Jose L. Duarte
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Comment on Verheggen et al.; climate consensus research

2/13/2015

18 Comments

 

Here's my recent Comment on Verheggen et al. in Environmental Science & Technology. 

Their core argument in their Reply is that all the non-climate scientists who were invited to participate in this survey because of their climate-related papers – all the psychologists, sociologists, Marxists, economists, palladium experts, etc. – would deny having done any climate-related work, and would thus not be a significant portion of the responses to the survey. This is nonsensical and a waste of everyone's time.

Background: The authors don't know who is in their data, due to inadequacies in their design. That's the key fact that frames this issue.

1) We don't know who is in this data.

2) We know vast numbers of non-climate scientists were invited.

3) We don't know the actual results of this study. That is, we don't know the results that are strictly based on qualified experts – climate scientists. They should just retract, or the journal should. We might need to deploy arms-reach retraction buttons to grease the wheels for pro-science decisions, for reasons I explain below.

The larger issue here is that there is likely nothing happening in science right now that is of lower quality than climate consensus research. It's a disaster. Much of the research doesn't meet anyone's standards for science. It's pre-scientific. Many of these studies are politically motivated junk that we couldn't possibly draw any inferences from.

The junk studies report the highest consensus figures. They're inflating the consensus, probably distorting people's estimates of certainty, given the nature of human minds and how "97%" might be processed. (There is no 97%. That was a scam, as I'll explain below.)

This is a terrible distraction, because it casts doubt on the whole premise of a climate consensus, and it risks enormous harm to the reputation and standing of science in the public mind. Skeptics see this garbage and find it satisfying and convenient for their prior commitments to climate skepticism. They may not pay attention to the valid studies that show a consensus, albeit a smaller one. It unreasonable to expect the general public to wade through all the junk and find the good stuff.

There are valid studies. There is almost certainly a consensus in climate science with respect to human-caused warming. It's not as though anyone has done a survey and reported a 40% consensus or anything like that. There are no disconfirming findings, to my knowledge. Every survey reports a consensus well north of 50%.

The junk studies started with Oreskes (2004) and mimic her methods. That study is not a study. It's a one-page paper whose methods section is a paragraph or two, that offers no detail or validation of its methods. We don't even know how these subjective ratings of abstracts were conducted, or by whom. I'm slowly getting my head around the idea that she did them all herself, apparently. That's very confusing, for someone to basically say, hey I read 900 abstracts, decided what they mean, and none of them disagree with human-caused warming. I'm not a climate scientist or anything, but here's my one-page paper. (Oreskes is a staunch environmentalist activist who in a recent book projects a collapse of civilization because of our anti-environment ways. Also note the incredible fallacy in demanding to see explicit disagreement with a proposition or hypothesis, and treating a lack of explicit disagreement as positive support for the hypothesis. There are several problems embedded in that bizarre supposition.)

Subjective rating is a social science method. No social scientist would ever submit the results of a subjective rating study where he alone did all the ratings and had an ideological conflict of interest with respect to the outcome.

This is all a horrible joke. Let me pause and note that I have never been more confused than I have been over the past year by all the fraud and all these bizarre junk studies. It's disorienting. This can't be what science is. Science is this precious, wondrous thing. It's arguably the best thing humans do. Political ideology is eating science alive. This collapse of integrity, the incredibly bold acts of fraud and scientific authorities' attempts to protect that fraud, the apparent lack of serious peer review and of even minimal methodological standards, this is all a disaster. Science can't be this. Politics is just killing us right now. Politics is acid on science. It always has been. But I think our era is more political than many other eras. I think the the influence of political ideology in academia is at a historic peak.

The Oreskes method includes searching climate science literature with plain English phrases like "global warming". All the ideologically driven junk studies that copied her method likewise searched on "global warming" or "global climate change". That was it. They take the results of these searches and include them all in their mystical counting rituals. This is what Verheggen et al. did.

In fact, Verheggen et al. did not even bother to uncheck the Social Science and Arts & Humanities boxes in their search. (This is the Web of Science index.)

I'm sorry, I know this is very negative, but this honestly isn't even undergraduate-level work. You could get a kid to do this. This is so awful that it's a disgrace that any of these studies were published in 21st-century scientific journals. Politics is the reason they are published. Politics is just devastating us. It's turning science into a scam.

These people had no idea how to search scientific literature. This is confusing. Did they have no training? They think climate scientists are going to commonly say "global warming" in their titles or something. This is bizarre. 21st-century scientific fields have their own technical terminology. We could never search scientific literature with casual English phrases. Climate scientists don't talk like that. They'll be talking about aerosol spectra, ENSO, and seasonal variation in CFCs.

The search these people did has extreme asymmetries in its results. Searches on casual English phrases like "global warming" will capture lots of non-climate scientists who would use less technical language – most especially activists and people who are framing their non-climate science work around warming.

The search was never validated. Searching scientific literature is a well-documented discipline, most notably as a core feature of meta-analyses. It's not a casual thing. You have to test your search. A basic way to test it would be to compare the results to known sets of climate science papers, for example from climate scientists' CVs. The Cook 97% scam conducted this same search. Look at how many papers they included by James Hansen, compared to Richard Lindzen. That study was based on counting the papers. Those people conducted a bizarre casual English search, got thousands of papers, had environmental activists who had profound conflicts of interest subjectively rate the abstracts, à la Oreskes, and then counted the papers, sorting them into their rating categories. They simply... counted... the papers. They thus arbitrarily gave some scientists over a dozen votes and other scientists zero votes. They treated these votes, these papers, as quanta of consensus.

That is something I hope we never have to deal with again. The sheer dimwittedness of this stuff scares the hell out of me. I'm not sure that we can have a civilization if people can do that and plant a 97% meme all over the world. If people can do what they did, and get the President of the United States to tout their "study", holy cow. This seems incredibly dangerous. This is like watering your crops with Gatorade. We can't do too much stuff like this and expect to have a reliable food supply, technology, hospitals, smartphones, a stable civilization. We're not going to have nice things.

Anyway, for good consensus research:

Bray and von Storch are outstanding. Their studies are real, and bear the customary marks of scientific effort.

The AMS studies are excellent, and also feature valid scientific methods. You can read their latest, July, 2014 study here.

Note that the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) only cited the junk studies in their What We Know missive. That was incredible. (I'm going to use the word incredible a lot this year.) They cherry-picked the studies that gave them the inflated, false 97% figure they apparently wanted. I couldn't believe it. They completely ignored virtually the entire body of research on the consensus. They ignored the two sources above, which are of massively higher quality than the bizarre "studies" they cited, and much more up to date. They ignore every sub-97% study. Instead, they cited Oreskes, the one-pager from 2004, as one of their three sources, along with Cook et al's bizarre counting study (which is also a fraud case, with three separate fraud acts, three different lies about their methods...unbelievable.) I doubt the AAAS membership are aware of this, would have paid a lot of attention to it. I assume someone's going to have to retract that report if they want to be considered a scientific body in the future. The report is incredibly misleading. It's simply lying to the public, inflating the consensus by citing ten-year-old one-page studies that no scientific body could ever cite. That's unconscionable, and again this behavior is killing us. AAAS is sabotaging the reputation and trustworthiness of science as a whole. I would not assume that these scandals, these politically-driven frauds, will have no impact on the public's respect for science. They know we're lying to them. Someday we might really need them to believe us.

AAAS is not some two-bit organization known for scams. They're much more serious than IOP. They're an august scientific body. When I think of august scientific bodies, I think of AAAS and the National Academy of Sciences. We're running out of august and honest scientific bodies. They're falling like dominoes to political ideology and fraud. We need to have a home, a place to go for truth, integrity, and sober science. We need a place where the average applied IQ is somewhat north of 80.


We can't run out of scientific bodies. If science has no home, no reliable non-fraudulent, non-political institutions, I think that could seriously weaken our civilization. We're nearing a point where science will be broadly associated with fraud that particularly serves left-wing political agendas. We're nearing a point where the rational knower would be well-advised to ignore what contemporary scientists say, because employing such a heuristic would lead to the most accurate set of beliefs about the world, that one's ratio of true to false beliefs would be maximized by ignoring scientists. That scenario entirely possible as an epistemic reality given our current course. Another ten or twenty years of this, and we're there. The "deniers" could end up being the rational knowers, the pro-science among us.


Note that there are some very large cases emerging right now, where the scientific consensus was wrong. There's a massive new study in Annals of Oncology by Wang, et al. that reports that second-hand smoke does not significantly increase lung cancer risk (in women.) A review in PLOS One by Yang et al. finds no link between second-hand smoke in breast cancer. The second-hand smoking case is emerging as something that might never have been well-researched. That whole issue seemed political, where people were using the political process to coerce property owners (bars, restaurants, etc.) into enacting their preferred comfort and lifestyle settings, and using the machinery of the state to enforce various prejudices against smokers, who are now corralled into holding pens hundreds of feet from building entrances.


And the Washington Post reports that the US government is poised to withdraw its warnings about cholesterol. On both second-hand smoke and cholesterol, we were sold a consensus, we were sold "Science says X"-style propositions, which are generally barbaric and take no account of where science is in our lifetimes, in our era – which is an arbitrary era – and whether the methods employed in said arbitrary era are capable of giving us a workable grasp of reality on any arbitrary issue Y, and that our scientifically sourced grasp of reality will not be mediated or shaped by political processes, the media, and the ideological and financial biases of scientists. Scientists are wrong all the time. We have to be. In a sense, it's almost part of the job, bias notwithstanding. We need to be smarter about how we understand science.

In any case, there is indeed a consensus in climate science. It's probably in the 80s though, maybe as low as the 60s for some questions. It's not very meaningful to speak of "the" consensus, since there are a number of different propositions one could pose to climate scientists, and the two sources above do a great job of posing a range of relevant propositions. What you do with that consensus up to you. There will be all sorts of philosophical, ethical, and political factors that people will reasonably apply, and there will be a host of different perspectives along those dimensions. But I don't think climate change skepticism per se is justified. I would love to be wrong.

There are new arguments and insights in my Comment below, so I encourage you to read it. To my knowledge, no one has before made the argument about mitigation studies, for example.


18 Comments
Jonathan Abbott link
2/12/2015 10:15:53 pm

Jose,

Thank you for a very good article, on a topic that greatly concerns me, too. The damage that political activists (of all colours) are doing to the integrity of science is terrible, and I fear it will be long lasting. The end result of this process is to fundamentally undermine not just technological progress but democracy itself.
I wrote a blog post on this subject a little while ago:

https://jonathanabbott99.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/politics-is-poisoning-society/

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Sheri link
2/13/2015 02:16:13 am

Excellent post. It is truly sad what is happening to science with a political take-over. Had I written a paper similar to Oreskes years ago when I was in college, I am certain my professor would have torn the paper up, tossed it in the trash and told me I needed to actual research if I wanted to pass the course. This type of thing would not have been accepted. As of late, I think climate change advocates are their own worst enemy. Those who are skeptical probably cannot do as much damage to the science as the science is doing to itself.

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Barry Woods
2/13/2015 07:34:49 pm

Most sceptics believe in the climate consensus.. ie, earth has warmed, co2 a ghg,man contributes co2, warming caused in part due to man vs natural processes, for varying opinions of how big that part is)

the activist have tried to label them otherwise, not believing earth has warmed (being ambiguous on cause), or not believeing co2 a ghg

by never defining, the object of the consensus.. the can spin in every and which way.

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Andy West link
2/14/2015 12:14:05 am

"In any case, there is indeed a consensus in climate science. It's probably in the 80s though, maybe as low as the 60s for some questions. It's not very meaningful to speak of "the" consensus, since there are a number of different propositions one could pose to climate scientists, and the two sources above do a great job of posing a range of relevant propositions. What you do with that consensus up to you. There will be all sorts of philosophical, ethical, and political factors that people will reasonably apply, and there will be a host of different perspectives along those dimensions. But I don't think climate change skepticism per se is justified. I would love to be wrong."

Barry's point is well-made. The object of the climate consensus is curiously slippy, and by some definitions would include most of the skeptics, as he points out.

Yet we have seen these kind of characteristics many times in history, which examples suggest we are asking the wrong question. What matters is not the 'size' of the consensus, which is probably not measurable anyhow, but <em>what is maintaining that consensus</em>.

Culturally enforced consensuses are more common in humans than the common cold, and all it requires to explain the public survey data and the confusion over the nature of the consensus etc, is to acknowledge that CAGW is a culture. Hence its core narrative (e.g. as expressed by the IPCC AR5 summary for policy makers), is a cultural construct, <em>not</em> a scientific truth.

The 97% myth is merely one of thousands of bias mechanisms that has grown the climate culture over decades. There is no hoax at work, only the ubiquitous social mechanisms that have driven us at least since language began. Much of the careers of very many climate scientists are embedded in the long cultural growth of CAGW.

As atmospheric scientist Judith Curry points out, understanding the climate system is a wicked problem, essentially unknowable, with or without perturbations from man. But cultures are not only able to enforce a consensus on the unknowable, it a major part of why cultures exist in the first place (super social cohesion is an advantage).

So I think you are indeed wrong. There's certainly as much need for skepticism about (at least) the 'C' in CAGW (the major narrative component), as there is for say all religious narratives, or the social cross-coalition of Eugenics and anti-semitism in 1930s Germany, or Lynsenkoism (a cultural component of Stalinism). Heck, even peer pressure in scientific elites, a <em>far</em> weaker force than a full-on culture, managed to delay the proper emergence of the theory of continental-drift / tectonics for several decades, with pretty much the entire geological establishment against it at one point, despite a six year old child could see that the east coast of South America matched the west coast of Africa.

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MikeR
2/16/2015 01:13:24 pm

I appreciate the post. However, though Bray and von Storch might be useful as a source of ideas, I don't think you can get much from their stats. 1) the survey was self-selected. 2) the response rate was low. Not too surprising, their survey was really long.
Still, I don't think there's much doubt that all sources pretty much agree that a pretty high fraction of climate scientists agree with (most of) the consensus.

Reply
Joe Duarte
2/16/2015 06:11:10 pm

All surveys are self-selected if you mean people choose whether or not to participate. Well, I suppose telephone surveys of the Gallup and Pew variety would not be self-selected, at least not to the extent that surveys of climate scientists are (there will still be people who choose not to participate when Gallup calls them.)

Self-selection will be a feature of all surveys of climate scientists. I share your concerns about low response rates, though I don't know which study you're looking at. But again this is not a problem unique to Bray and von Storch – they all have low response rates.

The low response rate is frustrating because I kind of feel like climate scientists have a responsibility to answer these surveys. This is not a small issue – it's a huge issue in modern politics, and major policies have been proposed that could impact millions or billions of people. I think we might need to do something to get them to respond, like make funding contingent on their participation in such surveys, or get universities to enforce some kind of policy, though I'm not sure how make faculty do something. In general, they're not managed. They don't have a boss. (It's a bit different in Europe.) I don't have any hypotheses about selection effects, about whether there's some systematic difference between the responders and the non-responders.

Something that's starting to worry is how we lack credible institutions and processes to deal with fraud and error in scientific publications. In particular, we have none of the controls or provisions we would need to keep politics out of these cases, or to manage the profound ideological conflicts of interest that many editors and scientific bodies have.

The private sector has much stronger mechanisms than science does. I'm very disturbed, disoriented really, by the corruption that I've encountered on the recent cases I've taken on. I feel like my implicit estimate of the base rate of corruption or of terrible people in our civilization was simply wrong. I assumed idealism was the norm in science. I assumed that people would care deal about fraud, would swing into action, politics or no politics. This is not the case. In every case, I've been met with almost complete silence from the journals and scientific bodies. This is probably a very different reality than what the public thinks science is.

That corruption might have implications for the consensus. I don't have any reason to believe that a significant number of papers have been rejected for political reasons. But the behavior at ERL was remarkable. It's going into at least one book. The behavior at Psych Science and the incredibly bold fraud committed by APS headquarters staff is going into at least two books – one by me, and one by another scientist.

Hopefully we can build clean institutions that have smart mechanisms for keeping politics out, managing ideological conflicts of interest, and extremely vigorous investigations of fraud or falsity in published work.

I don't know that anyone ever considers the base rate of fraud and falsity, and the lack of reliable and independent institutions to root out fraud and falsity, when they argue that people should just believe whatever scientists say. There is a rate of fraud and falsity at which believing the claims of contemporary scientists would simply be irrational and foolish. There isn't going to one, definitive threshold for that – there are different ways to come to a reasonable answer there, and different costs and tradeoffs for different science consumers.

I don't know of any fraud in climate science, but the behavior at some of these journals and institutions is morally revolting and worries me. There's a profound lack of the classic scientific virtues, and very obvious political bias. I think the force of politics in shaping personal identities and tribal moral communities is extraordinarily strong in our era. It doesn't have to be this way, but it simply is what we've come to.

The climate science consensus will be more convincing if climate scientists build better, more objective and honorable institutions with strong anti-fraud and anti-politics tools and processes.

I'm also starting to worry about some of the behavior of climate scientists. I don't think I understood how political Gavin Schmidt is, for example. I had become a fan of his because of some posts on RealClimate that seemed extremely intelligent and competent. But the fact that he's clearly left-wing and leaps to policy prescriptions without seeming to be aware of the philosophical and ethical assumptions underneath those prescriptions worries me. I was also appalled by the way he and others treat Judith Curry, who is clearly not driven by malice or an IQ deficit. It's as if they were raised by wolves. The way some of these people savagely attack her, and make terrible, incompetent arguments from authority and ad hominem when they do so, tells me something is wrong with t

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MikeR
2/17/2015 12:38:30 am

Yeah, well, I agree with you. I liked their survey, but it was _so_ long. And I would have written it differently, but that's just me. It would have been great to have direct questions on climate sensitivity, ECS and TCR, for instance: best guestimate, best guess at highest likely value, best guess at lowest likely value. And also a question on causes for the "pause", or if they think there is one! A question on extreme weather events, whether the respondent thinks that they have changed significantly to date. Etc. - in other words, questions on things that are the actual disagreements that I see today.

Paul Matthews link
2/17/2015 06:35:47 pm

I find it interesting and puzzling that you are very outspoken with your accusations of fraud and corruption at journals like ERL and Psych Science and you are very critical of the AAAS and other scientific institutions, and in the latest comment you also criticise Gavin Schmidt and Realclimate. Yet at the end of all this you say
"I don't think climate change skepticism per se is justified."

I have sent you my recent paper. Have you looked at the current thread denizens ii at Climate etc? It's very interesting. You will see that in many cases, having worries about RealClimate was what started people off on the road to climate skepticism. Perhaps you are on the same path. I think this is fascinating, which is why I wrote a paper about it.

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Joe Duarte
2/18/2015 03:51:44 am

The reason I don't buy skepticism is that I'm suspicious of overly convenient realities. It's just too neat, too symmetric, to be true. That's just a heuristic. I don't actually know enough about climate science to have a scientific assessment.

Reality is a complicated place. I think we have to be cautious to not bundle everything together in a neat pile. So if some climate scientists look like real jerks and are obviously extremely political, we're tempted to use that as justification for dismissing the whole package. We tie up loose ends and align our beliefs to be simple and orderly -- we don't want to be on the side of jerks, so we tell ourselves they're wrong and the whole thing is a scam or something. That's just how humans are, and here I'm drawing from science I do know.

Note that none of the fraud was in climate science. I wouldn't be able to find fraud there. I stumbled on the other frauds. They inflated the consensus and all that, but it didn't have anything to do with climate science per se.

We have a fraud problem that I guess is much bigger than I imagined. I was naive a few months ago. I thought false or fraudulent papers would have to be retracted. It had never come up before. It's clear that we lack the basic institutions, independent investigators, controls for bias and corruption, that we would need to make science serious. This is joke. This isn't what the public thinks science is. I helped companies implement Sarbanes Oxley on the IT side, and the standards in the private sector are much, much higher than science. These people are a complete disgrace. I'm only warming up, not even at phase 1 yet. These are probably the worst human beings I've ever encountered. That's partly why I tend to go slow. They confuse me.

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Joe Duarte
2/18/2015 04:18:33 am

It's also worth noting that climate change is not a political issue for me. It has no inherent policy implications. Logically, nothing has inherent policy implications. It will depend on various assumptions, political philosophy, some deep ethical questions, etc.

I think one of the deepest and more subtle forms of left-wing bias in science is the lazy assumption that science must always be evaluated for its policy implications. That assumptions is fraught with all kinds of problems, and potential harms for society. I hate seeing a policy tab on the homepage of a scientific body. That tells me they're almost certainly political, and that they are political in one specific way – left.

Conservatives would not necessarily assume that things have policy implications, except maybe the psychological harms of abortion or something like that. Libertarians would make few assumptions about policy implications. Various non-political and idiosyncratic scientists, who are common, would also probably make fewer of the assumptions that leftists make.

I also see common code for partisan left-wing politics, like "the public interest". They tend to own that term. It's incredibly arrogant and reckless of scientists to presume that a particular application of some body of scientific research is in the public interest. They don't seem to have heard of the knowledge problem and all sorts of known effects of government interventions, nor do they seem to have any kind of nuanced grasp of the range of philosophical and ethical frameworks, many of which would not grant their assumptions about the public interest (which always reduces to "what leftists want".)

A couple of months ago, I realized that these scientific bodies have publicists. It hit me like a bus. Publicists are epistemologically incompatible with science and its values. They tend to be very into subjectivist and contingent views of reality, see reality as perception-based and something that can and should be manipulated via their professional efforts. It hit me hard when I realized I was dealing with a publicist in correspondence with one institution. I had forgotten that she was publicist, and remembering it explained so much. It's so precarious for scientific bodies to have publicists. It's a decision in advance to distort the truth.

Assuming that we owe the people of 2100 a narrow band of temps and sea levels is a remarkable that requires some kind of well thought out argument. I don't see many. It's very iffy to assume we know what's best for people who aren't even alive yet and who will live in a different world than us, climate change or not. They might be better off if we maximized economic growth, policies which would conflict with mitigation. They would certainly be richer. But all this assume it's even valid and coherent to specify what's best for those people, or that we are obligated to manage their interests. That is so fraught with potential for major error and stupidity. That kind of stuff needs to be thought out much more carefully.

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MikeR
2/19/2015 02:00:50 am

Am I remembering wrong, or has the AMS survey article been modified since I last saw it? I thought it was this survey that had a chart that I remember clearly, which showed the attitudes of the respondents about climate sensitivity. It asked some question like, what is your best estimate on ECS? Then it had a very interesting graph, where most respondents fell at the median from IPCC (about 3), but something like a third to 40% were down nearer the IPCC lower limit. To me, that was very significant, as it implied that the climate sensitivity, which I think is hugely important, is not part of the "consensus".
Or did I see it somewhere else?

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MikeR
2/19/2015 02:02:07 am

Also, hardly anyone was above the IPCC estimate. That was important for me as well, since the high estimate "fat tail" is the source of most of the real disaster scenarios.

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MikeR
2/19/2015 02:08:26 am

Ah - http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es501998e
Figure 8

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Andy West link
3/1/2015 12:17:01 am

"The reason I don't buy skepticism is that I'm suspicious of overly convenient realities."

So you believe the raw reality of "no-one knows" as espoused by skeptics, essentially a consequence of Judith Curry's 'wicked problem', is more convenient that the culturally enforced consensus of "settled science says calamity is coming"?

Without any modern reference or climate science knowledge, history speaks very well to the great convenience of powerful cultural consensus, whether spawned by science, religion, or indeed past climate fears. After all, it is part of the 'job' of culture to make such consensuses.

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Andy West link
3/1/2015 12:25:25 am

P.S. which is the real heuristic here? The highly emotive "we're all doomed unless [carte blanche for host of massive policies]", or the effortful thinking around "we don't know nearly enough".

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Barry Woods
5/31/2015 09:09:41 pm

Hi Joe:

ref this:

"Note that there are some very large cases emerging right now, where the scientific consensus was wrong. There's a massive new study in Annals of Oncology by Wang, et al. that reports that second-hand smoke does not significantly increase lung cancer risk (in women.) A review in PLOS One by Yang et al. finds no link between second-hand smoke in breast cancer. The second-hand smoking case is emerging as something that might never have been well-researched. That whole issue seemed political, where people were using the political process to coerce property owners (bars, restaurants, etc.) into enacting their preferred comfort and lifestyle settings, and using the machinery of the state to enforce various prejudices against smokers, who are now corralled into holding pens hundreds of feet from building entrances."

Professor Lindzen has been smeared for years for thinking along these lines. The activist message/spin about him, he is a tobacco shill that doesn't believe that actual smoking causes cancer....


Dana (sks) does the smear here (look at the photo):
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/jan/06/climate-change-climate-change-scepticism

note this is the updated version after complaints, but even so it still misrepresents, LIndzen thinks the link between second hand smoking is tenuous, they still imply actual smoking..

just google - Richard Lindzen tobacco (or cancer)

he has been smeared for years.

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JDoherty
7/31/2015 03:56:48 pm

In considering the straits in which the practice of science finds itself, it would be a good thing to remember that while Climate Science is often an example of extraordinarily poor science, there are may examples from other fields as well, ranging from biology to cosmology. There for instance sceptics of the standard model of cosmology, seriously professional and armed with absolutely unimpeachable counter examples to common ideas such as cosmological red shift. The parallels to the problems in climate science are not just similar, but exact. From "adjustment" of data, control of research opportunities and publication venues, circular reasoning to refusal to even discuss the critical features of numerous photographs that call common theoretical assumptions into question. Even the "ride alongs" practice the same forms of misconstrual and outright lying about a sceptic's views. Not just individual sciences but science as an institution is in dire straits because the idea of understanding reality at a fundamental level has been discarded in favour of far more mundane attractions like money, social allies, and political support where a genuinely scientific granting body would ignore or reduce support in order to foster wider research.

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JohnT
1/19/2017 02:15:28 pm

When I read Verheggen my gut reaction was that they didn't like the results of the survey they themselves had constructed (i.e., < 50% agreed with their premise), so they went back and invented a subset that would yield more palatable results.

If that's what they did, it would be neither academically or intellectually honest. Obviously, one needs to start with metrics and let the data fall where they may, not invent metrics after-the-fact to serve a conclusion.

I note that you thank Verheggen for clarification of his study design. Did the original study design indicate an intention to narrow the study group to a specific amount of authorship?

I'm admittedly a layman in this field, but it seems to me inarguable that climates do change (they always have), and probable that man contributes to it, at least nominally (I add to the ocean when I spit in it). The question is quantifying the contribution to the change and determining its significance.

Of course, the thorniest question is whether anything meaningful can be done about it.

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    José L. Duarte

    Social Psychology, Scientific Validity, and Research Methods.

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