Cook, John
i broke this page; he's ok
MERI OK
SEE 97% 2013
RED TEAM DOE BS STUDY CURRY ZELDIN DECAPITATION STRIKE TRAVIS FISHER
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COOK OCT 2019 ORESKES SUPRAN MAIBACH...
J Cook — Climate denial arguments can be summarized by the five techniques of science denial (summarized with the acronym FLICC): fake experts, logical fallacies ...Read more
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heritage BS:
A common claim among proponents of action on climate change is that the overwhelming majority of climatologists agree on global warming science. One commonly cited statistic is that 97 percent of climatologists agree on global warming. This 97 percent number is recited and embellished by politicians and environmental activist organizations pushing to decarbonize America and the world’s energy sector. In a 2014 commencement speech at Boston College, Secretary of StateJohn Kerry said, “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.”[[2]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn2) This is, in fact, not the case.
The figure comes from a 2013 Cook et al. study in Environmental Research Letters that examines the abstracts of nearly 12,000 academic papers on climate change and global warming between 1991–2011. Of those papers, 66.4 percent expressed no opinion on anthropogenic warming, 32.6 percent “endorsed” anthropogenic warming, 0.7 percent rejected anthropogenic warming, and 0.3 percent were unsure of the cause.[[3]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn3) Of the 33.6 percent expressing an opinion on man-made global warming, “97.1 percent endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”[[4]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn4) Importantly, the claim says nothing about urgency or danger.
Cook’s paper was the subject of much criticism. Richard Tol, a professor at the University of Sussex, warned that “[t]his claim, frequently repeated in debates about climate policy, does not stand. A trend in composition is mistaken for a trend in endorsement. Reported results are inconsistent and biased. The sample is not representative and contains many irrelevant papers. Overall, data quality is low.”[[5]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn5)David R. Legates,former director of University of Delaware’s Center for Climatic Research, along with three other researchers, analyzed the same set of papers in the Cook study. They found that a mere 0.3 percent of all papers, or 1 percent of the 4,014 papers expressing an opinion on the matter, claim that the majority of warming since 1950 is man-made.[[6]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn6)
Further, the Cook et al. study is misleading as to what there is consensus on and glosses over major points of uncertainty and disagreement in the scientific community.To be clear, Cook et al. do not attempt to quantify how much global warming is man-made, or even say that man-made emissions contribute to the majority of global warming. The specific or even generalized amount of warming caused by anthropogenic emissions, according to Cook’s study, is undetermined. Furthermore, the search terms Cook used to aggregate the climate papers excluderesearch papers from climate “skeptics,” such as MIT atmospheric physicist and former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contributor Dr. Richard Lindzen.[[7]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn7)
The 97 percent statistic is nothing more than a false talking point; no overwhelming consensus exists among climatologists on the magnitude of future warming or on the urgency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Biases in Climate Research.There is increasing concern that climate science and scientific reviews are no longer truly independent. The state of climate science should be concerning to everyone, regardless of where scientific evidence leads and how policymakers choose to act on scientific knowledge.
The IPCChas had a powerful role in defining the scientific and political conversation and conclusions about global warming, especially through its guide for policymakers. Itsprematurely declared “consensus” that global warming is dangerous, accelerating, and instigated by carbon dioxide (CO2) has had a far-reaching influence, conflating scientific research with certain economic, energy, agricultural, and social policies. Many scientists and scientific institutions consequently have become quasi-political lobbies.[[8]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn8)
The U.S. is not insulated from the political biasing of climate science; in fact, it actively contributes to it. U.S. taxpayers help fund the IPCC, having contributed $10 million in 2015,[[9]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn9) in addition to the $22 billion spent within federal agencies.[[10]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn10) Rather than fostering scientific discovery in a field that is a mere few decades old, the U.S. government instead appears to express bias in funding science that supports federal climate policies.[[11]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn11) And while there has been relatively little comprehensive study into the government’s potential conflict of interest, there have been numerous personal reports of government bias in climate research.As Dr. Judith Curry, climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences of the Georgia Institute of Technology, recently testified before Congress:
I recently received [an e-mail] from a scientist employed at NASA: “I was at a small meeting of NASA-affiliated scientists and was told by our top manager that he was told by his NASA boss that we should not try to publish papers contrary to the current global warming claims, because he (the NASA boss) would then have a headache countering the ‘undesirable’ publicity.”[[12]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn12)
In addition, there have been high profile efforts to stifle non-government research that challenges global-warming catastrophism. For instance, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D–RI) proposed criminal investigations into scientists and funding organizations for what he and others deemed “a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead the American people” on climate science.[[13]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn13)
Frequently avoiding discussion on the merits of the science, critics of skeptics attempt, instead, to discredit the speaker.[[14]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn14) Some scientists who were otherwise well-respected in the international scientific community have faced incredible pressure directed at their character rather than the quality of their science. For instance, Professor Lennart Bengsston, acclaimed Swedish meteorologist,gave some concerning reasons for his resignation just weeks after joining the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF):
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lone dissent on p1 ggl 919:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/uhenergy/2016/12/14/fact-checking-the-97-consensus-on-anthropogenic-climate-change/#1fb5a5731157
no lnx grafs
211,727 viewsDec 14, 2016, 02:01pm
Fact Checking The Claim Of 97% Consensus On Anthropogenic Climate Change
University of Houston Energy Fellows
University of Houston Energy Fellows Contributor
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POST WRITTEN BY
Earl J. Ritchie, Lecturer, Department of Construction Management
Earl J. Ritchie, Lecturer, Department of Construction Management
The claim that there is a 97% consensus among scientists that humans are the cause of global warming is widely made in climate change literature and by political figures. It has been heavily publicized, often in the form of pie charts, as illustrated by this figure from the Consensus Project.
(Graph by The Consensus Project)
(Graph by The Consensus Project)
The 97% figure has been disputed and vigorously defended, with emotional arguments and counterarguments published in a number of papers. Although the degree of consensus is only one of several arguments for anthropogenic climate change – the statements of professional societies and evidence presented in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are others – there is data to suggest that support is lower. In this post, I attempt to determine whether the 97% consensus is fact or fiction.
[Today In: Business]
The 97% number was popularized by two articles, the first by Naomi Oreskes, now Professor of Science History and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, and the second by a group of authors led by John Cook, the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland. Both papers were based on analyses of earlier publications. Other analyses and surveys arrive at different, often lower, numbers depending in part on how support for the concept was defined and on the population surveyed.
This public discussion was started by Oreskes’ brief 2004 article, which included an analysis of 928 papers containing the keywords “global climate change.” The article says “none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position” of anthropogenic global warming. Although this article makes no claim to a specific number, it is routinely described as indicating 100% agreement and used as support for the 97% figure.
In a 2007 book chapter, Oreskes infers that the lack of expressed dissent “demonstrates that any remaining professional dissent is now exceedingly minor.”The chapter revealed that there were about 235 papers in the 2004 article, or 25%, that endorsed the position. An additional 50% were interpreted to have implicitly endorsed, primarily on the basis that they discussed evaluation of impacts. Authors addressing impacts might believe that the Earth is warming without believing it is anthropogenic. In the article, Oreskes said some authors she counted "might believe that current climate change is natural." It is impossible to tell from this analysis how many actually believed it. On that basis, I find that this study does not support the 97% number.
The most influential and most debated article was the 2013 paper by Cook, et al., which popularized the 97% figure. The authors used methodology similar to Oreskes but based their analysis on abstracts rather than full content. I do not intend to reopen the debate over this paper. Instead, let’s consider it along with some of the numerous other surveys available.
Reviews of published surveys were published in 2016 by Cook and his collaborators and by Richard S. J. Tol, Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex.The 2016 Cook paper, which reviews 14 published analyses and includes among its authors Oreskes and several authors of the papers shown in the chart below, concludes that the scientific consensus “is robust, with a range of 90%–100% depending on the exact question, timing and sampling methodology.” The chart shows the post-2000 opinions summarized in Table 1 of the paper. Dates given are those of the survey, not the publication date. I’ve added a 2016 survey of meteorologists from George Mason University and omitted the Oreskes article.
The classification of publishing and non-publishing is that used by Cook and his collaborators. These categories are intended to be measures of how active the scientists in the sample analyzed have been in writing peer-reviewed articles on climate change. Because of different methodology, that information is not available in all of the surveys. The categorization should be considered an approximation. The chart shows that over half the surveys in the publishing category and all the surveys in the non-publishing category are below 97%.
Scientists Opinions of Human-Caused Global Warming
(Graph by IOPScience)
Cook is careful to describe his 2013 study results as being based on “climate experts.” Political figures and the popular press are not so careful. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have repeatedly characterized it as 97% of scientists. Kerry has gone so far as to say that “97 percent of peer-reviewed climate studies confirm that climate change is happening and that human activity is largely responsible.” This is patently wrong, since the Cook study and others showed that the majority of papers take no position. One does not expect nuance in political speeches, and the authors of scientific papers cannot be held responsible for the statements of politicians and the media.
Given these results, it is clear that support among scientists for human-caused climate change is below 97%. Most studies including specialties other than climatologists find support in the range of 80% to 90%. The 97% consensus of scientists, when used without limitation to climate scientists, is false.
In the strict sense, the 97% consensus is false, even when limited to climate scientists. The 2016 Cook review found the consensus to be “shared by 90%–100% of publishing climate scientists.” One survey found it to be 84%. Continuing to claim 97% support is deceptive. I find the 97% consensus of climate scientists to be overstated.
An important consideration in this discussion is that we are attempting to define a single number to represent a range of opinions which have many nuances. To begin with, as Oreskes says, “often it is challenging to determine exactly what the authors of the paper[s] do think about global climate change.” In addition, published surveys vary in methodology. They do not ask the same questions in the same format, are collected by different sampling methods, and are rated by different individuals who may have biases. These issues are much discussed in the literature on climate change, including in the articles discussed here.
The range of opinions and the many factors affecting belief in anthropogenic climate change cannot be covered here. The variety of opinion can be illustrated by one graph from the 2013 repeat of the Bray and von Storch survey showing the degree of belief that recent or future climate change is due to or will be caused by human activity. A value of 1 indicates not convinced and a value of 7 is very much convinced. The top three values add to 81%, roughly in the range of several other surveys.
A survey of the perceptions of climate scientists 2013 (Graph by Dennis Bray & Hans von Storch)
A survey of the perceptions of climate scientists 2013 (Graph by Dennis Bray & Hans von Storch)
Even though belief is clearly below 97%, support over 80% is strong consensus. Would a lower level of consensus convince anyone concerned about anthropogenic global warming to abandon their views and advocate unrestricted burning of fossil fuels? I think not. Even the 2016 Cook paper says “From a broader perspective, it doesn’t matter if the consensus number is 90% or 100%.”
Despite the difficulty in defining a precise number and the opinion that the exact number is not important, 97% continues to be widely publicized and defended. One might ask why 97% is important. Perhaps it’s because 97% has marketing value. It sounds precise and says that only 3% disagree. By implication, that small number who disagree must be out of the mainstream: cranks, chronic naysayers, or shills of the fossil fuel industry. They are frequently described as a “tiny minority.” It’s not as easy to discount dissenters if the number is 10 or 15 percent.
The conclusions of the IPCC are the other most often cited support for anthropogenic climate change. These conclusions are consensus results of a committee with thousands of contributors. Although this is often viewed as a monolithic conclusion, the nature of committee processes makes it virtually certain that there are varying degrees of agreement, similar to what was shown in the Bray and von Storch survey. The Union of Concerned Scientists says of the IPCC process “it would be clearly unrealistic to aim for unanimous agreement on every aspect of the report.” Perhaps this is a subject for another day.
Earl J. Ritchie is a retired energy executive and teaches a course on the oil and gas industry at the University of Houston. He has 35 years’ experience in the industry. He started as a geophysicist with Mobil Oil and subsequently worked in a variety of management and technical positions with several independent exploration and production companies. Ritchie retired as Vice President and General Manager of the offshore division of EOG Resources in 2007. Prior to his experience in the oil industry, he served at the US Air Force Special Weapons Center, providing geologic and geophysical support to nuclear research activities.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2016/04/14/new-meta-study-confirms-consensus-97-publishing-climate-scientists-agree-we-causing-global-warming
By John Cook, The University of Queensland
When we published a paper in 2013 finding 97% scientific consensus on human-caused global warming, what surprised me was how surprised everyone was.
Ours wasn’t the first study to find such a scientific consensus. Nor was it the second. Nor were we the last.
Nevertheless, no-one I spoke to was aware of the existing research into such a consensus. Rather, the public thought there was a 50:50 debate among scientists on the basic question of whether human activity was causing global warming.
This lack of awareness is reflected in a recent pronouncement by Senator Ted Cruz (currently competing with Donald Trump in the Republican primaries), who
: The stat about the 97% of scientists is based on one discredited study.
Why is a US Senator running for President attacking University of Queensland research on scientific agreement? Cruz’s comments are the latest episode in a decades-long campaign to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on climate change.
Back in 2002, a Republican pollster advised conservatives to attack the consensus in order to win the public debate about climate policy. Conservatives complied. In conservative opinion pieces about climate change from 2007 to 2010, their number one argument was “there is no scientific consensus on climate change.”
Recent psychological research has shown that the persistent campaign to confuse the public about scientific agreement has significant societal consequences. Public perception of consensus has been shown to be a “gateway belief,” influencing a range of other climate attitudes and beliefs.
People’s awareness of the scientific consensus affects their acceptance of climate change, and their support for climate action.
The psychological importance of perceived consensus underscores why communicating the 97% consensus is important. Consensus messaging has been shown empirically to increase acceptance of climate change.
And, crucially, it’s most effective on those who are most likely to reject climate science: political conservatives.
In other words, consensus messaging has a neutralising effect, which is especially important given the highly polarised nature of the public debate about climate change.
Expert agreement
Consequently, social scientists have urged climate scientists to communicate the scientific consensus, countering the misconception that they are still divided about human-caused global warming.
But how do you counter the myth that the 97% consensus is based on a single study?
One way is to bring together the authors of the leading consensus papers to synthesise all the existing research: a meta-study of meta-studies. We did exactly that, with a new study published in Environmental Research Letters featuring authors from seven of the leading studies into the scientific consensus on climate change.
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I’m Going to Climate Denial School: My First Week Inside the Science of Anti-Science
A new online course takes on the climate deniers. Here's what I learned in Week One.
By Lindsay Abrams / Salon April 29, 2015
Tuesday, for me and some ten thousand classmates, was the first day of climate denial school.
Or, should I say, anti-climate denial school. We’d all signed up for Denial101x, a new, six-week MOOC (that’s “massive open online course,” for all you education luddites) aimed at making sense of this whole phenomenon — and at giving us the tools to fight deniers, so that we can all get on with fighting climate change itself.
Our professor is John Cook, the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland and the founder of Skeptical Science, which over the past two years has been an invaluable resources for me, a newbie debunker of deniers.
Of course, there’s always more to learn. As a student, Cook told me via email, I can expect to leave the course with “a better understanding what’s happening to our climate, able to identify the techniques used to distort the science and be able to debunk misinformation.” That’s a great thing for a climate blogger, as well as — and this is really the point — for any concerned citizen of the world who wants to understand the truth about climate science for themselves.
The course doesn’t waste time wringing its hands over whether or not to call deniers “deniers” — a true skeptic, Cook explains in his welcome video, “doesn’t come to a conclusion until they’ve considered the evidence,” while “someone who denies well-established science comes to a conclusion first, and then discounts any evidence that conflicts with their beliefs.” But it is interested in whyclimate deniers believe the things they do. That’s because in order to effectively debunk climate denier myths, Cook told me, it’s important first to understand the psychology behind them — and to understand how and why they’re so good at casting doubt on the scientific consensus.
That, incidentally, was the theme of our first lesson. I’d recommend anyone who’s interested to sign up for themselves (it’s free, and only requires one to two hours of your time for its six-week run), but here are a few highlights from day one:
-The “scientific consensus” is a term that’s bandied around a lot as a shortcut for shooting down deniers, but it’s even more well-established than many perhaps realize. After three short videos describing the consensus of evidence, scientists and papers, guest lecturer Peter Jacobs, a graduate student in Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University, explains how we know when a consensus is truly knowledge-based. It needs, he explains, to meet three conditions: a consilience of evidence, meaning different, independent lines of evidence all pointing toward the same conclusion; social calibration, meaning everyone establishing that evidence relies on the same basic concepts, like global temperature, and uses the same, rigorous scientific method; and social diversity, meaning that different groups, from different backgrounds, are all on the same page. Can you guess which “controversial” scientific theory meets all of those conditions?...
ENVIRONMENT
I’m Going to Climate Denial School: My First Week Inside the Science of Anti-Science
A new online course takes on the climate deniers. Here's what I learned in Week One.
By Lindsay Abrams / SalonApril 29, 2015
69 COMMENTS
Tuesday, for me and some ten thousand classmates, was the first day of climate denial school.
Or, should I say, anti-climate denial school. We’d all signed up for Denial101x, a new, six-week MOOC (that’s “massive open online course,” for all you education luddites) aimed at making sense of this whole phenomenon — and at giving us the tools to fight deniers, so that we can all get on with fighting climate change itself.
Our professor is John Cook, the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland and the founder of Skeptical Science, which over the past two years has been an invaluable resources for me, a newbie debunker of deniers.
Of course, there’s always more to learn. As a student, Cook told me via email, I can expect to leave the course with “a better understanding what’s happening to our climate, able to identify the techniques used to distort the science and be able to debunk misinformation.” That’s a great thing for a climate blogger, as well as — and this is really the point — for any concerned citizen of the world who wants to understand the truth about climate science for themselves.
The course doesn’t waste time wringing its hands over whether or not to call deniers “deniers” — a true skeptic, Cook explains in his welcome video, “doesn’t come to a conclusion until they’ve considered the evidence,” while “someone who denies well-established science comes to a conclusion first, and then discounts any evidence that conflicts with their beliefs.” But it is interested in whyclimate deniers believe the things they do. That’s because in order to effectively debunk climate denier myths, Cook told me, it’s important first to understand the psychology behind them — and to understand how and why they’re so good at casting doubt on the scientific consensus.
That, incidentally, was the theme of our first lesson. I’d recommend anyone who’s interested to sign up for themselves (it’s free, and only requires one to two hours of your time for its six-week run), but here are a few highlights from day one:
-The “scientific consensus” is a term that’s bandied around a lot as a shortcut for shooting down deniers, but it’s even more well-established than many perhaps realize. After three short videos describing the consensus of evidence, scientists and papers, guest lecturer Peter Jacobs, a graduate student in Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University, explains how we know when a consensus is truly knowledge-based. It needs, he explains, to meet three conditions: a consilience of evidence, meaning different, independent lines of evidence all pointing toward the same conclusion; social calibration, meaning everyone establishing that evidence relies on the same basic concepts, like global temperature, and uses the same, rigorous scientific method; and social diversity, meaning that different groups, from different backgrounds, are all on the same page. Can you guess which “controversial” scientific theory meets all of those conditions?
-People don’t just wake up one day and decide to deny the scientific consensus on climate change. There’s actually some pretty strong psychologybehind their anti-science beliefs, and a lot of it has to do with the way their political ideology informs their worldview, and thus their understanding of the facts themselves.
But politics aside, the University of Victoria’s Robert Gifford explains, our brains just didn’t evolve to grapple with long-term, global threats like climate change. And so a number of psychological barriers, or what he calls “dragons of inactions,” prevent us from responding in a way that’s commensurate to the problem: we tend to discount events that seem far away, for instance, and we tend to be overly optimistic about the risks of climate change while at the same time deeply pessimistic about our individual ability to make a difference. And then, there’s the whole matter of the “consensus gap“: the difference between the 97 percent scientific consensus, and where the public believes it is — somewhere around 50 to 60 percent. How great people believe the consensus is has a big influence on their other beliefs, like whether the support the need for climate action. And according to Gifford’s own experiments, the more Americans support “free, unregulated markets,” the larger the consensus gap.
Here’s more from Cook on how science denial comes about in practice:...[vids]
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http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/energy-environment/237502-forecast-the-facts-merchants-of-smear
his piece is in response to a Congress Blog piece by Sylvie Stein of Forecast the Facts that takes issue with O'Keefe's previous piece in the Contributors section.
Sylvie Stein's recent piece in the Congress Blog, "Don't help the merchants of doubt," tells a great deal about Stein and her organization. Stein and the authors of "Merchants of Doubt" are skilled in distortion and being practitioners of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, especially the rule to "pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."
It is telling that Stein wants her views and those of climate alarmists to be conveyed by the media, but not those of people who challenge them. What does that say about her organization's views of the Constitution and the importance of free speech to a free society? Movements to suppress free speech believe that the end justifies the means. That is unsettling.
he word "denier" has been used by some to equate skeptics of the climate orthodoxy to deniers of the Holocaust. That is shameless. Neither I nor those I associate with deny that climate change and global warming are real or that human activities impact climate. That is far different than human activities being the major cause of warming and extreme weather events like hurricanes.
Her attacks are based on "Merchants of Doubt" and an alleged "97 [percent] consensus" of scientists. That foundation shows the weakness of her case. The movie "Merchants of Doubt"is based on a book by Naomi Oreskes that defames and slanders the good names and reputations of three outstanding scientists who cannot defend themselves because they are deceased. The George C. Marshall Institute published a critique, "Clouding the Truth: A Critique of Merchants of Doubt" in 2013; another critique is "A critique of Oreskes et al. 2008." Truth and accuracy are victims of Naomi Oreskes's piece of work.
Using the "97 percent" canard typifies the tactic of repeating a lie until it is accepted. Surveys claiming the 97 percent consensus have been thoroughly refuted. The most recent survey by John Cook involved reviewing cited abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Professor David Legates and co-authors dismembered Cook's 97 percent in an article in Science and Education. They reviewed the same papers cited by Cook and found "only 41 — 0.3 percent — of the 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 (scientists?) expressing an opinion had been found to endorse" the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming.
Stein's claims that "when CO2 levels have risen, so have global temperatures" or that the world has been warming rapidly are refuted by geological history, U.S. temperature records since the end of the Little Ice Age, satellite data and the most recent warming pause. Most scientists agree that a doubling of carbon dioxide would only raise temperature about 1 degree unless there is increased climate sensitivity, which has not been demonstrated. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) keeps reducing its "estimate" of sensitivity. The real issue is sensitivity; not carbon dioxide levels.
Stein attempts to use the ocean's storage capacity to explain the warming pause since 1998. But oceanographers acknowledge that good data on ocean warming have only been available for about 20 years. So her point lacks credibility. Carl Wunsch, professor of oceanography at MIT, observes that oceans have been warming since the end of the last glaciation over 10,000 years ago and will continue to warm until the next glaciation.
Finally, Stein attempts to discredit me by allegations about funding. As Ted Koppel told former Vice President Gore when he used the same tactic on ABC's "Nightline": "The measure of good science is neither the politics of the scientist nor the people with whom the scientist associates. It is the immersion of hypotheses into the acid of truth. That's the hard way to do it, but it's the only way that works." The Marshall Institute's publications are publicly available and have stood the test of time.
Stein needs to be reminded of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's (D-N.Y.) admonition that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts." Stein is very short on facts.
O'Keefe is CEO of the George C. Marshall Institute and president of Solutions Consulting, Inc.
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desmog
One of the most consistent of all the attacks from climate science sceptics and deniers is the one which tries to convince the public that expert scientists are divided on the causes of climate change.
Those attacks have come from ideologically motivated think tanks and the fossil fuel industry, often working together. Only last week, the Wall Street Journal published a polemic to try and mislead the public that a consensus does not exist.
In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute was developing a campaign with the explicit aim of convincing the public that “uncertainties” existed in the science of climate change and its causes.
In 2002, Republican pollster Frank Luntz wrote that: “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.”
Several studies have surveyed the views of climate science experts or the scientific literature and have come to the same conclusions — the number of studies and the number of scientists who reject the fact that humans are causing climate change remains vanishingly small.
The latest and most high profile study to survey the scientific literature was led by John Cook, of the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute and founder of the Skeptical Science website, and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters in May 2013.
Cook et al analysed close to 12,000 global warming studies from 1991 to 2011 to see how many accepted or rejected the fact that human activities are causing climate change. The researchers also asked scientists themselves to look at their own papers and confirm whether they endorsed the scientific consensus.
The central finding, reported widely and even Tweeted by Barack Obama’s campaign team, was that 97 percent of the scientific papers on climate change found that humans were causing it.
Since that study was published, Professor Richard Tol, an economist from the University of Sussex, has been planning to attack Cook’s paper.