects that a big slice of the 2.5 percenters have bizarre/extremist political views & a lot of cognitive dissonance. But 'twas ever thus ~ for almost any field of science. (Personal anecdote - I know quite well a PhD-level scientific researcher who is a member of his local Flat-Earth Society.)

And the vonStorch survey questions were very unsuited to elicit actual consensus-relevant opinions.

Overall, John Cook's 2013 survey of the true scientific literature was the optimum approach to the "consensus" issue. It was reasonably neutral in selection; it didn't suffer from drop-outs (drop-outs by the busy, or by the disgruntled) . . . and it looked at the actual science , not the sometimes-flaky opinions of us imperfect human beings.

And on top of it, the Cook 2013 survey doubled-down by asking the scientists personally to confirm (or not) what they viewed their scientific papers as saying. Brilliant !

There is no consensus

Eclectic at 23:50 PM on 16 January, 2022

BaerbelW @ #902 : We can look even further, regarding the Forbes 2016 article mentioned by Star-affinity @ #900 .

The article's author, Mr Earl Ritchie, has grossly misrepresented the vonStorch 2013 survey ~ the survey simply does not support Ritchie's thrust of argument. Ritchie is severely misleading the Forbes readers - readers who are probably good at business but probably rather unthinking (and ill-informed) on science. And Ritchie is also misleading them about the Cook 2013 survey of scientific papers.

The vonStorch 2013 survey [now 8 years old] had its interesting points. And I think the brief "Mertonian" discussion on pages 68 & 69 was a pleasant change of pace. And at the end of the survey report, Bray & vonStorch published a long list of comments criticizing the deficiencies of the survey (participants' critiques ~ especiallly about the ambiguities of the survey questions).

Additionally, please note that the survey had a 7% return rate. (Vastly different from the Cook 2013 survey, which had a different structure.)

And, the survey was about opinions ~ and much of it was about opinions on technical aspects/adequacies of climate models & future projections.

Most of the questions were rather vague and fuzzy and "word based" instead of scientific concept based. So, somewhat difficult for the participants to express themselves about the overall climate science situation ~ in analogy: they were invited to give opinion about a leaf or two, but not to discuss the background forest.

(There were a few exceptions in the questions: one where 2.5% of respondents opined that they were not at all convinced about AGW. And another question, where 89% of respondents said they were now more convinced [versus in 2007] that greenhouse gasses had produced modern global warming.)

All this compares very poorly with the excellent methodology used in the Cook 2013 assessment of scientific consensus.

There is no consensus

BaerbelW at 21:30 PM on 16 January, 2022

Star-affinity @#900:

Several other studies have looked at the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change since that Forbes article was published. Here is a blog post from last year written by John Cook about a study he was involved with, replicating Doran & Zimmermann (2009) with a larger sample:

The scientific consensus on climate change gets even stronger

The interesting thing with the Forbes' article is, that it has to cherry pick a particular study to make its point of a lower than 90% consensus. And expecting 100% agreement of climate scientists before accepting the evidence is a case of impossible expectations, one of the main science denial techniques covered in the FLICC framework.

There is no consensus

Eclectic at 08:24 AM on 16 January, 2022

Star-affinity @ #900 :

Thank you for the reference to the 2016 Forbes article by Earl Ritchie, who describes himself as a retired oil industry executive (not a scientist). I read the article with interest, and found it disappointing. It was more a propaganda piece, and not at all a rigorous logical examination of the issue.

Star-affinity, if one chooses to define things very loosely, and also use rhetoric like a lawyer-advocate ~ then one can come to any "conclusion" that is desired. (e.g. the good Lord Monckton - not at all a scientist - can re-define "3%" to be the result of the excellently clever Cook 2013 survey of scientific papers which produced the famous "97%" consensus figure.)

What is a consensus here? (See some of the comments upthread.) Broadly, consensus in non-scientific matters is all about opinion ~ and opinion is worth the price of the paper it is printed on [except in politics!]

But consensus in scientific matters (such as climate science) is all about the evidence. And that evidence is expressed in the scientific literature (peer-reviewed papers published in reputable journals). And there you will nowadays find a 99+% consensus in line with the mainstream science. Not an 80-90% consensus (not even in 2013 or 2016).

The 80-90% figure you (or Mr Richie) are mentioning, is a result of canvassing opinions of "scientists" ~ not of canvassing the evidence. And who is a scientist? And are their individual opinions relevant? The notorious Oregon Petition (of the 1990's) had "scientists" ranging from Wood Engineers to Spice Girls. In other words, it was a completely worthless survey, simply gathered for propaganda value.

In short, Mr Ritchie's article is worthless.

Animals and plants can adapt

Hal Kantrud at 08:36 AM on 20 December, 2021

"ost extinctions have been linked to immense volcanic events, called Large Igneous Province (LIP) eruptions. These events spew billions of metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere, in many cases triggering marine anoxia (oxygen loss) and ocean acidification due to rapid greenhouse warming. Of the Big Five mass extinctions, the one exception is the end-Cretaceous event. The current scientific consensus is that the end-Cretaceous mass extinction (that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago) was primarily caused by a large meteor strike (and a resulting, jarring change in climate). In Figure 1, the past three events (end-Permian, end-Triassic, and end-Cretaceous) are positioned at their respective, estimated short-term CO2 spike levels. These CO2 spikes which triggered their respective mass extinctions are not captured in the grey CO2 concentration curve due to its coarser temporal resolution."

I read where the Tubo volcano about 2MYA resulted in a long cooling period caused by the sun's rays reflecting off the ash in the air. I would think that would decrease atmospheric greenhouse gasses. Mass extinctions resulted including nearly all our homonid ancestors, with survivors limited to small populations in Africa.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c

Fighting back against climate misinformation and the damage being done

Mal Adapted at 07:14 AM on 10 October, 2021

I've been commenting on climate-related articles on NYTimes.com for a few years now. I've noticed a change in the science-denying participants, as public opinion has tilted in favor of the scientific consensus, perhaps shocked by widely-reported new weather extremes. Denialism is ever more automatic and reactive. Some regular pseudonyms appear to be software agents, deployed to spout denialism on triggering. OTOH, the overwhelming consensus of commenters in these articles is science-respecting. Every once in a while, a comment of mine will get enough 'recommends' to make me think I'm not just talking to myself. I'll probably keep commenting for awhile, at least.

Why the IPCC climate reports are so important

Evan at 20:24 PM on 7 August, 2021

rkcannon, the IPCC "bias" is often referred to as scientific consensus, the result of over 160 years of climate science showing conclusively that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

Thinking is Power: The problem with “doing your own research”

citizenschallenge at 09:09 AM on 5 August, 2021

There's a good quote in that article,

Even those of us with excellent critical thinking skills and lots of experience trying to dig up the truth behind a variety of claims are lacking one important asset: the scientific expertise necessary to understand any finds or claims in the context of the full state of knowledge of your field.

It’s part of why scientific consensus is so remarkably valuable: it only exists when the overwhelming majority of qualified professionals all hold the same consistent professional opinion. It truly is one of the most important and valuable types of expertise that humanity has ever developed. (Ethan Siegel)

It comes down to motivations and what is one after, learning or winning an argument. Just like the two forms of debate, a scientific debate where learning is the goal, and honesty is a requirement. Compared to the lawyerly political debate where winning is everything and the truth is treated with contempt and derision.

As a lay-person I've come to appreciate that when I do "my own research" I'm actually doing "homework" collecting as much information as I can to understand a topic.

A serious student questions their own assumptions and wants to understand opposing views because only through dissecting and resolving objections can we truly come to understand our own position.

As for expertise - for the constructive layperson, all it takes is reading scientific papers, to get an inclining of the amazing details scientists are familiar with, which I can barely, or not at all, grasp. It's a good humbling experience.

Finally, possessing a healthy dose of self-skepticism is a prerequisite for constructive learning.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

Engineer-Poet at 11:18 AM on 4 August, 2021

Michael Sweet @265:

You are wasting your time talking about radiation safety.

Oh, I don't know. Putting your intransigence out there for all to see has value.

My experience is that people who do not like nuclear recognize that the scientific consensus is LRNT.

How much of said "consensus" is from people in the "radiation protection" business—in other words, people with an interest in maintaining and ever-tightening the rules so they can make money from "minimization"? Meanwhile, health physics deals with the REAL world, and workers at university research reactors routinely take many times the dose allowed at commercial nuclear plants, yet suffer no ill effects. Why is this allowed? It's because research reactors are not competing with the fossil fuel industry; nuclear electric plants do. Evidence-based radiation standards would seriously reduce the operating and maintenance cost of nuclear electric plants, and applying the same radiation standards to fossil fuels would require things like the handling of radium-rich petroleum well pipe scale as radwaste with all the same protection standards as at nuclear plants. Such cost shifts might even get people to build more nuclear and use less fossil.

There is a LOT of uranium in the ground, and the decay chain of U-238 produces Ra-226 and Rn-222. A lot of this uranium chemically deposits in the same strata which host coal, oil and gas, which is why natural gas from the Marcellus shale is so high in radon. Gas stoves dump the radon straight into the air people breathe. I don't see any major "environmental" organizations demanding protection from that,do you?

People who are avid supporters of nuclear, like you, do not care how many people nuclear power kills

That's libelous. I used to spend 2 weeks a year mere miles from a Generation I nuclear power plant, and the rest of the year not too far from a university research reactor. Neither ever killed ANYONE. Both are gone now, with only the casks storing the used fuel showing the former was ever there (I don't know about the latter). I now live year-round mere miles from this "danger". Do I sound like I don't care about lives? It's MY life on the line here. I walk the walk.

Know what I'd love? I'd love a new nuclear plant on the site of the old one, causing people with radiophobia to stay away and not buy homes here. It would reduce my property value and thus my property taxes. Pay less money for the same or better quality of life (less crowding and cleaner air)? Sign me up!

and cherry pick their references to the few scientists who disagree with the consensus.

Science is not determined by consensus. It's determined by evidence, and anyone who will not look at the evidence has no business calling themselves a scientist. The evidence is on the side of Calibrese. Those opposed are not scientists, whatever degrees they hold or what they call themselves.

We are all familiar with the scientific deniers of climate change. Citing the few outliers of the LRNT consensus does not prove your point. The National Academy of Science strongly backs LRNT.

The acronym is "LNT", and the NAS shows every sign of having been captured by special interests. Fossil-fuel interests are notoriously wealthy.

As you pointed out, dissenters of the consensus were allowed on the committee.

But not allowed a voice. Calabrese has published many papers on radiation hormesis and the errors in LNT. None of those objections made it into the BEIR VII section on radiation hormesis, and yes I read it from end to end. What does this mean? (lemme try list tags here)

The BEIR VII report reflects a majority view, not a consensus view and certainly not a view of the actual range of opinion in the field.

The majority view is subject to capture by various interests, especially wealthy ones.

Those interests are overwhelmingly benefitted by fossil fuels.

You need to acknowledge this. (love it, list tags rock)

Reviewing this thread I notice that opponents of nuclear power have never raised the issue of low level exposure to radiation as a reason not to build out nuclear.

That's implicit in the use of LNT to oppose nuclear energy.

It is raised by nuclear supporters.

Because we see no detectable increase in morbidity or mortality due to small increases in radiation; on the contrary, the evidence supports hormesis (when you can extend the median lifespan of rats from 460 to 600 days by irradiating them with gamma rays, it very likely has the same effect in all mammals including humans). We do see increases in morbidity and mortality with increases of criteria air pollutants and things like PM 2.5, neither of which are produced by nuclear energy. So why are you raising these issues? It's enough to make anyone think you're doing it in bad faith.

1) Nuclear plants are not economic. They cost too much to build.

France proved otherwise; France has some of the cheapest and cleanest electric power in Europe, while "renewable" Germany has some of the most expensive and continues to burn lignite. The way you make nuclear power cheaply is the same way you make automobiles cheaply: series production of stanard units. That's what France did in the 80's. That is not what France is doing now, which is why Flamanville costs so much.

2) Nuclear plants take too long to build.

They didn't used to. Ever ponder what's different now?

The breeder reactors you support have not yet been designed. Once they have a design (at least 5 years from now), the approval of the design takes 3-5 years.

So you admit that the regulators are a big part of the problem.

3) There are not enough rare materials to build a significant number of nuclear plants.

Nonsense. Nuclear plants do not require rare materials; they've just been convenient for the way we've been doing things since the 1950's. We don't have to keep doing things that way, and there are a great many reasons not to. Many of the new reactor concepts use other physical mechanisms than e.g. control rods to control the rate of reaction, so they have no need for the elements which go into them.

You admit in your post 260 that there is not enough uranium for your plan.

No, I said there's not enough land-based uranium to start the required fleet of fast-neutron reactors. There's more than enough in the oceans, and the depleted uranium already on hand in the USA would suffice to run the entire world for about a century on fast reactors. Also, there's more than enough thorium available to do the job (3-4x as abundant as uranium and it's almost 100% convertible to energy with thermal neutrons).

4) Your responses to Abbott are grossly inadequate and uninformed. For examply you claim "pretty much ANY site that has ever hosted a coal plant is suitable for a nuclear plant." Only 10 miles from my house is the Big Bend power plant (it is switching from coal to gas). This plant is too close to a city to be converted to nuclear

It's "too close" for nuclear, but far more dangerous and polluting coal (with far more radioisotope emissions from the tramp actinides) was just fine? Ye gods, if it wasn't for double standards, anti-nukes wouldn't have any standards.

(Mods: there's a bug in the way the post editor JS handles closing bold and italic tags when switching from "Source" back to "Basic" after pasting in HTML; a trailing space is deleted even when it's explicitly in the source.)

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

michael sweet at 23:23 PM on 31 July, 2021

Engineer Poet:

You are wasting your time talking about radiation safety. My experience is that people who do not like nuclear recognize that the scientific consensus is LRNT. People who are avid supporters of nuclear, like you, do not care how many people nuclear power kills and cherry pick their references to the few scientists who disagree with the consensus. We are all familiar with the scientific deniers of climate change. Citing the few outliers of the LRNT consensus does not prove your point. The National Academy of Science strongly backs LRNT. As you pointed out, dissenters of the consensus were allowed on the committee.

Reviewing this thread I notice that opponents of nuclear power have never raised the issue of low level exposure to radiation as a reason not to build out nuclear. It is raised by nuclear supporters. I have never raised this point in debate about nuclear power. It is a waste of time. Neither Abbott or Jacobson mention this issue. I suggest you concentrate your efforts on the arguments that matter:

1) Nuclear plants are not economic. They cost too much to build. It currently costs more for operation and maintenance of a nuclear plant than to build a new renewable plant with a mortgage. Nuclear plants are shutting down because they cannot make money at the price of renewable energy.

2) Nuclear plants take too long to build. The breeder reactors you support have not yet been designed. Once they have a design (at least 5 years from now), the approval of the design takes 3-5 years. Than it is 10-15 years to build a test plant. The earliest that a pilot plant will be built is 20 years from now. Production of many plants can not start before 2050. The entire energy system will be renewable by then. A few nuclear plants cannot make money against renewable energy.

3) There are not enough rare materials to build a significant number of nuclear plants. You admit in your post 260 that there is not enough uranium for your plan. Nuclear plants use many other exotic materials that are already in short supply.

4) Your responses to Abbott are grossly inadequate and uninformed. For examply you claim "pretty much ANY site that has ever hosted a coal plant is suitable for a nuclear plant." Only 10 miles from my house is the Big Bend power plant (it is switching from coal to gas). This plant is too close to a city to be converted to nuclear and it is very seriously threatened by sea level rise. For both reasons it is unsuitable for nuclear power. This disproves your "ANY site" claim and I didn't even have to look past the nearest plant to my home. The Turkey Point Nuclear plant in Miami is almost isolated by sea level rise already. Its location is unsuitable for nuclear power.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

Engineer-Poet at 11:23 AM on 31 July, 2021

Michael Sweet @262:

You post this in response to my citing the most recent National Academy of Science BEIR VII concensus science report on the topic of LRNT, published in 2006. This report was specifically written to determine the consensus of scientists on the effects of low level exposure to radiation and resolve the LRNT argument. They strongly endorsed LRNT.

Yes, about that. I found a great many references to it, including one taking the authors to task for failing to deal with issues straightforwardly(sadly, the full text is paywalled):

Risk of low-dose radiation and the BEIR VII report: A critical review of what it does and doesn't say Michael K O'Connor PMID: 28826776 DOI: 10.1016/j.ejmp.2017.07.016 Abstract This article briefly reviews the history behind the BEIR VII report and the use of the linear no-threshold hypothesis. The BEIR VII committee considered four primary sources of data on the stochastic effects of ionizing radiation. These were environmental studies, occupational studies, medical studies and studies on the atomic bomb survivors. These sources are briefly reviewed along with key studies that run counter to the LNT hypothesis. We review many of the assumptions, hypotheses and subjective decisions used to generate risk estimates in the BEIR VII report. Position statement by the Health Physics Society, American Association of Physicists in Medicine, and UNSCEAR support the conclusion that the risk estimates in the BEIR VII report should not be used for estimating cancer risks from low doses of ionizing radiation.

It wasn't until I was way down in the search results before I found the actual report itself rather than your link to a press release about it (which, strangely, did not link to the report either). Sadly, I can't find specific quotes with which to identify details about which there is more recent research. But here's something from the introduction:

(4) assess the current status and relevance to risk models of biologic data and models of carcinogenesis, including critical assessment of all data that might affect the shape of the response curve at low doses, in particular, evidence for or against thresholds in dose-response relationships and evidence for or against adaptive responses and radiation hormesis;

Except they didn't do that, or did it incompetently. Here's a meta-study from just 3 years later, compiling studies which contradict BEIR and LNT (full text at the link):

Media reports of deaths and devastation produced by atomic bombs convinced people around the world that all ionizing radiation is harmful. This concentrated attention on fear of miniscule doses of radiation. Soon the linear no threshold (LNT) paradigm was converted into laws. Scientifically valid information about the health benefits from low dose irradiation was ignored. Here are studies which show increased health in Japanese survivors of atomic bombs. Parameters include decreased mutation, leukemia and solid tissue cancer mortality rates, and increased average lifespan. Each study exhibits a threshold that repudiates the LNT dogma. The average threshold for acute exposures to atomic bombs is about 100 cSv. Conclusions from these studies of atomic bomb survivors are: One burst of low dose irradiation elicits a lifetime of improved health. Improved health from low dose irradiation negates the LNT paradigm. Effective triage should include radiation hormesis for survivor treatment.

Back to you now.

You are welcome to your opinion, but the consensus of scientific experts is LRNT.

I know it's NOT a consensus, because the BEIR VII committee included Dr. Edward J. Calabrese, who is a strong opponent of LNT and has published a number of papers showing that it is inaccurate and often flatly contradictory to the truth.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

michael sweet at 02:06 AM on 31 July, 2021

Engineer-Poet:

Congratulations on getting your first warning on your first post! A new record.

I note that in your 6 post rant that you have referred to only two peer reviewed reports, both in post 259. One report, published in 1958, is apparently an attempt by the nuclear industry to argue against using the LInear Response No Threshold model of exposure to harmful radiation. You post this in response to my citing the most recent National Academy of Science BEIR VII concensus science report on the topic of LRNT, published in 2006. This report was specifically written to determine the consensus of scientists on the effects of low level exposure to radiation and resolve the LRNT argument. They strongly endorsed LRNT. You are welcome to your opinion, but the consensus of scientific experts is LRNT. Upthread a nuclear supporter said the data supporting LRNT was too old. Here you use ancient data to argue against the most recent NAS report which used no data older than 1990. Even in 1958 the consensus was LRNT. You also link a 1982 paper that describes the medical effect of radiation. That seems unrelated to LRNT exposure in large populations.

In post 256 your comments on entropy are designed to start an argument. You do not add anything to the defination of heat, energy and entropy.

Post 256: your speculation on how future reactors might be designed is irrelevant to the question that was asked. Again you are trying to start an argument and not answer the question asked.

Post 256: you make the unuspported claim that nuclear reactors are safe. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates 27,000 deaths from Chernobyl alone. The nuclear industry denies responsibility for the people they kill.

Post 257: Peer reviewed papers state that not enough materials exist to build out more than an insignificant number of nuclear reactors. See Abbott 2012 linked in the OP. It is the job of nuclear proponents to show that enough material exists for your proposed system. Claiming there are many undesigned, proposed reactors that might use less materials is not an answer. You must show materials exist for your proposal. Nuclear proponents claimed that enough materials did not exist for a renewable system. Jacobson 2011 (free copy for those who don't know how to find papers) shows all the materials needed for a renewable energy system exist.

Post 258: Arguing that it is a good idea to build cheap, unsafe nuclear reactors will not get you many supporters. If you think that is a good argument go for it.

Post 260: I note you have only your own, unsupported opinion to argue with Abbott 2012. I note that you have no experience designing or operating a nuclear power plant and have no related educational experience either. I guess you learned a lot watching videos on the internet.

Post 261: I linked the same copy of Jacobson 2018 the moderator found at least 3 times upthread like here and here and here. It indicates how familiar you are with the peer reviewed literature that you are unable to find a copy of a linked paper yourself.

I will not respond in more detail to your extended Gish Gallops. I know that your system to issue long, repetitive, opinion statements unsupported by any data. Eventually the moderators will ban you for sloganeering. They have already started warning you for not adhering to the comments policy. If you do not start producing data to support your insane claims they will not allow you to post any more.

As scientists have long predicted, warming is making heatwaves more deadly

prove we are smart at 10:21 AM on 24 July, 2021

Taken from Wiki: "Mass maintains a popular weblog in which he posts regular articles on meteorology, Pacific Northwest weather history, and the impacts of climate change[8] written for the general public. According to Mass, "Global warming is an extraordinarily serious issue, and scientists have a key role to play in communicating what is known and what is not about this critical issue.[9]"

Mass has stated publicly that he shares the scientific consensus that global warming is real and that human activity is a major cause of warming trend in the late 20th and 21st centuries.[10][11] He has been critical of the Paris Climate accord for not going far enough to address the negative impacts of climate change.[12]

However, Mass is frequently critical of and has expressed concern that when media and environmental organizations make exaggerated claims about the current impacts of climate change, or cite climate change as the cause of specific weather events. He is concerned about misinforming the public about a key societal issue, distracting public and governmental attention from more immediate environmental concerns, and stifling opportunities for effective bipartisan policy-making to slow climate change and mitigate its effects.[13][14][15][16]

His statements on the severity and progression of anthropogenic global warming have elicited condemnation from The Stranger[17] as well as members of activist environmental organizations[18] due to concerns that Mass's scientific approach to understanding and communicating the risks associated with global warming could result in public apathy or be used by climate change deniers to bolster their claims."

I think Professor Mass is just typical of climate scientists giving responses to their perceived inaccuracies in the increasing climate craziness reporting. What is different with this professor is he is more of a "personality". Possibly the second link from 2.Bob Loblaw at 22:18 PM on 21 July, 2021 disproves Mass' theory but the science though was beyond my understanding.

The back and forth exchange between scientists peer reviewing "science" is what keeps us up to date and reliably informed. The fact Climate Change deniers can cherry pick a "headline" will never change. I don't know whether to feel hopeful or nor when I read this either,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1rxv1yPQrc

Dr. Ben Santer: Climate Denialism Has No Place at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Evan at 22:41 PM on 25 May, 2021

Trump is demonstrably incompetent in most areas where he claims competence, uses paper-thin lies, and has no defensible basis for questioning the recent election, yet he is galvanizing a dangerous movement.

Koonin has academic credentials, is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and he is being championed by credible sources (WSJ, LLNL). Whether we like it or not, he will continue to galvanize the contrarians.

But we need to continue to fight such disinformation for the sake of those whose minds are still open, even a crack, to receiving input from more diciplined, consensus-based scientific sources.

There is no consensus

MA Rodger at 13:45 PM on 11 May, 2021

The argument presented by hedron @896 is entirely anti-science in that it is saying any area of scientific study can be fake as it can be created to sustain fallacious findings based purely on the belief of those who initiated that area of study and not based on the scientific evidence. If this fake science were possible, all science would be at risk of being slowly stacked full of undebunked nonsense.

Of course, that is not to say that an individual or small group of resrearchers cannot go off and create a pile of undebunked nonsense. Indeed, many researchers do effectively spend their whole careers so employed. Such work is not of itself anti-scientific as, through the act of bebunking it by others or eventually by those initially involved, the science learns what is and what is not nonsense. The 97% consensus is thus healthy and healthier than 100% as the missing 3% provides an arena for testing the veracity of the 97% and specific to AGW healthy because that 3% is better seen as comprising 30 x 0.1% (as those testing the 97% do not present a singular criticism).

There is no consensus

Karlengle at 23:58 PM on 9 April, 2021

Tom Dayton, Thanks for the insight into the peer review process! Sounds pretty grueling...

I was asking because one of the main responses I get from deniers when I give the studies on consensus, are links to notable deniers going into details on their own reviews about the studies always claiming a smoking gun of trickery and deception on these studies. One usually has to get pretty deep in the weeds to dispel those. I always look for the simpler explanation that makes sense to the possible audience of my discussion. I've usually given up on convincing the other person, but I want to always frame my arguments to appeal to those with a cursury interest and not get mired in the snowing attempts from deniers. It would be good to argue that denier biased "reviews" of studies are not reliable, and the scientific peer review process is much better at catching bad science.

There is no consensus

scaddenp at 13:14 PM on 9 April, 2021

Note there is more the Naomi Oreskes paper here. It is not clear to me from the context whether the Oreske article was peer-reviewed. Editorial-type and some review pieces in Science journals are not always peer-reviewed, though papers are in Science. However, the Oreske paper was in section called "essays on science and society". Since it was presenting an actual analysis rather than comment, I would guess "yes", but it isnt that clear.

The Oreske conclusion is not substantively different from other peer-reviewed studies of consensus however. It is extremely difficult to challenge the conclusion that a very strong scientific consensus on AGW exists from the evidence.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #3, 2021

michael sweet at 08:52 AM on 19 February, 2021

Jamesh,

The "scientific consensus" argument was popular about 10-15 years ago. That horse was flogged untill there was nothing left. Read the articles the moderator has highighted. There is a scientific consensus when a great majority of scientists agree that the problem has been solved. Scientists agree that CO2 causes global warming. The question is exactly how much it will warm and what the consequences of that warming will be.

2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #52

Eclectic at 21:57 PM on 1 January, 2021

As it is the New Year today, perhaps there is room for some lighter revue.

Yes, the Covid-19 situation is dire, but at least we have hopes that some moral and intellectual sanity will be gaining strength from later this month in the District of Columbia.

And even in the darkest times of 2020, there was always the Bedlam entertainment regularly found on the WattsUpWithThat blogsite.

I am a reader of WUWT (a blog which, to avoid nausea, is best digested in tiny amounts per day . . . or, alternatively, should be skimmed through at high speed). But for the end of 2020, I noted there was one recent article by a guest author whom I shall call "W".

W was vexed to learn that Wikipedia described WUWT as "a blog promoting climate change denial" [and] ... accommodating "beliefs that are in opposition to the scientific consensus".

W was appalled at Wikipedia's failure to understand the real nature of [modern] science, and at Wikipedia's failure to appreciate how WUWT is valuable as a place [one of the few places in the world] "where scientific ideas of all kinds can be most critically examined and publicly peer-reviewed in a modern efficient manner".

Now I like W ~ he is clever and at times humorous, though rather deficient in insight. He also tends to digress off the topic. And in this case, he digressed so far that he forgot to actually debunk Wikipedia's assertion.

Equally entertaining, were many of the subsequent responding comments ~ as typical displaying the assertions that the formal peer-review in journals was a nefarious & malign influence on true science. And that anything within the modern scientific consensus must automatically be wrong. And that "the scientific societies have betrayed science".

(These attitudes are almost universal at WUWT. Along with the frequent assertion that AGW is not only incorrect, but is a conspiracy & hoax & stalking horse ~ for the imposition of a Communist World Government dedicated to the destruction of mankind's freedoms.)

WUWT is a treasure-box of beliefs that the modern rapid (yet simultaneously non-existent) global warming is unconnected with CO2 , and is actually caused by Natural Cycles / or Cosmic Rays / or the Solar Wind / or other yet-undiscovered or unappreciated factors. One commenter repeatedly asserts the sole influence of geothermal heat. Another, the sole influence of tidal heat energy deriving from the presence of super-dense materials in the Earth's core, being fragmentary remnants of an ancient neutron star.

The Wikipedia statement certainly stirred up the WUWT denizens. W's article brought on some 250+ comments, of which 26 were made on the first 60 minutes. But evidently the function of WUWT is a healthful outlet for all this denialist steam pressure. Though it would be less tiresome if it wasn't always the flood of Usual Suspects repeating the usual intellectual insanity.

What did 1970’s climate science actually say?

Nick Palmer at 22:23 PM on 13 November, 2020

As any one will find out when dealing with 'hard core' deniers (as opposed to the gullible majority of 'sceptics'), who repeatedly post the same misinformation even after having been corrected multiple times, it's hard not to be driven to the conclusion that they are actually deliberately using deceit and insinuation to drive their readers to certain conclusions.

In this case the desired conclusion they want their audiences to jump to is that if scientists changed their mind once before, then it's unsafe to rely on what they are saying now, particulary about science based policy that is being planned to globally make big changes.

The insinuation and deceit is in how they frame their assertion. It uses a form of the 'magnified minority' technique (here's John Cook Tweeting about it twitter.com/johnfocook/status/1314301046756384794)

The misleader will say or write something like this

'but, but, but scientists predicted an ice age in the 70s - it was in Time and Newsweek - now they've changed their minds, so how can we trust them now?'

The thing about this deceit, like the best propaganda, is that it's technically true but rests upon the ambiguities of language to mislead.

The nitty gritty of the deceit is that the word "scientist's" can be taken to mean all scientists or as few as two. It gives no idea of the relative numbers, yet the insinuation in the 'imminent ice age' meme is that all, or the majority of, scientists supported the hypothesis.

The mention of the Time and Newsweek articles, which the public are infinitely more likely to remember and be far more familiar with than the consensus scientific view in the literature at the time, is highly likely to tip the undecided 'quantum state' of the public's appreciation of the topic towards their accepting that the scientific consensus back then was different to what it actually was...

What Tucker Carlson gets wrong about causes of wildfires in U.S. West

Daniel Bailey at 03:35 AM on 7 October, 2020

JoeZ, increased forest fire activity across the western U.S. in recent decades is due to a number of factors, including a history of fire suppression and human encroachment in forest regions, natural climate variability, and human-caused climate change. Forest management would help in some areas, however the wildfire numbers and burned area are also increasing in non-forest vegetation types. Wildfire activity appears strongly associated with warming temperatures (California spring/summer temperatures have increased by more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970) and earlier spring snowmelt.

Source: NASA

"For all ecoregions combined, the number of large fires increased at a rate of seven fires per year, while total fire area increased at a rate of 355 km2 per year. Continuing changes in climate, invasive species, and consequences of past fire management, added to the impacts of larger, more frequent fires, will drive further disruptions to fire regimes of the western U.S. and other fire-prone regions of the world."

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2014GL059576

Since the 1980s, the wildfire season has lengthened across a quarter of the world's vegetated surface.

"We show that fire weather seasons have lengthened across 29.6 million km2 (25.3%) of the Earth’s vegetated surface, resulting in an 18.7% increase in global mean fire weather season length. We also show a doubling (108.1% increase) of global burnable area affected by long fire weather seasons (>1.0 σ above the historical mean) and an increased global frequency of long fire weather seasons across 62.4 million km2 (53.4%) during the second half of the study period."

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8537

"The start of the Southwestern fire season—as indicated by the date of first large-fire discovery—has shifted more than 50 days earlier since the 1970s, accounting for about one-third of the increase in the length of the fire season. The substantially earlier SW fire season start is consistent with warmer temperatures and earlier spring seasons leading to earlier flammability of fuels in SW forests."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4874415/

"Anthropogenic increases in temperature and vapor pressure deficit significantly enhanced fuel aridity across western US forests over the past several decades and, during 2000–2015, contributed to 75% more forested area experiencing high (>1 σ) fire-season fuel aridity and an average of nine additional days per year of high fire potential.

Anthropogenic climate change accounted for ∼55% of observed increases in fuel aridity from 1979 to 2015 across western US forests, highlighting both anthropogenic climate change and natural climate variability as important contributors to increased wildfire potential in recent decades.

We estimate that human-caused climate change contributed to an additional 4.2 million ha of forest fire area during 1984–2015, nearly doubling the forest fire area expected in its absence.

Natural climate variability will continue to alternate between modulating and compounding anthropogenic increases in fuel aridity, but anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a driver of increased forest fire activity and should continue to do so while fuels are not limiting."

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/42/11770

"By 2100, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, one study found that the frequency of extreme wildfires would increase, and the average area burned statewide would increase by 77 percent. In the areas that have the highest fire risk, wildfire insurance is estimated to see costs rise by 18 percent by 2055. "

https://climateassessment.ca.gov/state/overview/#wildfire

"The clearest link between California wildfire and anthropogenic climate change thus far has been via warming-driven increases in atmospheric aridity, which works to dry fuels and promote summer forest fire, particularly in the North Coast and Sierra Nevada regions.

Importantly, the effects of anthropogenic warming on California wildfire thus far have arisen from what may someday be viewed as a relatively small amount of warming. According to climate models, anthropogenic warming since the late 1800s has increased the atmospheric vapor-pressure deficit by approximately 10% and this increase is projected to double by the 2060s. Given the exponential response of California burned area to aridity, the influence of anthropogenic warming on wildfire activity over the next few decades will likely be larger than the observed influence thus far where fuel abundance is not limiting.

Since the early 1970s, California's annual wildfire extent increased fivefold, punctuated by extremely large and destructive wildfires in 2017 and 2018. This trend was mainly due to an eightfold increase in summertime forest‐fire area and was very likely driven by drying of fuels promoted by human‐induced warming. Warming effects were also apparent in the fall by enhancing the odds that fuels are dry when strong fall wind events occur.

The large increase in California’s annual forest-fire area over the past several decades is very likely linked to anthropogenic warming.

Human‐caused warming has already significantly enhanced wildfire activity in California, particularly in the forests of the Sierra Nevada and North Coast, and will likely continue to do so in the coming decades."

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019EF001210

Wildfire mitigation efforts can reduce wildfire intensity and severity while improving forest resilience to fire, insects and drought. The total area burned by wildfires is a trend driven by the warming climate (which is warming because of human activities), so mitigation efforts will not likely be able to affect the total area burned trend.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42408-019-0062-8

Droughts in the Southwestern US have been made nearly half-again worse by human activities and are projected to worsen yet.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6488/314

These droughts couple with rising temperatures, reduced soil moisture and lower humidity to kill vast amounts of trees, providing an ever-increasing amount of fuel loads for wildfires.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6488/238

California’s frequency of fall days with extreme fire-weather conditions has more than doubled since the 1980s. Continued climate change will further amplify the number of days with extreme fire weather by the end of this century.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab83a7

https://twitter.com/CAL_FIRE/status/1311722710284693505

There is strengthened evidence that climate change increases the frequency and/or severity of fire weather around the world. Land management alone cannot explain recent increases in wildfires.

Analysis shows that:

• Well over 100 studies published since 2013 show strong consensus that climate change promotes the weather conditions on which wildfires depend, enhancing their likelihood.

• Natural variability is superimposed on the increasingly warm and dry background conditions resulting from climate change, leading to more extreme fires and more extreme fire seasons.

• Land management can enhance or compound climate-driven changes in wildfire risk, either through fuel reductions or fuel accumulation as unintended by-product of fire suppression. Fire suppression efforts are made more difficult by climate change.

• There is an unequivocal and pervasive role of climate change in increasing the intensity and length in which fire weather occurs; land management is likely to have contributed too, but does not alone account for recent increases in wildfire extent and severity in the western US and in southeast Australia.

Human-induced climate change promotes the conditions on which wildfires depend, enhancing their likelihood and challenging suppression efforts. Although the global area burned by fires each year is declining, the majority of this trend is explained by conversion of natural savannahs and grasslands to agriculture in Africa (Andela et al. 2017). In contrast, the area burned by forest wildfires is increasing in many regions, including in the western US and southeast Australia.

• “Fire weather” refers to periods with a high likelihood of fire due to a combination of high temperatures, low humidity, low rainfall and often high winds.

• Human-induced warming has already led to a global increase in the frequency and severity of fire weather, increasing the risks of wildfire.

• Land management can ameliorate or compound climate-driven changes in wildfire risk.

• Wildfires can have broad impacts for human health and wellbeing and for the natural environment.

US fires:

• Fire weather has become more frequent and intense in western US forests.

• Fire weather is driving more wildfire activity in western US forests.

• Demographic factors alone cannot account for the magnitude of the observed increase in wildfires in the western US, but increased population leads to greater impacts.

• Land management practices are contributing factors, but cannot alone explain the magnitude of the observed increase in wildfires extent in the western US forests in recent decades.

Australia fires:

• The scale of the 2019–2020 bushfires was unprecedented.

• Fuel management through prescribed burns and improved logging practice cannot fully mitigate increased wildfire risk due to climate change.

• Extreme weather and Pyroconvection are projected to increase wildfire risk under future climate change in southeastern Australia.

Scientific evidence that climate change is causing an increase in the frequency and extent of fire weather, contributing to extreme wildfires around the world, continues to mount.

The severe droughts in the USA and Australia are signs that the tropics, and their warm temperatures, are expanding in the wake of climate change, due to the warming of the subtropical ocean.

https://public.wmo.int/en/media/news/climate-change-increases-risk-of-wildfires
https://sciencebrief.org/topics/climate-change-science/wildfires
https://sciencebrief.org/briefs/wildfires
https://news.sciencebrief.org/wildfires-sep2020-update/
PDF here

Climate change will continue to drive temperature rise and more unpredictable rainfall in many parts of the world, meaning that the number of days with “fire weather” – conditions in which fires are likely to burn – is expected to increase in coming decades.

Carbon Brief Wildfire explainer

2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #37

Postkey at 18:20 PM on 16 September, 2020

Steve @5

“The IPCC report that the Paris agreement based its projections on considered over 1,000 possible scenarios. Of those, only 116 (about 10%) limited warming below 2C. Of those, only 6 kept global warming below 2C without using negative emissions. So roughly 1% of the IPCC’s projected scenarios kept warming below 2C without using negative emissions technology like BECCS. And Kevin Anderson, former head of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has pointed out that those 6 lone scenarios showed global carbon emissions peaking in 2010. Which obviously hasn’t happened. So from the IPCC’s own report in 2014, we basically have a 1% chance of staying below 2C global warming if we now invent time travel and go back to 2010 to peak our global emissions. And again, you have to stop all growth and go into decline to do that. And long term feedbacks the IPCC largely blows off were ongoing back then too.”

www.facebook.com/wxclimonews/posts/455366638536345

'Limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius will not prevent destructive and deadly climate impacts, as once hoped, dozens of experts concluded in a score of scientific studies released Monday. A world that heats up by 2C (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)—long regarded as the temperature ceiling for a climate-safe planet—could see mass displacement due to rising seas, a drop in per capita income, regional shortages of food and fresh water, and the loss of animal and plant species at an accelerated speed. Poor and emerging countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America will get hit hardest, according to the studies in the British Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions A. "We are detecting large changes in climate impacts for a 2C world, and so should take steps to avoid this," said lead editor Dann Mitchell, an assistant professor at the University of Bristol. The 197-nation Paris climate treaty, inked in 2015, vows to halt warming at "well under" 2C compared to mid-19th century levels, and "pursue efforts" to cap the rise at 1.5C.'

phys.org/news/2018-04-degrees-longer-global-guardrail.html#jCp

If 'change' can be implemented?
“LONDON, 19 February, 2020 − Virtually all the world’s demand for electricity to run transport and to heat and cool homes and offices, as well as to provide the power demanded by industry, could be met by renewable energy by mid-century. This is the consensus of 47 peer-reviewed research papers from 13 independent groups with a total of 91 authors that have been brought together by Stanford University in California.”

LINK

Will there be change?
“Today’s global consumption of fossil fuels now stands at roughly five times what it was in the 1950s, and one-and-half times that of the 1980s when the science of global warming had already been confirmed and accepted by governments with the implication that there was an urgent need to act. Tomes of scientific studies have been logged in the last several decades documenting the deteriorating biospheric health, yet nothing substantive has been done to curtail it. More CO2 has been emitted since the inception of the UN Climate Change Convention in 1992 than in all of human history. CO2 emissions are 55% higher today than in 1990. Despite 20 international conferences on fossil fuel use reduction and an international treaty that entered into force in 1994, wo/man made greenhouse gases have risen inexorably.”

medium.com/@xraymike79/the-inconvenient-truth-of-modern-civilizations-inevitable-collapse-8e83df6f3a57

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

michael sweet at 04:34 AM on 5 September, 2020

Preston Urka at 216:

This is another post where you state your unsupportted ideas. Since you have no training, experience or education in nuclear power or power systems this post is entirely sloganeering. You are simply cherry picking data to fit your arguments. If your arguments had any weight you would find some references to support them. This is a completely unscientific post.

At 217: Every point you make is started "I believe". You have only one reference from 2012. Experience in wind power worldwide since 2012 shows that your reference is incorrect. Once again you are simply sloganeering. This is a completely unscientific post.

218: Here you actually have citations!!! Unfortunately, all are to news articles (including one at WUWT!!!) and not peer reviewed articles. You primarily discuss grid expansion costs. Fortuantely, this is covered in the peer reviewed literature cited upthread. If you had carefully read the background you would know that grid expansion typically costs 10-15% of total costs. This turns out to be a reasonable cost. Here is another link to a peer reviewed paper that discusses grid costs. Nuclear supporters used to make this argument several years ago until it was proven incorrect. Please try to catch up to current knowledge. Citing outdated papers and debunked arguments makes you look bad.

At 219: The point is that your claim that low carbon intensity in Sweden is due to nuclear was deliberately false.

At 220: Everyone wants to reduce the carbon intensity of economies. The peer reviewed literature indicates that the best way to achieve this goal is by building out renewable energy as fast as possible. This link contains the abstracts of 47 papers that describe how to provide 100% of energy to the entire economy world wide using renewable energy. They come from 13 different research groups with 91 different authors. This list demonstrates a consensus among energy system researchers that renewable energy is the way to go. (Hat tip to Postkey. You need to describe why your link is useful to be compliant with the posting rules.)

Your claims that renewable energy cannot supply 100% of world power are supported only by your opinion as someone who has no education, training or work experience in power systems and is completely informed by reading on the internet (and who cites WUWT as a reliable source). Coonstantly repeating your unsupported opinion is sloganeering.

Please cite one paper that suggests it might be possible to supply even half of world energy using nuclear power. Such a paper does not exist. According to Abbott 2012, it is impossible to supply a significant amount of world energy (more than 5%) using nuclear power.

2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #32

nigelj at 08:53 AM on 9 August, 2020

"The encyclical was seen in some camps as an attack on capitalism, and it made some Catholic Republican leaders squirm, like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who in 2015 observed that the pope "is not a scientist."

The pope is not a scientist. Yes Mr Bush, we know that. The Pope is not claiming to be a scientist. He is not making up his own science. He is not twisting or interpreting the science. Hes quoting the majority view in the scientific community. Plenty of consensus studies show what the vast majority of scientists think documented here.

IPCC human-caused global warming attribution confidence is unfounded

MA Rodger at 09:12 AM on 10 May, 2020

Deplore This @3,

As set out by Philippe Chantreau @5, in the time of Galileo there wasn't much of a process which could be today called a "scientific community's acceptance" to allow us to understand how far Galileo's contemparies accepted his work. All we hear is that the Pope famously got very 'trumpy' with his work. But if you roll the clock on 50 years and you find the likes of 'Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes' or 'Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica' so in 50 years there was established complete acceptance.

And so for comprison, 50 years on from, say, the likes of John Sawyer setting out the scientific case for saying:-

"The increase of 25% CO2 expected by the end of the century therefore corresponds to an increase of 0.6 °C in the world temperature – an amount somewhat greater than the climatic variation of recent centuries."

50 years on we see there is a very strong consensus that such a finding is correct. And spelling-wise, "Judith Curry" is correct although so much of what she writes about climate change is unsubstatiated nonsense.

IPCC human-caused global warming attribution confidence is unfounded

Philippe Chantreau at 04:19 AM on 10 May, 2020

If Galileo's contemporaries had developed their own instruments similar to his, repeated his observations, replicated his results, reached his conclusions through multiple independents lines of inquiries, there would have been a scientific consensus in no time. Of course, in the time of Galileo, science was more like philosophy and had severe social constraints emanating from the religious power structures, who would not let one challenge their authority so easily. So the consensus that existed at the time was by no means a scientific consensus, but a mish mash of superstition, dogmatism, conformism, social control, politics etc.

The difference is glaringly obvious, and anyone with basic critical thinking skills can see through the fallacy.

A scientific consensus does not consist of a bunch of people getting together to pat each other on the back for agreeing with all the rest of them. It consists of multiple independent teams working hard, double checking their results, submitting them to highly critical peers who will try their hardest to find flaws in their work, and independently reaching the same conclusions. A scientific consensus is not similar opinions across the board, it is persistent convergence of research results. That is what an examination of the scientific litterature will show.

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

michael sweet at 09:04 AM on 10 April, 2020

David Benson:

The BIER VII report was comissoned by the National Academy of Science to provide a summary of current scientific consensus. A group of experts in the field reviewed all the recent data. They concluded that LRNT is strongly supported by the data. Linking to a 100+ response list on a blog is not a refutation of a NAS scientific consensus report. Please link to the relevant comments instead of making us read all the chaff on your unmoderated site.

The Executive summary contains a summary of the information in the report. Even if there was a minor error in the Executive summary that would not invalidate the netire consensus of experts.

YouTube's Climate Denial Problem

Eclectic at 23:08 PM on 8 April, 2020

MA Rodger , the marvellous WUWT that you call rogue planetoid, is not a planet nor a planetoid. It is more of a moon or lunar body, orbiting the real universe yet not truly part of it. Yet it draws sustenance from the real universe, just as a tick draws sustenance from its unwilling host. (You can see that I am laboring to get lunar & tick into the same sentence, to describe WUWT . . . but sadly the intended pun is an uphill labor, and I had better retract it, and move on.)

For my sins (and for the pleasure of Schadenfreude ) and for my education in the field of psychopathology I am often reading parts of the comments columns at WUWT. (Of the lead articles there, I would say that 80% of them are not worth reading or maybe just worth a very high-speed skim.) But the comments columns are a goldmine of mental pathology.

Not every commenter there is intellectually and/or morally insane. There are a few notable exceptions ~ pre-eminent is Nick Stokes, who is always worth reading. Nick is a very well-informed scientific thinker who is regularly (and blandly) correcting the the usual errors & inanities of the run-of-the-mill commenters at WUWT. He is balanced and scientifically accurate . . . in short, he is the complete opposite of the typical on-line Denialist. And they hate him for it, and bay for his blood. Most non-denialists are quickly booted out by the website proprietor (Mr Anthony Watts) and his Moderators. Yet Nick Stokes endures, year after year (and AFAICT he is unfailing correct in his observations). I am sure Anthony Watts keeps tolerating Nick Stokes ~ partly as a demonstration of the [cough] civilized & open-minded nature of the WUWT website . . . as a token "contrarian" [i.e. mainstream scientist] . . . and possibly also as a piece of raw meat to keep inflaming the rabid dogs who frequent the WUWT columns (and who keep the website hit-rate high, for the benefit of the routine on-line advertisers).

And yes, just recently WUWT has been serving up quite a bit of Covid-19 headlines ~ that's out of the ordinary for the site, but surely no worse than all other media outlets at present. The usual WUWT articles are sourly scoffing or sneering [e.g. anti-Thunberg] or generally anti-renewables . . . spiced up with the occasional mathematical clangers from Christopher Monckton as he comes up with his bi-annual mathturbational "proofs" that the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity is only 1.1 degrees or 0.5 degrees or whatever (or that the scientific Consensus was not 97% but actually 33% or 4% or whatever). And sometimes other scientific Mc Experts demonstrate (in completely different & incompatible ways) how the mainstream scientists are all wrong about climate.

WUWT puts up several new headlines each day. It's important to keep the flock supplied with fresh clickbait. And I must admit they occasionally have a brief but interesting article of general interest, including astronomy news. After all, this is a serious science-based website !

A history of FLICC: the 5 techniques of science denial

Daniel Bailey at 00:11 AM on 3 April, 2020

"I like to watch a lot of debates on both sides and it is complicated"

Actually, it's not very complicated at all. The scientific debate-train left the station, decades ago.

In the discussions around global warming and its anthropogenic causation, there are those who focus on the science using the scientific method and logic, seeking reproducible evidence that best explains what we can empirically measure.

Then there is everyone in the extreme minority, those who ignore the above in favor of slander, innuendo, unsupported assertion and character assassination in favor of promulgating false equivalence to support the ephemeral facade of "debate" and "sides".

But it is not about the science, the bulk of the science was settled, decades ago. Deniers posing as skeptics set up a charade tableau of false equivalence to poison the well of public acceptance of that science.

A parsimonious harping at the font of stolen, out-of-context and context-less emails proven not germane to the science is continuing on in the prosecution of the agenda of denial.

Truth, science and reputable journalism all sacrificed to the unholy alter of false equivalence under the guise of promulgating a fallacious "debate".

There is no debate. All that remains is the informed and the uninformed.

A history of FLICC: the 5 techniques of science denial

scaddenp at 14:18 PM on 2 April, 2020

Well duncan61, so which do you trust most? Information derived from a consensus of peer-reviewed scientific literature, even it is an unwelcome point of view; or information coming from non-climate scientists, non-scientists even, but which conform to what you would like to beleive?

The difficulty for laymen is, that unless they are willing to delve into the science (and learn it from impeccable sources), then you are having to decide what sources to trust.

A good start for critical thinking, is to decide what information/data would change your gut (value-driven) point of view. Scientists have no trouble telling you what measurements would change their mind on AGW. A pseudo-skeptic is more inclined to require the impossible, something science predicts cant be true (eg linear rise of temp with CO2), or the unmeasurable.

How deniers maintain the consensus gap

DantetnaD at 20:54 PM on 26 February, 2020

This is what scares me.

There was an article yesterday about this new "anti-Greta" german girl which basically says climate change isn't as bad as it looks. Go in the comments and you see the sheer ignorance of a vast majority of the folks out there, even in our "first world" countries.

Just a whole bunch of hateful comments against Greta and a whole lot of people who have a complete lack of intellectual capacity to understand and analyse scientific evidence.

I don't have a scientific degree per say, but my parents both had scientific degrees. I work with computers which gives me the capacity to understand complex systems. And what I do see out there, is that a lot of people don't understand how systems work in general. They don't understand that it is all about an equilibrium of a large number of factors that, when they work together, make a stable system. When you start to tinker with a parameter, the system will eventually become unstable and crash. Simple example: raise the frequency of a CPU without increasing the cooling capacity and you computer will overheat and crash.

What annoys me most about deniers, is that they completely dismiss scientific evidence. They will go at great length to find data, studies or any piece of news (often not verified for that matter), that comforts them in their own bias. When you tell them that there is a consensus of actual scientists that do state that global warming is real and probably accelerated by humans, they will throw this "30'000 scientists say it's not true" idea in your face without even fact checking that these people are actual climate scientists.

It honestly doesn't take a genius to read the reports. To look at the data. To look at the charts. And from their on, extrapolate to what is potentially going to happen.

The real problem in the end, is that human induced climate change has been politicized. Suddenly you're either pro or anti climate change. Why does everyone fail to understand that this should not be the case? How is it that we cannot understand that we all need to work together to do something about it? What's the worst that can happen? We make a better home for ourselves?

Have we regressed so much that we are, once again, dismissing science in favor of "beliefs"?

How deniers maintain the consensus gap

Eclectic at 12:05 PM on 24 February, 2020

JoeZ , I am pleased to see you have returned to multiple-thread posting at SkS after a brief "hiatus". Perhaps you were confused when you said that SkepticalScience had given you "a warning that ... [you would] be locked out!" . I haven't seen any evidence of such a warning ~ so presumably it came on some other website where you currently post.

Readers at SkS like to see science and fact-based opinions, rather than mere truculent denialism. So I am hoping you can provide some reasonable comment on the scientific consensus, even when you are struggling to come to terms with the future spending of "trillions" of dollars in dealing with the global warming problem. ( I would be interested to see - on another thread, please - a more precise budgeting of your projected "trillions". Trillions [over 30 years] are sometimes a figure thrown about, but AFAIK they are not offset by the trillions that would otherwise ordinarily be spent on upgrading & routine replacement of coal-fired power stations, and the routine replacement of ICE cars & so on, and on medical health costs & loss of productivity from air-pollution/particulates, nor the high [dollar] costs associated with big numbers of climate refugees . . . going to Boston etcetera. Nor the many other costs arising from a warming world. Human compassion aside, for those who are purely concerned with the dollar bottom-line, it seems a bargain to spend up-front money in tackling climate change.

.... and a minor comparison, the APPA expenditure figures project a total spend [over 30 years] of one trillion dollars on pet food. And that's just for the USA, alone. )

How deniers maintain the consensus gap

Eclectic at 15:57 PM on 22 February, 2020

Libertador @1 , Yes I think sometimes a science-denier deliberately plays "change the goal posts" during a dialogue, as a rhetorical tactic to disconcert his opponent. Though probably more often this tactic reflects the denialist's own intellectual confusion and lack of logical thought about the consensus issue.

PatriceM @2 , and also PhilippeC : in addition there is the point that the denialists confuse & conflate the two separate facets of "consensus" :- being (A) the numerical percentage you get when you discuss/survey the expressed opinions of (climate) scientists, and (B) the numerical percentage you get [99.9%] when you look at the current state of science, as expressed in peer-reviewed scientific papers.

"B" is extremely close to 100% . . . while "A" is slightly lower, owing to some scientists being inhibited by their personal bias (bias of the rather extreme political sort and/or extremist religious beliefs).

MA Rodger @4 , You make a very good point about denialists who (quite often) throw up a Gish Gallop of "historical consensuses being wrong" as though it is a Law of Nature that any/every consensus must eventually & inevitably turn out to be completely wrong. Their arguments are mostly irrelevant to climate, and are totally illogical, but - by the sin of omission - they carefully fail to mention the vastly greater proportion of scientific consensuses which turned out to be right (as confirmed in historical retrospect).

Yet the "But Copernicus : But Galileo : etcetera" line of argument would often sound somewhat valid to the casual onlookers. I can think of only two cards to be played in reply :- That in olden times, the so-called consensus often swung back and forth on a number of occasions before settling on the true scientific conclusion: and yet that hasn't happened with the AGW climate consensus of modern decades ~ where the consensus keeps moving more and more strongly in the one direction, as the scientific evidence has continued to build up. The consensus was about 90% . . . then later 97% . . . and nowadays well over 99% , with absolutely no sign of going the other way.

The second card to play, is your point that (unlike in olden times) the "contrarians" nowadays have no valid evidence to back their "alternative theories". No evidence ~ because all their ideas have proven wrong when tested. (This point means nothing to the committed hard-core denialist . . . but it would have value, in the minds of onlookers.)

How deniers maintain the consensus gap

MA Rodger at 21:16 PM on 21 February, 2020

There is the argument that science doesn't have anything to do with 'consensus'. In one respect, this is surely correct.

A denialist version of this comes from Michael Crichton who was described by Joe Romm as "the world’s most famous global warming denier." Crichton's defines 'consensus science' in a broad denialist polemic of 2003 'Aliens Cause Global Warming ':-

"I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.
"Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had."
...
"If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period."

Crichton goes on to set out how in science "the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of." So he is not denying the existence of 'consensus science'. Rather, he is actually saying is that 'consensus science' is synonimous with science being wrong, badly wrong, and this is because 'consensus science' is used to stiffle unwanted argument that turns out to be the 'correct' science. By implication Crichton is saying of AGW that it is also badly wrong and the scientific community is trying to stiffle the 'correct' science. (Note, the word 'legitimate' is probably better than 'correct' but Crichton doesn't make that point.)

To a certain level, Crichton was correct. The scientific community is trying to stiffle unwanted argument by invoking 'consensus science'.

Myself, I prefer the version of 'consensus science' defined by the idea that 'consensus' is reached when the 'science' stops. So the question becomes "Is there any actual science being carried out by the myrad of numpties who deny AGW?" We can ask "That 3% who are outside the AGW consensus: what 'science' are they actually doing?"
The argument set out by Crichton gave examples of 'consensus science' being wielded as a way of ignoring specific theories which proved to be correct - puerperal fever, pellagra, continental drift. "The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy. The list of consensus errors goes on and on." So, if AGW is another example of dreadful 'consensus science' as Crichton evidently implies, where are the specific theories wielded by AGW that we are ignoring? Where is this 'legitimate' science that prevents the existence of an AGW 'consensus'. I would be happy to consider the merit fo such work. And so would many others. But I don't see any specific theories wielded by the numpties who deny AGW! Their 'legitimate' science simply doesn't exist!!

And by my definition, until the numpties set out a specific theory, until there is 'legitimate' science which we can debate, we are left with nothing but AGW 'consensus'. And a climate emergency.

97% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven

Eclectic at 15:09 PM on 22 January, 2020

Andrew Strang @70 :

The short answer is . . . No, it's not.

There's been endless talk downplaying "the 97% consensus" ~ just as there's still endless talk (mostly within the Flat Earth Society) that the Earth is not really Round.

Regarding climate aspects, much of the naysaying has been like the speech delivered by the Defendant's lawyer trying to minimize his client's guilt. Rhetorical sophistry, distortions, cherry-pickings, and outright misleading information. (The only difference here is that the lawyer won't utter a 100% mendacity . . . yet there are many prominent climate-change deniers who routinely do cross that line.)

But some lawyers will go up pretty close to the line. Sort of :-

"Yes the victim died later in hospital, but my client is not actually guilty of murder because it was a flesh-wound and my client's knife only made an entry wound and the blade did not come out the other side of the body. The whole thing is really a case of poor treatment by the surgeons."

Andrew, it's a sad fact that the "op-eds" in Forbes are aimed at the reader who knows the business/financial field and is not easily fooled there . . . but who knows so little about science, that he is easily fooled in the science & climate field. (And there are some Forbes readers who want to be fooled because, consciously or subconsciously, they have a guilty conscience about fossil fuels . . . and here we might justifiably point at the very author of the article and his role with fossil fuels or "energy" as prefers to call it. Motivated Reasoning at work, eh. )

Why does Forbes publish op-eds / articles which are little short of morally criminal? Perhaps it's their politics . . . or what they suspect is their reader majority politics . . . or perhaps they fear losing major advertisers.

Andrew , consider three important points :-

(A) What is happening in the real physical world.

(B) What are the causations acknowledged by the expert scientists when you speak with them or survey their personal opinions.

(C) What does "the science" show ~ and in essence, modern mainstream science is what is published in the respected peer-reviewed scientific journals (tens of thousands of scientific articles).

(B) and (C) together or separately, can be called the consensus. In practice, (B) is the result of (C) . . . but you will find science-denialists bending over backwards to say: "Ignore (C)" and: "Let's do some creative accounting with the figures & definitions in (B)". ~Hence the Forbes article, amongst others!

Andrew, the consensus "(C)" is well over 99.9% . . . and there are some rare contrarian scientific papers ~ but they've all been shown to be very faulty.

(B) is well over 90% (the small remnant usually due to personal political extremist views, rather than any actual scientific evidence).

(A) is simply a rapidly warming world ~ ice melting, seas rising & acidifying. The more you educate yourself on the subject, the more starkly obvious it all is.

And yet there are still denialists busily denying the facts. Go figure !

Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?

michael sweet at 14:40 PM on 19 January, 2020

Nigelj,

You need to read your own citations.

Claiming that the US National Academy of Science is wrong and saying you will not provide any citations to support your claim is completely unscientific. Their review, published in 2006, is the most up to date consensus report on low level radiation. If you wish to substitute your personal opinion for the National Academy of Science scientific consensus you should stop posting here. This is a scientific site, citations are required.

I read the original paper for your pv magazine citation. I gave you a reference to the paper. They model only wind and solar power for electricity only in the USA. They do not model a renewable energy system that anyone would propose for the USA. They do not model All Power. Nuclear power is not modeled at all in the paper. At the end they speculate that adding nuclear might help but they provide no data or citations to support that wild claim. They do not model costs of their renewable system and they do not give nuclear costs either so speculating that nuclear would lower costs is completely unsupported. I quoted from a peer reviewed paper, you cited a popular magazine.

It is common for nuclear supporters to make up a fake renewable energy system that is very expensive. Then they claim, without data, that nuclear should be added since renewable is so expensive. Even if it were true that renewable was expensive that would not mean that nuclear is reasonable. As Abbott shows, it is impossible to build out more than a trivial amount of nuclear power.

You did not read your reference for nuclear cycling. The first paragraph stated that no reactors in the USA load follow because it is not economic. They say no reactors in the USA can load follow. They suggested that future reactors could be designed to very slowly load follow. It will never be economic. It will never be possible to load follow in real time. In France they shut down reactors on the weekend. For nuclear that is "load following". It is not economic.

Your claims that storage is too expensive is simply ignorant. You have not read the papers I cited that show a well designed renewable system can store all needed power using electrofuels in existing storage facilities. If replacement facilities need to be built it is over 1,000 times cheaper to build liquid electrofuel storage than to build out the pumped hydro you favor. (In any case it is impossible to build out major pumped hydro storage because the environmental damage is too great). Liquid electrofuels are stored in the same tanks that you see if you drive by any chemical storage facility worldwide. "Working prototypes" are everywhere and the costs are well known. Jacobson also documents storage for an all power system without electrofuels and the cost is reasonable. Jacobson details all storage down to the last battery and builds exactly zero pumped storage. Anyone who proposes using extensive pumped storage is trying to mislead you.

Doubling down: Researchers investigate compound climate risks

Hank at 00:56 AM on 12 January, 2020

I will admit that I may be defensive about my profession after practicing and experiencing it for 50 years but I hope I can still be objective. I think we are all on the same team of trying to prevent climate change deniers from spreading their false and damaging message. However....

One of the things I have consistently found is that climate change deniers use bits and pieces of scientific research and twist it into the opposite of what the research found. If they can convince the public that they know as much about climate change as the scientists because the data is just simple to understand, then they have accomplished their mission. One of the things I have learned in my limited research into climate change is that what can appear simple on the surface is very complicated when digging down into the details, something that deniers take advantage of every day. In my experience the same is true of all technical professions so in the end I ask and defer to the opinions of peer reviewed published material as explained by the authors. So I think that ironically the same thing is happening in this debate.

Nigelj has stated this:

“However let's take an increase in wind pressure of 17% as you mentioned. This doesn't sound too horrendously severe. I agree much of the global warming threat comes more from flooding etc. Anyway upgrading the code for a 17% increase in pressure sounds like a bit of extra wall and roof bracing and more fixings, so not a huge increase in cost.”

In effect you have decided that you know enough about the statistical analysis of wind speeds, the application of that analysis to structures, the development of risk factors the economics of risk and the risk to the public among many other things that makes you an expert in how the structural codes should be changed. Yet you have pretty much admitted you have no expertise in any of these areas. And it appears you assume that the professionals that produce these codes are either not aware of environmental changes and how they affect the design of structures or they are deliberately ignoring those changes because of political pressure or greed. Pretty much exactly what climate change deniers are saying and using against climate scientists.

From what all of you have said it seems you have some if not a fair amount of structural training. If so you should know that the design of structures are limited by the yield strength of the material for wind design in most cases. This is far from the “failure” of a structure unless you consider the “failure” of a structure to be some limited permanent deflections of the structure. This is evidenced by the success of seismic designed structures to prevent the total collapse of structures which exceed the wind forces by a large amount. In other words there is almost always a large amount of redundancy in structures due to many factors that are not considered in design. So rarely is this a matter of risk to public safety, but to economic risk.

I am by all means in favor of requiring structures to consider human safety first and economy risk second. However there is no way codes can be written to cover all possible risks. My company and some of the companies I have worked for have multiple standard products they sale. The costs of upgrading all those products by a 17% increase in wind pressure would include a massive amount of redesign (I’m not sure everyone realizes the amount of time and work that goes into designing a large structure), the replacement and/or modification of millions of dollars of tooling required for the existing structures and the amount of published marketing material that would need to be replaced. This is not just adding some bracing. Existing structures would be grandfathered in with a new code but sales of new structures have to meet the new codes. If the experts decide an increase is necessary I will be leading the cause to get it implemented. But I’m not in favor of unnecessary feel good changes that can have unintended consequences.

I am all in favor of public pressure to create changes in public policy when it is obvious the government is ignoring public safety. I think that is pretty evident with climate change when you look at heat waves, drought, floods, rising seas, the consensus of climate scientists, etc. Of course structures do fail for many reasons. But I have not seen, nor has anyone here presented any evidence of an increase in structural failures due to increased wind pressures.

The never-ending RCP8.5 debate

michael sweet at 08:08 AM on 3 January, 2020

Nick Palmer at 31:

Thank you for a post completely lacking in citations so I do not need to go read them.

Long time readers ar Ske[ptical Science might remember a drawing from a scientist (sorry I do not remember the scientists name) which had a large gaussian curve labeled "Scientific Opinion" on one side. At the far right of the gaussian curve was a line labeled "IPCC position. About 10% of the curve was to theleft of the IPCC line. Much further to the left, past the point of no problems, was a line labeled Denier scientists. In the middle of the IPCC line and the denier line was a line labeled "news reports splitting the middle". The news reports line was far to the left of the end of scientific opinion. (If anyone has a link to this drawing please post it below, I have not been able to find it).

The point of the graph was that, exactly as OPOF describes, the IPCC report determines the point where a consensus of scientists agrees "the damage must be higher than this". That means the average of scientific opinion is much more damage than reported by the IPCC. The lowest 10-15% of scientific opinion determines where the line is drawn. Your description of the IPCC linne as the midpoint of scientific opinion is simply incorrect (I note that you have provided no citations to support your claim).

I support my claim with this reference to a RealClimate post. (the data discussed is referenced to a peer reviewed paper at RealClimate). The graph below shows the data from IPCC AR5 and the results of a survey of 90 sea level rise experts.

sea level graph

In the IPCC report the data was only quoted from the 17-83%. Standard data in scientific reports is to the 95%. Thus for RPC 8.5, the I(PCC reported a maximum expected rise of just under 1 meter. The 95% opinion of the experts was just over 1.5 meters.

I call the IPCC claim of under 1 meter low balling.

Just for giggles let us look at a recently published survey of experts:

"We find that a global total SLR exceeding 2 m by 2100 lies within the 90% uncertainty bounds for a high emission scenario." my emphasis

Your position is that I should only say sea level will rise 0.95 meters when expert opinion says there is as much as 10% chance of over 2 meters if we go BAU?? If I am responsible for building an airport I am expected to anticipate it will last 100 years with 95% certainty. That would be well over 2 meters.

According to this RealClimate post, Jason Box, a glaciologist who studies this issue, has said:

"There was controversy after AR4 that sea level rise estimates were too low. Now, we have the same problem for AR5 [that they are still too low]."

Stefan states:

"One statement that I do not find convincing is the IPCC’s claim that “it is likely that similarly high rates [as during the past two decades] occurred between 1920 and 1950.” I think this claim is not well supported by the evidence. In fact, a statement like “it is likely that recent high rates of SLR are unprecedented since instrumental measurements began” would be more justified."

At 27:40 of the video linked above Dr. Alley says:

"The IPCC is way on the optomistic side fo what is possible [for this issue and many others]"

He does not mention 30-40 feet but does say "could be bigger than this [15-20 feet]. they have not done a worst case study"

Prominent scientists complain repeatedly that the IPCC is lowballing the numbers. I think it is acceptable for me to do the same. Can you provide something besides ":this what Nick Palmer thinks" to support your position.

I have not been called a doomer before. Thinking about it, I note that low balling it for 30 years as you advocate has not gotten anything done. Perhaps Hallem of ER will do better with his approach.

The never-ending RCP8.5 debate

nigelj at 06:48 AM on 3 January, 2020

michael sweet @29

"you can't argue every issue by pointing to what an expert or two said and leaving it at that. Sometimes experts are dead wrong. You are using the "argument from authority fallacy," and also doing exactly what the denialists do when the point at a couple of denialist experts."

Yes I did say this, but at that point I was referencing the claims of Reese that 6 billion people will die by 2100, not sea level rise per se. This is really Reeses opinion, its not in the peer reviewed literature as far as Im aware, its been heavily criticised by several other experts, and like Nick Plamer says theres a big difference between claiming what will happen and what might happen. Reese is feeding the denialists. It's sad if you can't see this.

"Your paper actually supports my posts: 2 meters is a high estimate but within 95% estimates of high sea level rise and 5 meters is within the long tail. You did not read the paper. The paper also states that the consensus of experts has significantly increased since 2013. "For sea level rise the consensus always increases every 5-10 years."

Whatever. I have already stated that I accept some published science (Hansen and others) concludes 5 metres is possible as the most extreme worst case. An incredible numbers of things have to happen for this to occur and some of the mechanisms in Hansens research are none too clear. That's the opinion of plenty of scientists. Not everyone accepts Hansens conclusions. 2-3 metres by 2100 is what is considered more reasonably possible and scares the hell out of me anyway and would be devastating. I don't know why anyone needs to wildly speculate beyond this.

Even Hansens sea level rise predictions that New York would be underwater by date xyz have fed the denialists for decades, and the scientific community has had to do gymnastics to defend them.

If we want to be convincing the public, and using scary predictions towards the upper end, imho we need to be focusing in on a worst case for sea level rise that is strongly backed by evidence, not the off the chart highly contested stuff at the extreme end. I have already made this point so I'm trying again. It's a subtle difference but its important.

Nick Plalmer is right when he says "If you havent seen the clear evidence from psychology that overstating risks not only turns people off, but reduces the credibility of the 'consensus' middle ground of science in the publics' eye then you need to read a bit wider." I have done some psychology, so Im aware of this. Basically fear can motivate change, but the research finds when using extreme and scary scenarious, there has to be a solid evidence base or fear can work in the opposite direction to whats intended.

"Farmers raise crops on all the good land. Only poor land is allowed to go to trees. Virtually all farmable land is already occupied by a farmer. Your gross insensivity to farmers on good, delta land being forced to move to cities is disgusting. Lost good land is not replaced by poor land in the mountains or melted permafrost. All the estimates I used were for 2100. You refer to multiple time periods so it is unclear what you mean. It is clear that you are not up to date on the amount and consequences of sea level rise."

My point was sea level rise will reduce framland, and forests might be cut down to provide more farmland so its hard to see 6 billion people dying by 2100. And it seems plausible, given huge numbers of trees are being cut down in the Amazon rain forest to grow crops and for cattle (unfortunately). Obviously there could well be very increased mortality longer term given seaa level rise wont stop by 2100.

I said nothing about farmers being forced to move to cities. I said nothing about growing trees on mountains or permafrost regions. I don't recall using multiple time periods. I only talked about 2100 or end of this century. I provided you with a reference from physics.org to some of the latest science on sea level rise.

----------------------

Michael Sweet @30

"The rules for the IPCC reports were written by fossil fuel lawers."

Where do you get that from? Not that it would suprise me.

"Lowballing problems as you suggest has not motivated anyone to take action in the past 30 years. "

I don't think problems have been low balled as much as you think. While the IPCC have not highlighted the possibility of multi metre sea level rise by 2100, there is a graph in their report talking about 12 degrees c by 2200 for business as usual. This is not low balling. The media has been full of scary predictions of all sorts.

"I do not support frightening people with 15 feet (Alley actually mentioned 30-40 feet as a maximum in his talk, listen to it again), but having 65 cm in the Executive summary, which is the most you expect people to read, is not accurate."

This seems in total contradiction to all your previous rhetoric!

My position is this and it always has been and I've said it 100 times: The IPCC understate things in the executive summary and are too cautious. The possibility of 2 metre sea level rise should be mentioned, or something like that, because theres good evidence its a reasonable possibility. But making truly extreme claims like 6 metres sea level rise and 6 billion people dead within one hundred years feeds is on shaky ground, and feeds the denialists and could be counter productive.

I think we might be more on the same page than you think.

The never-ending RCP8.5 debate

One Planet Only Forever at 04:04 AM on 3 January, 2020

Nick Palmer @31 (also applicable to swampfoxh),

Michael Sweet may not have explained in detail why it is correct to refer to IPCC reported summaries of the science as 'low-balling' how serious the problem is. However, it is true that the IPCC methodology for finalizing the wording of its reports, particularly the Executive Summary, results in 'low-balling of the negative seriousness'.

The science continues to be clear. Human impacts beyond 1.5C warming are likely very negative for the future generations. That has not changed. Politicians who have less concern for future generations decided that a 1.5C limit was 'too hard on the current generation' and tried to say 2.0C would be OK. And some extremist economists, extreme in their lack of concern for future generations, have determined and declared that 3.0C would not only be OK, it would be a generous restriction of the harm done to future generations. They say that to be fair the warming limit could be even higher than 3.0C, depending on how much less concern for the negative future impacts (discounting of future costs) is acceptable (even though it is patently absurd to believe that it is acceptable to benefit from actions that create, or risk creating, negative impacts on Others).

The IPCC report writing methodology is for an 'absolute consensus' to be reached among the participants in the authorship of a Report. And each science contributor has a 'political minder from their nation' influencing the way the report is worded. The 'absolute consensus' wording has to meet the desires of the political minders, but can only be pushed to the limit of scientific legitimacy. The result is reports that are pushed to the 'low-ball end' statements of what can be scientifically supported. (Based a my listening to a CBC Radio interview from long ago of a Canadian Scientist who was a participant in the process).

That process has resulted in almost every subsequent Report 'stepping-up' its statement of 'negative consequences'. When you start from a position of 'low-balling how bad things are' it is almost certain that increased investigation will result in a 'higher low-balling of how bad things are'. Even the incredibly frightening most recent IPCC Special Reports regarding Climate Change impacts on Oceans and Land could be understating the severity of the future impacts.

Compromising expanded awareness and improved understanding of climate science has not been helpful at all, from the perspective of the future generations. But nobody 'has to look at things that way' these days do they? - which is the real problem, especially when leaders don't have to see how unsustainable and harmful their choices actually are.

It is correct to understand that some people will rigidly dig-in when faced with an attempt to correct something they developed a liking for believing. But some people are open to continued learning, even as they get older.

The future of humanity requires Sustainable Development, the sooner the better, no matter how angry that makes the 'learning resistant'.

The future will only be better without the 'learning resistant'.

The 'learning and correction resistant' who fight against any of the pursuits of Sustainable Development corrections need to understand that their harmfulness will not be missed by Others. And their collective fading into impotent angrier irrelevance will be an improvement for global society and the future of humanity. Their lack of significant impact on Others would be a welcome improvement. I would prefer that they choose to learn to be more helpful, less harmful, and have their impacts be more welcomed and sustainably admired by Others.

Once a person's basic needs are met, any improvement of their circumstance increases their ability to be helpful to Others. The choice is theirs to make. Hopefully more of them will resolve to become more helpful, less harmful, people.

The never-ending RCP8.5 debate

Nick Palmer at 02:07 AM on 3 January, 2020

Michael - it's getting tedious hearing your defence of extremist views. Yo just repeatedly used then term 'lowballing' which shows you do not have a good grasp of the science. The figures from the IPCC represent MIDBALLING, being the most likely figures. Lowballing would be using the figures, again least likely, at the other end of the probability graph.

If you havent seen the clear evidence from psychology that overstating risks not only turns people off, but reduces the credibility of the 'consensus' middle ground of science in the publics' eye then you need to read a bit wider.

Most people, if they have memories, have seen extremist science predictions - or rather how the media report such predictions - fail before. The textbook example is that of Paul R. Ehrlich who famously, in 1968 wrote a book and the original edition of The Population Bomb began with this statement: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate ..."[20] Ehrlich argued that the human population was too great, and that while the extent of disaster could be mitigated, humanity could not prevent severe famines, the spread of disease, social unrest, and other negative consequences of overpopulation."

I think you will find that although he was a top person in his field at the time he was essentially completely wrong. The inheritors of his mantle today are such as Guy McPherson, Pete Wadhams, Beckwith, Kevin Anderson, Carana, Scribbler etc who all take the far-end-of-the-probability-graph most unlikely forecasts and, in their public interviews, talk as if the least likely is pretty certain. It's just not scientifically valid to do that.

Alley, of course, is a top notch scientist but people have to remember that he is speaking as a scientist using very precise language which unfortunately can be very prone to misintrepretation when reported on by interviewers of lesser scientific appreciation.

Similarly the Hallam of E.R. activist types who spout extremist definitive statements such as "six billion people will die as a result of climate change in coming decades" need to be told to shut up because they are are seriously damaging the credibility of the actual climate science in the public arena.

Ice age predicted in the 70s

MA Rodger at 23:56 PM on 26 December, 2019

Dave Evans @84,

The Wattsupian nonsense from Nov 2018 you ask about doesn't appear to have been de-bunked but the major slight-of-hand employed by the denialist-&-nonsense-author Angus MacFarlane has been de-bunked by SkS.

The Nov 2018 nonsense purports to itself de-bunk Peterson et al (2008) which is the main evidence base for the OP above. [The co-authors seem to have been overlooked by the OP above who call it Peterson 2008.] In directly challenging Peterson et al, the Wattsupian denier reclasifies 20% of the surveyed papers cited by Peterson et al (14 of the 66 re-assessed with 5 Peterson et al citations not assessed) and thus attempts to convert the result from 7 'cooling', 20 'neutral' and 44 'warming' into 16 'cooling', 19 'neutral' and 36 'warming'. This is not greating different and certainly does not support the contention that there was a scientific global cooling concensus during the 1970s.

To provide more fire-power, the Wattsupian denilaist adds extra citations to the survey - two which he found for himself (again not a level of evidence that would change the Peterson et al result) and an additional 117 papers gleaned from an earlier denialist attempt to debunk Peterson et al. It is only with this extra denialist fire-power from 2016 that anything like the number of citations can be obtained to overcome the Peterson et al result. This 2016 nonsense has been debunked in a two-park SkS post here & here.

The general nonsense in this 2016 denialist blather is possible best summed up by the denialistical use of the 1974 CIA document which considers the global food supply and within this considers climate as potentially a major factor. Global cooling is presented as a potential increase in risk to an adequate global food supply. There is no 'consensus' being waved that global cooling is expected. Instead they cite HH Lamb but ignore Lamb's view at that time in the mid-1970s that "On balance, the effects of increased carbon dioxide on climate is almost certainly in the direction of warming but is probably much smaller than the estimates which have commonly been accepted." As this may sound itself a little 'denialist' to modern ears, I should all that the 1977 book containing this quote had added into its 1984 preface:-

"It is to be noted here that there is no necessary contradiction between forecast expectations of (a) some renewed (or continuation of) slight cooling of world climate for some years to come, e.g. from volcanic or solar activity variations; (b) an abrupt warming due to the effect of increasing carbon dioxide, lasting some centuries until fossil fuels are exhausted and a while thereafter; and this followed in turn by (c) a glaciation lasting (like the previous ones) for many thousands of years.” [my bold]

The evidence-base for the CIA document is set out in its Annex II is based on the work of one scientist, Reid Bryson who did continue to find it beyond his abilities to accept the idea of AGW as a problem that needed tackling. So even though the 1974 CIA document runs with global cooling, a worst-case scenario, there is no scientific consensus backing it up.

The other study cited by the 2016 nonsense is Stewart & Glantz (1985) which talks of an emerging AGW-warming consensus but itself analyses the conclusions of a 1978 study on climate projection to the year 2000. This 1978 study would presumably have been advised by any 'cooling' concensus had such a thing existed in the mid-1970s. So their conclusions will be of interest:-

"The derived climate scenarios manifest a broad range of perceptions about possible temperature trends to the end of this century, but suggest as most likely a climate resembling the average for the past 30 years.- Collectively, the respondents tended to anticipate a slight global warming rather than a cooling. More specifically, their assessments pointed toward only one chance in five that, changes in average global temperatures will fall outside the range of -0.3°C to +0.6°C, although any temperature change was generally perceived as-being amplified in the higher latitudes of both hemiipheres."

So here the 1970s view was more towards 'warming' than 'cooling' although I note the 'warming' opinion prevailed as warming 1975-2000 was +0.5°C.

And today we see nothing but blather in that Nov 2018 Wattsupian whittering. It is ever thus there on the remote planetoid Wattsupia.

There is no consensus

MA Rodger at 21:16 PM on 19 December, 2019

PatrickSS @862,

You present three names in response to my request @858 for the scientists you tell us "think that doubling CO2 will raise the world temp by about 1C," a position you appear to set as equal in importance to "those who think that doubling CO2 will raise the world temp by about 3C." It's not much of a list. Do note that two of these are not climatologists and further, I do not see that any of them present substantive reasons to support their bold claims. This is evidently not two sets of scientists arguing. It is sadly science under attack from a handful of swivel-eyed lunatics.

In support of my own rather bold statement, I would share with you my view of the one climatologist you name - the veteran climate denier Richard Lindzen. He has been at this game so long that he has lost entirely his grasp on the science he is supposed to be practising and now resorts to bare-faced-lies/deluded-foolishness [delete as applicable]. He has certainly ventured far beyond the science of climatology with his nonsense. See his 2017 version here and tick off the numerous examples of untruth he presents. (And to keep us on-topic, note his first attempt to refute AGW is "The 97 Percent Meme".)

I note you cite Dickie Lindzen when you say "Increasing CO2 causes the IR to be emitted at slightly greater altitude. This warms the surface because the temperature at which the emission takes place is the same, so when the lower atmosphere is chaotically mixed the air reaching the surface is hotter (because it gets compressed as it comes down)." I am not sure where Lindzen explaining this mechanism but the way you phrase it is subject to vast misinterpretation.

You add that Judy Curry has had difficulty getting published yet if she has anything worth publishing she only has to post it on her website to get it into the scientific/public domain. Yet there is complete absence of any substantive comtribution from Curry, an absence that speaks volumes.

@862 you say you do not feel your "main argument" has not be "really engaged." You appear to be arguing that the scientific view of AGW is not truly reflected in the 97% consensus and specifically that Verheggen et al (2014) is 'obviously not' fairly summarised by the 91% value. I find this difficult to accept. Perhaps we are reading a different paper.

There is no consensus

MA Rodger at 03:14 AM on 16 December, 2019

PatrickSS @856,

You say that there is "an argument between the people who think that doubling CO2 will raise the world temp by about 1C ... and those who think that doubling CO2 will raise the world temp by about 3C ..." Do you consider the folk saying that Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (from 2 x CO2) is about +1.0ºC to be more than just a few contrarians and that their supporting evidence is well-founded? And if you do consider them to be thus, providing a serious scientific position, perhaps you should name their leading members so their position within the 'consensus' can be properly adjudged along with showing how numerous they are and how well-founded their arguments.

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