woodchip wrote:
So you are saying a sitting professor who once headed the Climatic Research Dept is a hack. Have you headed up anything? As to your assertions on how Legates obtained his research sounds an awful like like slick doing spin control. Unless you can back up anything what you said here, I consider you just another brainwashed warmer trying desperately to defend his position.
Anyone who attaches his name to a statement like the above linked is not a scientist. Period. It is anti-science to its core. The man is a member of
multiple think tanks which receive funding from large oil corporations. Hell, at one point the then-governor of Delaware basically told him, "Yeah stop using your official title on this nonsense." I don't necessarily agree with the governor's approach, but it's certainly telling.
As for the backing, let's look at
Cook's own response to his paper's detractors, since it contains some handy links. I don't have access to the full text of Legates's paper, but one of his co-authors originally
made a blog post with the same argument. The 0.3% figure they arrived at was by severely narrowing their criteria to papers that made very specific quantitative statements regarding global warming. They then proceeded to divide that limited number of papers by
every single paper examined in the study, which is in every way fraudulent considering that Cook's 97% figure came from only considering those papers that took a definitive conclusion on either side of the issue. What's more, Cook himself notes that the goal of his group's paper was never to limit themselves to papers making those specific quantitative claims, which renders Legates and his group's response even more foolish.
Also of note from Cook's site are how a few of the prominent scientists saying they were "mistakenly included" in the 97% figure were, in truth, actually considered part of the other 3% or weren't even included in the survey data. Oh, and to alleviate any doubt about his paper's methodologies, here's his
self-rating data submitted by scientists whose papers were reviewed in the study. Yup, same 97% figure.
I looked and unless you found some hidden questions or that I'm blinder than a bat...the questions only go to19b. So if I'm right then you wasted a lot of money on a degree that can't help you number questions correctly. If you want to look at questions try number:
18a where the question of co2 follows temp rise, or anthro co2 is smaller than natural co2. What are the respondents percentage? Try around 40% agree. Nowhere near overwhelming concensus. I suggest you read the charts closer instead of skim reading like you do here.
I will apologize for this part at least, as I was looking through multiple survey papers, and the questions to which I was referring were from the
Bray and von Storch survey from 2008, which I'd say are extremely definitive. But let's take another look at the PBL Netherlands survey, then: right there in the first question, about 80% of respondents attribute at least some fraction of global warming to anthropogenic causes. Question 1a.2 shows a stronger confidence amongst scientists with more experience in the field. Question 1b shows more confidence by the respondents who feel that anthropogenic warming is responsible for more than 50% of temperature increase than those who feel that it is responsible for less than 50%. In 3a, greenhouse gases are recognized as by far the most significant contributor to the warming over the past 150 years. Down to question 12, a whopping 92% of survey respondents are at least somewhat concerned about climate change as a global problem. Down to the questions you noted, the question in 18a about relative amounts of CO2 release makes absolutely no statement about the relative impacts of said releases, and in fact it doesn't really matter: if we run with the hypothesis that natural cycles are capable of dealing with natural CO2 releases in a reasonably-balanced manner, this in no way implies that said cycles can handle an additional large volume of anthropogenic releases. (The statement following that graph also notes that said question was deemed "unclear" by many survey respondents.) Also, in question 18b, over 80% of the respondents who stated that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are less than natural emissions still feel that this can be reconciled with anthropogenic CO2 being the main driver of climate change since pre-industrial times. As is a disturbing habit of yours, you're cherry-picking one small element of data out of a source that supports your pre-existing notions, misinterpreting it to bolster your position, and summarily ignoring the surrounding context which neatly undermines your original belief. As the kids say today, get good.
Yet you have difficulty understanding the graphs in the PBL study. Clearly it is not all scientists who agree on causation. The point of this exercise was to show that the whole of the science world is not in lockstep on the global warming issue. Many have questions and many downright do not agree. I see you have taken to using slicks term of "outliers" to down play the relevance of something. By doing so you represent everything wrong with scientists who try to prove a ideology instead of asking opposing questions. Hopefully you are not actively working as a physicist.
Lockstep? Of course not. This will never happen, nor should it. (Hell, there is still a frightening percentage of people out there who firmly believe that the Earth is flat, and will go through all sorts of illogical contortions to convince you as much.) But as has been shown definitively, on the question of anthropogenic global warming, the legitimate opposition does not even resemble "many." Again, you may keep trying to side-step it, but there is not a
single prominent national or international scientific body with a connection to climate that has not come down firmly in support of anthropogenic global warming.
And as it happens, I'm currently working as a teacher, and if I can get through nothing else to my kids, I hope I can show them how to properly evaluate evidence and draw conclusions. So long as they don't turn out making your same egregious mistakes, I feel like I've at least done a little bit of good.
