How to argue with a global warming "skeptic"

[quote=“Vay”]Hi Jotham and thanks for noticing this thread! In addition to posting the above, I hope you’ll find some time to address the list of human fingerprints on global warming on the first page.

In any case, I emailed John Cook (he’s in my Google+ friends) and asked him to address Tol’s criticism directly. Regarding your specific worry, here’s a response to a poster in the comments section of the actual SkS article announcing the publication of the study:

[quote=“Kevin C”]A ‘we don’t know’ paper would be counted as taking a position but uncertain (category 4b). A ‘less than 50%’ paper would be counted as an explicit rejection of the consensus (category 7)…

…We were cautious here, tending towards ‘no position’ in our ratings. This is confirmed by the scientists’ responses compared with ours: more than half of our ‘no position’ abstracts were rated as ‘endorsement’ by the scientists who actually wrote the papers!
A few ‘no positions’ were rated as ‘rejection’ by the authors too, but on average the scientists rated 0.6 classifications closer to endorsement than we did, on the 7-point classification scale.[/quote]

skepticalscience.com/97-percent- … -2013.html

Gosh, so they actually have categories. Wow - they’re not total idiots after all. Makes one wonder if other studies, such as:
[/quote]
Vay, Vay, Vay, you don’t get the controversy. No one is saying there aren’t categories. The problem is how they distribute papers in their categories, if that’s really accurate or reflective of their true position.

First of all, yes, I know if a paper explicitly states less than 50% certainty, that is a rejection. But few papers are going to get into that detail, it’s unnecessary. My “concern” is that people with my views, (but don’t necessarily write it explicitly in their paper) will be lumped up together with that 97% just because they make some generic statement that GHG’s cause warming, which statement I could also agree with. If I were writing a paper, I wouldn’t explicitly state my position that way because it’s unnecessary and probably totally irrelevant to the paper at hand.

That was another issue, that global warming wasn’t the main focus of many of those papers, and so authors give lip-service to the issue of global warming (not explicitly, mind you) because it’s become an issue of the day. Many of these authors will mention the issue (though the paper isn’t about global warming at all) and will be summarily grouped as endorsing it.

[strike]Your quote seems a little damning in that it says most of the papers with no position are categorized as endorsing it anyhow in the 97%.[/strike]
*Edit: Oh, never mind that, I misunderstood the quote. Now that I understand it, let me now respond more appropriately that papers with no position aren’t a big factor in this paper. It’s the majority of papers that have been allotted a position, and that falsely.

There were lots of stuff that Tol dug up about the methodology that seems to indicate my concerns are quite real. Why can’t raters be identified and time stamps so that tests can be done to see if any one or more have a bias (in other words, placing papers in the 97% camp based on their own low standards, because they want the research to show that).

Big time! This is often ignored but once global warming because the issue of the day, all agricultural programs included a plank on dealing with urgent issues “involving climate change,” and women’s empowerment mentions “to assist women deal with the effects of climate change” and health and disease prevention include a comment that “with climate change” and flood prevention because of “climate change” and developing new technologies “to incorporate possible effects of climate change” and anything to do with fishing “incorporating efforts to mitigate the effects of and adapt to climate change.” So much of this is bullshit but is required to “check the box.” In the past two decades, “mitigating the effects of and adapting to climate change” has replaced what would have been “to assist in and foster economic development to fight poverty.” New shit… same bloviating reporting… all at a cost to YOU.

[quote=“jotham”][quote=“Vay”]Hi Jotham and thanks for noticing this thread! In addition to posting the above, I hope you’ll find some time to address the list of human fingerprints on global warming on the first page.

In any case, I emailed John Cook (he’s in my Google+ friends) and asked him to address Tol’s criticism directly. Regarding your specific worry, here’s a response to a poster in the comments section of the actual SkS article announcing the publication of the study:

[quote=“Kevin C”]A ‘we don’t know’ paper would be counted as taking a position but uncertain (category 4b). A ‘less than 50%’ paper would be counted as an explicit rejection of the consensus (category 7)…

…We were cautious here, tending towards ‘no position’ in our ratings. This is confirmed by the scientists’ responses compared with ours: more than half of our ‘no position’ abstracts were rated as ‘endorsement’ by the scientists who actually wrote the papers!
A few ‘no positions’ were rated as ‘rejection’ by the authors too, but on average the scientists rated 0.6 classifications closer to endorsement than we did, on the 7-point classification scale.[/quote]

skepticalscience.com/97-percent- … -2013.html

Gosh, so they actually have categories. Wow - they’re not total idiots after all. Makes one wonder if other studies, such as:
[/quote]
Vay, Vay, Vay, you don’t get the controversy. No one is saying there aren’t categories. The problem is how they distribute papers in their categories, if that’s really accurate or reflective of their true position.

First of all, yes, I know if a paper explicitly states less than 50% certainty, that is a rejection. But few papers are going to get into that detail, it’s unnecessary. My “concern” is that people with my views, (but don’t necessarily write it explicitly in their paper) will be lumped up together with that 97% just because they make some generic statement that GHG’s cause warming, which statement I could also agree with. If I were writing a paper, I wouldn’t explicitly state my position that way because it’s unnecessary and probably totally irrelevant to the paper at hand.

That was another issue, that global warming wasn’t the main focus of many of those papers, and so authors give lip-service to the issue of global warming (not explicitly, mind you) because it’s become an issue of the day. Many of these authors will mention the issue (though the paper isn’t about global warming at all) and will be summarily grouped as endorsing it.

[strike]Your quote seems a little damning in that it says most of the papers with no position are categorized as endorsing it anyhow in the 97%.[/strike]
*Edit: Oh, never mind that, I misunderstood the quote. Now that I understand it, let me now respond more appropriately that papers with no position aren’t a big factor in this paper. It’s the majority of papers that have been allotted a position, and that falsely.

There were lots of stuff that Tol dug up about the methodology that seems to indicate my concerns are quite real. Why can’t raters be identified and time stamps so that tests can be done to see if any one or more have a bias (in other words, placing papers in the 97% camp based on their own low standards, because they want the research to show that).[/quote]

First of all, if I had “questions” about a piece of research, I’d actually go to that research and LOOK at it. Failing to do so is why I repeatedly accuse you of lack of curiosity - which gets you a big fat red flag on the claim that you are in any sense except the most colloquial one a “skeptic”. In any case, got a nice rebuttal to Tol’s critique. Since your post above is mostly just quoting him, I’ll just quote someone else right back to ya!

[quote=“Real Sceptic”]Because of all that one of the co-authors, Dana Nuccitelli, wrote a blog post putting some of the criticism in context; showing that they didn’t have merit. To this day he’s still addressing criticism towards this paper, most of it just puzzles me why they are made.

For example yesterday Anthony Watts again attacked this paper on his blog Watts Up With That (WUWT). The blog posts starts with a copy of what Bjørn Lomborg wrote about the Cook et al. paper on facebook. It repeats a lot of the already addressed criticisms towards the authors, which we already know have no merit. There were a few new details in there but Wotts has already talked about those.

But what really triggered me to write all this was the letter from Richard Tol that was printed in full in that blog post. A lot of accusations are made in that letter towards the authors but it mostly boils down to the claim that data is hidden. And that this hidden data is needed to verify that the results of the study are valid. With a good dash of speculation and other accusations towards the authors of the paper.

However,
there’s a problem with the accusation that data is hidden. How the abstracts were rated and how results were analysed are available in the paper. Also all the data you need to replicate the results are available. You can download it from the very same page this paper is hosted on (it’s linked under supplementary data)
.

It gives you everything you need to see if there are problems in the methodology they used or if they for example incorrectly rated papers.
Any serious problems in Cook et al. paper will be detected if you use that data and see if you can replicate the results.

But Tol isn’t doing that. He wants every little piece of data no matter how irrelevant it is to checking if the results they got are correct. And if it isn’t given for whatever reason he accuses the authors of hiding data and speculates on the motives as to why this might be.

Many, including me, have pointed out to Tol that he has everything he needs to check if the results are valid. And that so far there isn’t any real indication in the Cook et al. paper that it’s fundamentally flawed.
One of the biggest hints that it isn’t flawed are the results for authors rating their own papers. This part gave almost the same results, and it showed that the Cook et al. paper was conservative in its rating. Meaning that the ratings for the abstracts tended to er towards being neutral or rejecting that humans were the cause of global warming.

To me it looks like that Tol has a problem with the conclusions in the Cook et al paper. Not because he’s seeing a legitimate problem in the data, survey, methodology or criteria; as he’s still looking for those. It just seems he doesn’t like the conclusions.

With him looking for problems in the data without actually verifying if the conclusions are correct this is jut a game of gotcha. One that is played out on blogs and social media, not in the scientific literature where normally critiquing a paper takes place. But it isn’t because Tol hasn’t tried to publish his criticism as a response to this paper. He did, but it was rejected.

I truly don’t understand why Tol is going after this paper, often quite viciously. But I do understand why climate science deniers like watts do this.
This paper gives a result that is easy to communicate to the public, and also very easy to understand. Which is probably the reason why this paper has struck a nerve among climate science deniers.

Simply because this whole public “debate” isn’t about the science, it’s about winning the public communication campaign in an attempt to prevent or delay action. And as soon as you have something that is easily communicated like the results from the Cook et al paper everything is done to discredit the research. No matter if it is valid criticism or not.[/quote]

Cook’s 97% Climate Consensus Paper Doesn’t Crumble Upon Examination

Vay, didn’t you read Tol’s criticism? That data they released has little to do with it. And actually, Tol did try to replicate the results over and over and over with the data that was already released. It’s because he wasn’t succeeding that made him want to dig deeper in the methodology and ask for more data so that he could do statistical tests and verify the methodology to see what’s wrong, what’s up. Tol already concluded based on the statistics tests on the available data that it was inherently incoherent, there were red flags, and that the literature wasn’t representative of what they were trying to measure. But this guy doesn’t address that at all; he actually gets is all wrong – either he doesn’t understand either, or he’s lying, and just providing some desperate fodder for all you Borg robots, anything, everything.

[quote]Many, including me, have pointed out to Tol that he has everything he needs to check if the results are valid. And that so far there isn’t any real indication in the Cook et al. paper that it’s fundamentally flawed.
One of the biggest hints that it isn’t flawed are the results for authors rating their own papers. This part gave almost the same results, and it showed that the Cook et al. paper was conservative in its rating. Meaning that the ratings for the abstracts tended to er towards being neutral or rejecting that humans were the cause of global warming.
[/quote]
No, Tol didn’t have all the data he needed, he asked for time stamps and rater ID so that he could do tests on rater fatigue and rater bias, among other tests. He was especially surprised that the authors didn’t think to do this themselves on rater bias. This is just de rigueur

[quote]I truly don’t understand why Tol is going after this paper, often quite viciously. But I do understand why climate science deniers like watts do this.
This paper gives a result that is easy to communicate to the public, and also very easy to understand. Which is probably the reason why this paper has struck a nerve among climate science deniers.[/quote]
He doesn’t understand why Tol is going after this paper viciously? Vay, this is just standard procedure, statistical protocol, scrutiny that every survey deserves. We check methodology against bias, especially when the results sound as sensational as 97% – that requires greater scrutiny. The authors themselves should have done these tests and showed the data from them publicly if they were so confident. It is not vicious to look at methodology. It is trying to hold up the high standards of objective, rigorous science. Tol found so many errors on so many fronts that it might appear as vicious, but it really shows just how weak and wrong the paper is. It’s not just minor errors here and there. It totally puts the results in question. And this criticizer doesn’t even mention the big things wrong with this paper.

The statistical tests Tol used are standard – people who know about this stuff know what this is about. He didn’t just make them up. It isn’t like some opinion piece or editorial – these are legitimate tests you apply to check methodology. It isn’t vicious at all.

jotham: please give us some links to peer-reviewed sources. Otherwise we cannot actually evaluate your “offerings” beyond that of casual opinion of a motivated-thinking layman.

I am talking about the numbers. Back up your numbers please or STFU. :cactus:

[quote=“BigJohn”][quote=“jotham”]
Vay, I looked at that the first time you posted and linked it. That’s why I made my first criticism of it and asked you at that time how sure you can be that someone with my view (10 to 30% contribution of GHGs to global warming) or even scientists who believe it may be 50% would not be included in that all-comprehensive 97%.
[/quote]

jotham: please give us some links to peer-reviewed sources. Otherwise we cannot actually evaluate your “offerings” beyond that of casual opinion of a motivated-thinking layman.

I am talking about the numbers. Back up your numbers please or STFU. :cactus:[/quote]
This is your best argument? The authorities? Bro, this isn’t science. This is methodology, statistics. It’s black and white, it’s math, not opinion. We are talking about mathematical tests being applied to data. You can have a discussion about whether the tests were done correctly or not, but that wasn’t an issue raised here. Scientists supposedly understand these things, even though it isn’t strictly science, or should learn it if they don’t.

Mr. Cook should know better; well actually he does know better, which is why he’s hiding. He knows methodology is weak, because he manipulated the data himself, making it appear such that it is misleading. He understands what kind of tests would destroy him, which is why he is adamant about not releasing that information.

He knows his raters are biased. They are volunteers from Skeptical Science. Of course there is rater bias. Why shouldn’t there be. They are cheerleaders for AGW, they are just like Vay; I’ll laugh if you say they are neutral participants. There may be some honest ones there, but that’s why we need to do the rater bias test, to figure out how many are not.

[quote=“jotham”][quote=“Vay”]
First of all, if I had “questions” about a piece of research, I’d actually go to that research and LOOK at it. Failing to do so is why I repeatedly accuse you of lack of curiosity - which gets you a big fat red flag on the claim that you are in any sense except the most colloquial one a “skeptic”. In any case, got a nice rebuttal to Tol’s critique. Since your post above is mostly just quoting him, I’ll just quote someone else right back to ya![/quote]
Vay, I looked at that the first time you posted and linked it. That’s why I made my first criticism of it and asked you at that time how sure you can be that someone with my view (10 to 30% contribution of GHGs to global warming) or even scientists who believe it may be 50% would not be included in that all-comprehensive 97%.[/quote]

PLEASE. Your above initial response even uses the same Pinocchio graphic as WUWT! You may have looked at the Real Sceptic blog post, but I’m willing to bet just about anything you never looked at the actual study.

The birthday problem, again? How about the cancer problem I also described in the same post? Did you figure that one out, Mr. Intellectual Rugged Individualist? Here’s what I’ve already told you about the birthday problem:

Frankly, I don’t give a frack what Tol thinks or what his “analysis” says. No amount of consensus studies are going to make any difference to deniers, just as no number of investigations will satisfy 9/11 Truthers.

Your strategy is that of the OJ Simpson defense team: find a few needles to make the jury ignore the haystack, and here you’ve got this attention-craving economist who seems pissed more of his papers didn’t get into the study, so of course you use him - whether he’s representative or not, whether he’s right or not.

Here’s a key point you’ll never talk about, though, and it’s a pretty frickin’ simple one: there are no published, reviewed “skeptical” consensus studies. I wonder why? The richest industries on Earth have so much to gain by disproving AGW: why don’t they fund one? Because they already know the result. It’s going to come back the same, no matter how many times you run it. And people like you will always deny the result. Because doubt is your product.

But since you are [strike]being so chicken-shit as to carry on[/strike] arguing in the “Global Cooling (laugh)” thread while completely ignoring my rather important post on page 64 (used to be p 63, strangely, but maybe I’m being paranoid), I’m going to take the extra time to go through this a bit. [color=#0000BF](EDIT: feel bad about that “chicken-shit” comment and want to delete it, but in case you already saw it, thought I’d handle it this way. The nasty tone of these discussions sometimes builds momentum which is hard to overcome, but I’m going to try to get back to a more civil tone in future posts.[/color])

Dumb? No. Never said that. Blinded by ideology? Totally.

Here’s Tol’s criteria for “mis-classified”:

First of all, “neutral” isn’t even a category in Cook et al. “Neutral” could mean a mid-way point between extremes. The term Cook et al uses is “No position”, which could quite possibly mean the authors are likely to know that global warming is caused by humans, but their abstract just doesn’t focus on the cause. It’s an important distinction.

But in any case, why should studies focusing on impacts be necessarily rated as “no position”? This is just Tol making up his own rules and then critiquing the study based on them.

Here’s the category from Cook et al: Effects and impacts of climate change on the environment, ecosystems or humanity.

Such papers make up the biggest single factor in AGW research, and constitute roughly 48% of the studies Cook et al looks at. To say they should all be rated as a category which doesn’t exist in the study is silly. As for “no position”, it is non sequitur to claim this.

Here’s an impact study examined in Cook et al:

Does that sound “neutral”? Here’s another:

If we’re going to try to predict the impacts of global warming, we’ll need to know the fracking major causes, and if the major cause is C02, we’re going to have to fracking look at different C02 emission scenarios! So “no position” (or “neutral”) simply cannot apply here.

Now here’s a paper on mitigation (another category Tol inexplicably thinks should be automatically rated as “No position”) that Cook et al actually rated as “No position”:

From the Cook et al categories, this probably fits better as “Implicit” than “No position”, but the readers were trying to be conservative in their rating of papers, knowing full well what the AGW denial community is like, and how fearful they are of the notion of scientific consensus on global warming.

How do you know the authors “refused”? Did the possibility of “didn’t bother” cross your mind? And if an author felt his work had been mis-represented, don’t you think he’d be even more likely to express an opinion, in order to clear the air?

[quote=“Jotham”]Vay, didn’t you read Tol’s criticism? That data they released has little to do with it. And actually, Tol did try to replicate the results over and over and over with the data that was already released. It’s because he wasn’t succeeding that made him want to dig deeper in the methodology and ask for more data so that he could do statistical tests and verify the methodology to see what’s wrong, what’s up…

…No, Tol didn’t have all the data he needed, he asked for time stamps and rater ID so that he could do tests on rater fatigue and rater bias, among other tests. He was especially surprised that the authors didn’t think to do this themselves on rater bias. This is just de rigueur …

…He doesn’t understand why Tol is going after this paper viciously? Vay, this is just standard procedure, statistical protocol, scrutiny that every survey deserves. We check methodology against bias, especially when the results sound as sensational as 97% – that requires greater scrutiny. The authors themselves should have done these tests and showed the data from them publicly if they were so confident. It is not vicious to look at methodology. It is trying to hold up the high standards of objective, rigorous science. Tol found so many errors on so many fronts that it might appear as vicious, but it really shows just how weak and wrong the paper is. It’s not just minor errors here and there. It totally puts the results in question. And this criticizer doesn’t even mention the big things wrong with this paper…

…The statistical tests Tol used are standard – people who know about this stuff know what this is about. He didn’t just make them up. It isn’t like some opinion piece or editorial – these are legitimate tests you apply to check methodology. It isn’t vicious at all…[/quote]

First of all, let’s not pretend you and I know what the academic standards are for a particular type of study, or whether his criteria are typical, reasonable or appropriate in this case (I post something from Wotts Up that gets to this issue below.) Second, nowhere that I can see does Tol say he tries to replicate the results of the study. What he does is attack the study with statistical tests (this issue is also dealt with in the Wotts post below) and piddly details.

The EiC of the publishing journal - Environmental Research Letters - begs to differ, and rejects Tol’s paper for publication as a rebuttal to Cook et al quite pointedly:

[quote=“Environmental Research Letters Editor-in-Chief”]I do not think this manuscript satisfies those criteria. It is in a large part an opinion piece, in other parts it suggests better ways of analysing the published literature (e.g. using a larger database rather than just Web of Science). These are all valid points for the further discussion following the publication of a paper – colleagues will have different opinions on interpreting the results or on how this could have been done better, and it is perfectly valid to express these opinions and to go ahead and actually do the research better in order to advance the field.

I do not see that the submission has identified any clear errors in the Cook et al. paper that would call its conclusions into question – in fact he agrees that the consensus documented by Cook et al. exists. The author offers much speculation (e.g. about raters perhaps getting tired) which has no place in the scientific literature, he offers minor corrections – e.g. that the endorsement level should not be 98% but 97.6% if only explicit endorsements are counted. He spends much time on the issue of implicit endorsements, about which one can of course have different opinions, but the issue is clearly stated in the Cook et al. paper so this does not call for a published comment on the paper. He also offers an alternative interpretation of the trends – which is fine, it is always possible to interpret data differently.

All these things are valid issues for the usual discourse that exists in many informal avenues like conferences or blogs, but they do not constitute material for a formal comment.[/quote]

richardtol.blogspot.co.uk/2013/0 … paper.html

Now you’re going to say something that amounts to, OF COURSE HE SAID THAT!!! HE’S PART of the CONSPIRACY!!! So here’s a well-reasoned response - by a fellow who’s actually been interacting with Tol via Twitter as Tol attempts to fix the problems in his paper to get it published - on the issue of those statistical tests, other piddling issues and whether they really show “big problems” with the study:

[quote=“Wotts Up With That Blog”]Richard’s been making a great deal of noise about John Cook not releasing all his data. He wants all the ratings, not just the final ratings, and even thinks that individual keystrokes and time stamps should be provided, but accepts that this may be asking a bit much. He’s also been critical of the lack of a robust survey strategy. Now, here’s where I have an issue. If the goal of the Cook et al. work was to survey a group of people to, for example, determine their views on climate change, then Richard Tol would be perfectly correct. Such work would require that you had a well-defined survey strategy and that you kept track of all your data so that you could eliminate biases, or discuss biases if any exist. You’d need to know something about the sample; for example, what was the age distribution, the gender distribution, political affiliations, scientific background. In such a case I would completely agree with Richard.

However, the goal of the Cook et al. work was not to survey a group of people, it was to survey a set of abstracts that had been extracted from a database using a well-defined search. The people involved were simply a tool that analysed these abstracts so as to ultimately give each abstract a rating that reflected it’s position with regards to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). In some sense, what is important is whether or not the final rankings “properly” reflect the position of each abstract, not really how this rating was achieved. Now, I should be careful. I’m not suggesting that one doesn’t need to know about the strategy, simply that the requirements with respect to the intermediate data is different to what would be required if the goal of the work was to study the people doing the rating, rather than to study the abstracts.

Let me try and give you an analogy. I do quite a lot of computational work. I take some set of initial conditions (my raw data if you like) and I evolve them using a simulation to produce a result that I then analyse. If someone thinks my results are wrong, they wouldn’t typically ask for my code so that they can check it line by line. They might ask for my code and I might give it to them, but they would then redo the simulations (after checking the code). More typically, they would simply do the simulations using their, or another, code. No journal would let them publish a paper pointing out that my code had an error in line 1002 (for example). A journal would expect that they show the significance of the error by redoing some of the simulations.

So, in my view, to check the validity of the Cook et al. work, you need to redo the analysis of some of the abstracts to see if the new results are consistent with those obtained by Cook et al. Simply showing that some of their intermediate data fails a statistical test, doesn’t really tell you if there’s anything significant wrong with the Cook et al. results. In fact, in earlier drafts of his paper, Richard Tol acknowledged that the Cook et al. results probably did reasonably reflect the level of agreement in the scientific community (this appears to have been left out of the recent draft, although maybe I’ve missed it). Failing a statistical test may indeed indicate something is wrong, but doesn’t prove it. Furthermore, there’s another issue that I have. Presumably someone could design such a study with a very precise and rigorous analysis procedure. This could be designed to pass all (or most) of Richard Tol’s tests. But this doesn’t tell you that such a procedure can suitably rank a sample of abstracts, it just tells you that it satisfies a set of tests that someone thinks are important. Just to be clear, let me restate something. If the goal was to study the people, then passing these tests might well be relevant, but the goal wasn’t to study the people, it was to study the abstracts.

So, this is where I get a little more controversial and somewhat more critical of Richard Tol. The problem I’m having with this whole event is understanding Richard Tol’s motivation. His claim is that he is simply interested in making sure that a piece of work is robust and done properly. Even if the results are correct – he says – if the strategy is flawed, the work has no merit. However, what I have issues with are Richard’s own style and his own strategy. Firstly, he’s often remarkably rude and unpleasant. I have been told that this is pretty standard in his field, but I find it a strange way to interact with other academics. It shows a lack of decency, and if you’re not willing to be decent why should others be decent towards you? As a far as his strategy goes, he has spent quite a lot of time trying to convince people that John Cook’s reluctance to release all his data implies that he’s trying to hide something. Richard’s paper then consists of a set of statistical tests that the Cook et al. data apparently fail, hence indicating a problem with the work. However, as I try to explain above, it’s not clear that these tests are actually telling us anything about whether or not the Cook et al. results are robust. They might be perfectly fine tests to do if the goal was to study the people rating the abstracts, but that wasn’t the goal.

Richard Tol’s intentions may well be good and honourable. I obviously can’t claim otherwise. However, from my perspective, this all seems a little suspicious. Make people think that Cook et al. is hiding something and then when they do release data, run a set of statistical tests that the data fails. Those who don’t know better will think this means the Cook et al. study is nonsense, when – as far as I can tell – it’s told you nothing of the sort. I’m not claiming that there aren’t problems with the Cook et al. study, simply that Richard Tol’s tests aren’t a particularly good indicator of whether or not there are problems. It might indicate something, but until you test the actual abstract ratings, how can you know? It makes me think that Richard is following a similar strategy to that adopted by McIntyre & McKitrick when they tried to debunk Michael Mann’s hockey stick paper (although, with all due respect to Cook et al., I’m not suggesting that the Cook et al. paper is of the same calibre as Michael Mann’s hockey stick paper). Basically, do something that looks credible but that’s complicated enough that few will have the knowledge or understanding to know if it is actually credible or not.[/quote]

wottsupwiththatblog.wordpress.co … consensus/

I’m going to continue to read up on the Consensus Project, but that’s probably all I’m going to say on this topic. As I said above, I sincerely believe no amount of “consensus studies” will ever make any difference to those whose minds are already irrevocably made up, so the argument is a wasted effort from the get-go.

This lady won over a billion dollars because she wrote The Matrix. She also wrote the Terminator.
godlikeproductions.com/forum … 273900/pg1
The MSM won’t cover it.
People keep trying to disprove it, but they can’t.

[quote=“Vay”][quote=“jotham”]
Vay, I looked at that the first time you posted and linked it. That’s why I made my first criticism of it and asked you at that time how sure you can be that someone with my view (10 to 30% contribution of GHGs to global warming) or even scientists who believe it may be 50% would not be included in that all-comprehensive 97%.[/quote]

PLEASE. Your above initial response even uses the same Pinocchio graphic as WUWT! You may have looked at the Real Sceptic blog post, but I’m willing to bet just about anything you never looked at the actual study.[/quote]
You provided a link, and I looked at it.

Frankly, I don’t give a frack what Tol thinks or what his “analysis” says. No amount of consensus studies are going to make any difference to deniers, just as no number of investigations will satisfy 9/11 Truthers. [/quote]
You’re getting off track, keep focused. You provided a criticism, and I’m saying the criticism isn’t germane to what Tol was asserting. If you provide legitimate criticism of Tol, it should at least be relevant.

Motivation doesn’t matter entirely in science; rather being right or wrong. The tests are valid and he applied them legitimately. His intentions can’t be too suspect as he is a believer in AGW himself. He just believes in high standards in science, or rather methodology.

Your analogy to the defense of OJ Simpson is off. The defense doesn’t have a high standard as the prosecution does. Onus is on prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, because you’re dealing with people’s lives here. So defense poking holes in the prosecution is quite normal. Science however, has higher standards, like that of prosecution. The onus is to provide proof for your hypotheses.

The skeptics don’t rely on consensus for veritable science, and don’t really need to; it’s immaterial what people opine in science. More important is what the facts and proof is.

Here’s Tol’s criteria for “mis-classified”:

First of all, “neutral” isn’t even a category in Cook et al. “Neutral” could mean a mid-way point between extremes. The term Cook et al uses is “No position”, which could quite possibly mean the authors are likely to know that global warming is caused by humans, but their abstract just doesn’t focus on the cause. It’s an important distinction.

But in any case, why should studies focusing on impacts be necessarily rated as “no position”? This is just Tol making up his own rules and then critiquing the study based on them. [/quote]
Goof ball, when he says neutral, he means no position. There isn’t a rhetorical trick being deployed here. He means more of the papers should be “no position.” Cook only puts 67% of his papers in No Position. Tol believes it should be more like 93%, because climate policy or impacts are a different issue than causes.

For instance, impacts such as sea-level rise or melting glaciers may be legitimate whether the earth is warming by GHGs or solar or ENSO; it really doesn’t matter to the purpose of the paper what is the cause or someone’s opinion about the cause.

Furthermore, someone talking about melting glaciers doesn’t imply they necessarily believe it is human-caused unless they say it explicitly. Or a tax expert talking about carbon taxes because that is part of climate policy which the expert finds himself dealing with in his research doesn’t imply that such expert himself believes that human’s cause it; and it’s irrelevant to his research if he does. That’s why so many of those papers are doubted.

[quote]Here’s an impact study examined in Cook et al:

Does that sound “neutral”? Here’s another:[/quote]

Vay, He’s not saying the authors are neutral. He is saying for the purposes of a good study like this, (remember Tol believes in AGW), the consensus numbers should be driven by papers that actually deal with the cause of climate, in which the opinion or conclusions of the researchers are very germane for what the study proposes to measure. Impact studies and mitigation studies can be done, the author’s mere or passing opinion about the causes being irrelevant or not changing the researchers or readers understanding or interpretation of the study itself. Authors can still do mitigation studies without necessarily believing AGW is 80 or 90% the cause, just like Bush came up with a plan for emission controls without expressly endorsing 80 or 90% of AGW is GHGs. He’s saying impact studies are neutral to what the study would objectively measure and would be best effectively to place it in “No Position,” or Cook should have allotted another category for these irrelevant papers.

Again, no. Impacts are different. Glacier melting and all that jazz will do all that stuff whether it’s caused by ENSO or cosmic rays or CO2. Are you suggesting that the glaciers themselves can tell the difference between the temperature rises that are caused by humans and that caused by nature and only melting in response to the rise that is specifically human-made in nature? You’re looking silly here.

[quote]Now here’s a paper on mitigation (another category Tol inexplicably thinks should be automatically rated as “No position”) that Cook et al actually rated as “No position”:

From the Cook et al categories, this probably fits better as “Implicit” than “No position”, but the readers were trying to be conservative in their rating of papers, knowing full well what the AGW denial community is like, and how fearful they are of the notion of scientific consensus on global warming.[/quote]
No, it is not implicit at all. Cook was correct to place it in “No Position.” I could also do work like this if people payed me, be an expert in this field and not personally believe in AGW. You may be correct that most people who would do this sort of thing are likely to believe in AGW, but it isn’t necessarily so. People will do anything for money.

How do you know the authors “refused”? Did the possibility of “didn’t bother” cross your mind? And if an author felt his work had been mis-represented, don’t you think he’d be even more likely to express an opinion, in order to clear the air? [/quote]
I read the link you provided, which quotes Mr. Cook.

Will an author be more likely to express an opinion to clear the air? Naw, most of them just don’t really bother. But one editor did take the time to ask various researchers about their papers, and they did reply that they were misrepresented:

97% Study Falsely Classifies Scientists’ Papers, according to the scientists that published them

[ul][color=#000080]Dr. Idso, your paper ‘Ultra-enhanced spring branch growth in CO2-enriched trees: can it alter the phase of the atmosphere’s seasonal CO2 cycle?’ is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; “Implicitly endorsing AGW without minimizing it”.

Is this an accurate representation of your paper?

Idso: “That is not an accurate representation of my paper. The papers examined how the rise in atmospheric CO2 could be inducing a phase advance in the spring portion of the atmosphere’s seasonal CO2 cycle. Other literature had previously claimed a measured advance was due to rising temperatures, but we showed that it was quite likely the rise in atmospheric CO2 itself was responsible for the lion’s share of the change. It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming.”[/color][/ul]

This next one is very interesting. I see now that Cook uses a 50% borderline, not the 90 to 100% the IPCC uses. This means they are getting more scientists that were once considered skeptics. But now, global warmists like Cook are moving closer to 50%, which means they are moving closer to the natural side, but quietly…very interesting.

[color=#000080][ul]Dr. Scafetta, your paper ‘Phenomenological solar contribution to the 1900–2000 global surface warming’ is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; “Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%”

Is this an accurate representation of your paper?

Scafetta: "Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission.

What my papers say is that the IPCC view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun. This implies that the true climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling is likely around 1.5 C or less, and that the 21st century projections must be reduced by at least a factor of 2 or more. Of that the sun contributed (more or less) as much as the anthropogenic forcings.

The “less” claim is based on alternative solar models (e.g. ACRIM instead of PMOD) and also on the observation that part of the observed global warming might be due to urban heat island effect, and not to CO2.

By using the 50% borderline a lot of so-called “skeptical works” including some of mine are included in their 97%."

Any further comment on the Cook et al. (2013) paper?

Scafetta: "Please note that it is very important to clarify that the AGW advocated by the IPCC has always claimed that 90-100% of the warming observed since 1900 is due to anthropogenic emissions. While critics like me have always claimed that the data would approximately indicate a 50-50 natural-anthropogenic contribution at most.

What it is observed right now is utter dishonesty by the IPCC advocates. Instead of apologizing and honestly acknowledging that the AGW theory as advocated by the IPCC is wrong because based on climate models that poorly reconstruct the solar signature and do not reproduce the natural oscillations of the climate (AMO, PDO, NAO etc.) and honestly acknowledging that the truth, as it is emerging, is closer to what claimed by IPCC critics like me since 2005, these people are trying to get the credit.

They are gradually engaging into a metamorphosis process to save face.

[b]Now they are misleadingly claiming that what they have always claimed was that AGW is quantified as 50+% of the total warming, so that once it will be clearer that AGW can only at most be quantified as 50% (without the “+”) of the total warming, they will still claim that they were sufficiently correct.

And in this way they will get the credit that they do not merit, and continue in defaming critics like me that actually demonstrated such a fact since 2005/2006."[/b][/ul][/color]

This next one is also very interesting on another point. He makes the point that he is included in that 97% because he doesn’t explicitly reject the notion of AGW, and implies that it might be deemed unprofessional or unscientific if he had:

[color=#000080][ul]Dr. Shaviv, your paper ‘On climate response to changes in the cosmic ray flux and radiative budget’ is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; “Explicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimise”

Is this an accurate representation of your paper?

Shaviv: "Nope… it is not an accurate representation. The paper shows that if cosmic rays are included in empirical climate sensitivity analyses, then one finds that different time scales consistently give a low climate sensitiviity. i.e., it supports the idea that cosmic rays affect the climate and that climate sensitivity is low. This means that part of the 20th century should be attributed to the increased solar activity and that 21st century warming under a business as usual scenario should be low (about 1°C).

I couldn’t write these things more explicitly in the paper because of the refereeing, however, you don’t have to be a genius to reach these conclusions from the paper."[/ul][/color]

Whew, this is getting too long, I’ll break it up and respond to the rest of your too long post on another post.

[quote][quote=“Jotham”]Vay, didn’t you read Tol’s criticism? That data they released has little to do with it. And actually, Tol did try to replicate the results over and over and over with the data that was already released. It’s because he wasn’t succeeding that made him want to dig deeper in the methodology and ask for more data so that he could do statistical tests and verify the methodology to see what’s wrong, what’s up…

…No, Tol didn’t have all the data he needed, he asked for time stamps and rater ID so that he could do tests on rater fatigue and rater bias, among other tests. He was especially surprised that the authors didn’t think to do this themselves on rater bias. This is just de rigueur …

…He doesn’t understand why Tol is going after this paper viciously? Vay, this is just standard procedure, statistical protocol, scrutiny that every survey deserves. We check methodology against bias, especially when the results sound as sensational as 97% – that requires greater scrutiny. The authors themselves should have done these tests and showed the data from them publicly if they were so confident. It is not vicious to look at methodology. It is trying to hold up the high standards of objective, rigorous science. Tol found so many errors on so many fronts that it might appear as vicious, but it really shows just how weak and wrong the paper is. It’s not just minor errors here and there. It totally puts the results in question. And this criticizer doesn’t even mention the big things wrong with this paper…

…The statistical tests Tol used are standard – people who know about this stuff know what this is about. He didn’t just make them up. It isn’t like some opinion piece or editorial – these are legitimate tests you apply to check methodology. It isn’t vicious at all…[/quote]

First of all, let’s not pretend you and I know what the academic standards are for a particular type of study, or whether his criteria are typical, reasonable or appropriate in this case (I post something from Wotts Up that gets to this issue below.) Second, nowhere that I can see does Tol say he tries to replicate the results of the study. What he does is attack the study with statistical tests (this issue is also dealt with in the Wotts post below) and piddly details.[/quote]
I said Tol’s tests for methodology and bias are typical, I didn’t say “criteria,” whatever you mean by that.

[quote]The EiC of the publishing journal - Environmental Research Letters - begs to differ, and rejects Tol’s paper for publication as a rebuttal to Cook et al quite pointedly:

[quote=“Environmental Research Letters Editor-in-Chief”]I do not think this manuscript satisfies those criteria. It is in a large part an opinion piece, in other parts it suggests better ways of analysing the published literature (e.g. using a larger database rather than just Web of Science). These are all valid points for the further discussion following the publication of a paper – colleagues will have different opinions on interpreting the results or on how this could have been done better, and it is perfectly valid to express these opinions and to go ahead and actually do the research better in order to advance the field.

I do not see that the submission has identified any clear errors in the Cook et al. paper that would call its conclusions into question – in fact he agrees that the consensus documented by Cook et al. exists. The author offers much speculation (e.g. about raters perhaps getting tired) which has no place in the scientific literature, he offers minor corrections – e.g. that the endorsement level should not be 98% but 97.6% if only explicit endorsements are counted. He spends much time on the issue of implicit endorsements, about which one can of course have different opinions, but the issue is clearly stated in the Cook et al. paper so this does not call for a published comment on the paper. He also offers an alternative interpretation of the trends – which is fine, it is always possible to interpret data differently.

All these things are valid issues for the usual discourse that exists in many informal avenues like conferences or blogs, but they do not constitute material for a formal comment.[/quote]

richardtol.blogspot.co.uk/2013/0 … paper.html

Now you’re going to say something that amounts to, OF COURSE HE SAID THAT!!! HE’S PART of the CONSPIRACY!!![/quote]
Not quite. I always look at rhetoric and substance.

First, this is not the editor of the magazine. These comments were made by one board member only, and we aren’t told who made the criticism.

Second, Tol didn’t “point out clear errors” in the paper because he was only focusing on methodology, not the results, on which methodology could cast doubt on. That’s a no-brainer. Tol said himself that Cook may very well be right, but you wouldn’t know it from this particular study. Tol didn’t get into actual errors in the paper, because he was just looking at methodology.

As for Tol talking about “speculation about rater’s being tired,” that is because the data, the time stamps were withheld! He could do tests for that if he had all the data, the hiding of which makes one speculate if there were significant problems like this. Of course it’s legitimate criticism.

As for Tol’s minor criticisms, yes, that was a minor criticism and Tol would concede on that point, but that doesn’t obviate the fact that the paper has very very major criticisms that cast doubt on the whole paper. Inclusion of minor points doesn’t negate the major points at all!

These criticisms again avoid the substance and issue of Tol’s major concerns. I believe you said the right word, “pidley.”

Third, you left out the first two paragraphs, which is important to understand why this paper got rejected. It got rejected because of style, not substance. Talk about “pidley.” But being a magazine, they have to worry about style I suppose.

[color=#000080][ul]The comment raises a number of issues with the recent study by Cook et al. It is written in a rather opinionated style, seen e.g. in the entire introductory section making political points, and in off-hand remarks like labelling Skeptical Science a “polemic blog” or in sweeping generalisations like the paper “may strengthen the belief that all is not well in climate research”.
It reads more like a blog post than a scientific comment.

The specification for ERL comments is:
“A Comment in Environmental Research Letters should make a real
contribution to the development of the subject, raising important issues about errors, controversial points or misleading results in work published in the journal recently.”

I do not think this manuscript satisfies those criteria.[/ul][/color]
The reason Richard Tol didn’t “raise important issues about errors, controversial points or misleading results” is because he mistakenly thought most people were aware of the ramifications of bad methodolody, that it is common knowledge, that all he has to do is point out the major errors in statistics and people, professionals anyhow, would automatically understand the ramifications. (Actually they do) Tol didn’t realize what sort of political quagmire and fight he stepped into by doing what he considers upholding the rigor of scientific inquiry. This is just people trying to appear to be dealing with the issue while really avoiding it.

[quote]So here’s a well-reasoned response - by a fellow who’s actually been interacting with Tol via Twitter as Tol attempts to fix the problems in his paper to get it published - on the issue of those statistical tests, other piddling issues and whether they really show “big problems” with the study:

[quote=“Wotts Up With That Blog”]Richard’s been making a great deal of noise about John Cook not releasing all his data. He wants all the ratings, not just the final ratings, and even thinks that individual keystrokes and time stamps should be provided, but accepts that this may be asking a bit much. He’s also been critical of the lack of a robust survey strategy. Now, here’s where I have an issue. If the goal of the Cook et al. work was to survey a group of people to, for example, determine their views on climate change, then Richard Tol would be perfectly correct. Such work would require that you had a well-defined survey strategy and that you kept track of all your data so that you could eliminate biases, or discuss biases if any exist. You’d need to know something about the sample; for example, what was the age distribution, the gender distribution, political affiliations, scientific background. In such a case I would completely agree with Richard.

However, the goal of the Cook et al. work was not to survey a group of people, it was to survey a set of abstracts that had been extracted from a database using a well-defined search. The people involved were simply a tool that analysed these abstracts so as to ultimately give each abstract a rating that reflected it’s position with regards to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). In some sense, what is important is whether or not the final rankings “properly” reflect the position of each abstract, not really how this rating was achieved. Now, I should be careful. I’m not suggesting that one doesn’t need to know about the strategy, simply that the requirements with respect to the intermediate data is different to what would be required if the goal of the work was to study the people doing the rating, rather than to study the abstracts.[/quote][/quote]
No, this person is off using rhetoric twisting,and therefore not really criticizing Tol. This is dishonest, because I really don’t think this person is so stupid to sincerely believe what he wrote. It’s just to throw people off, take attention away from the real issue. He’s saying that you would eliminate bias if you were actually surveying people, instead of surveying abstracts. But Tol is not trying to eliminate, find, or deal with bias in abstracts! The author is making this case without sounding like it. Tol is concerned about bias in raters, not in the abstracts themselves. Geesh. Vay, did you pick this up on your apologetic websites again. Can you really not think through what these people are saying and identify if they are genuine criticism or not. Or are you just attracted because it appears specious on the surface and is rather long to boot, so it looks like a good defense?

This person is making the same criticism as that board member. Again, Tol is pointing out bad methodology. He never said he did anything more. And bad methodology automatically casts doubt on a paper.

Well, atleast he admits it’s all about Richard’s style, and not substance. (But where he tries to attack substance, he’s way off). People are not rude and unpleasant just because they point out that studies that are not robust could and probably does contain bias. That is not a lack of decency. That is being real in science, and pointing out that science needs to be objective and objectively done. And Cook hiding data also doesn’t reflect well on him. Science should be transparent. We should have access to the data, especially data that reveals methodology.

Well, consensus is consensus, which is fine for what it is. But if someone is going to do a study on it, they should at least be objective about getting it right, which is what Tol is saying, who believes there is a consensus.

But in the end, even if that 97% consensus is correct, it isn’t the same as proof in science. It isn’t the same as disproving other models of global temperature changes.

Vay, can you please learn how to find the essence of an argument and wrap it up in smaller posts, like everyone else? This is ridiculous.

[quote=“BigJohn”][quote=“jotham”]
Vay, I looked at that the first time you posted and linked it. That’s why I made my first criticism of it and asked you at that time how sure you can be that someone with my view (10 to 30% contribution of GHGs to global warming) or even scientists who believe it may be 50% would not be included in that all-comprehensive 97%.
[/quote]

jotham: please give us some links to peer-reviewed sources. Otherwise we cannot actually evaluate your “offerings” beyond that of casual opinion of a motivated-thinking layman.

I am talking about the numbers. Back up your numbers please or STFU. :cactus:[/quote]
There is now a peer-reviewed source recently released after you wrote this post.

[color=#000080][ul]“The consensus as described by the survey is virtually meaningless and tells us nothing about the current state of scientific opinion beyond the trivial observation that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet to some unspecified extent,” Andrew Montford says.

“The survey methodology therefore fails to address the key points that are in dispute in the global warming debate,” Montford adds.[/ul][/color]
Consensus, What Consensus?

Here is more:

[color=#000080][ul]The formulation ‘that humans are causing global warming’ could have two different
meanings. A ‘deep’ consensus reading would take it as all or most of the warming
is caused by humans. A ‘shallow’ consensus reading would imply only that some
unspecified proportion of the warming observed is attributable to mankind.
Differences over extent of any human influence is the essence of the climate debate.
The vast majority of those involved – scientists, economists, commentators, activists,
environmentalists and sceptics – accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that
will, other things being equal, warm the planet. But whether the effect is large or
small is unknown and the subject of furious debate

It is possible to show that when Cook and his colleagues say that there is consensus
of the proposition that ‘humans are causing global warming’, they are adopting the
shallow definition. According to the protocols used by the volunteers who rated
the abstracts, a paper was said to endorse the consensus if it accepted the concept
of anthropogenic global warming, either implicitly or explicitly, and regardless of
whether it quantified the extent of human influence on the planet’s temperature
.
Most papers on mitigation appear to have been taken to implicitly endorse the
consensus,7 although some seem to have been rated as neutral. A paper was only
said to reject the consensus if it minimised the human contribution, for example by
proposing that natural mechanisms dominate or, more explicitly, suggested that the
human contribution is minimal.

There was therefore an asymmetry in the classifications, with papers accepting
the influence of a large or an unspecified level of human influence included in the
consensus and only those actively minimising the human influence recorded as
rejecting it. For example, the guidance given to the volunteer raters suggests that
an abstract containing the words ‘Emissions of a broad range of greenhouse gases
of varying lifetimes contribute to global climate change’ should be taken as explicit
but unquantified endorsement of the consensus. Clearly the phrase quoted could
imply any level of human contribution to warming. This leads to the unavoidable
conclusion that the consensus as revealed by Cook et al. was indeed the shallow one

The treatment of the Shaviv paper is particularly interesting: its author did not
actively downplay global warming in the text because this would have made it
difficult to get the paper through peer review. So because of this silence on the
extent of manmade influence, its classification as endorsing the consensus was
correct according to the protocol set out for the raters

The last word on the paper goes to Professor Mike Hulme, founder of the Tyndall
Centre, the UK’s national climate research institute:

[list]The [Cook et al.] article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed.
It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately
poor level of public and policy debate in this country that the energy minister
should cite it. It offers a similar depiction of the world into categories of ‘right’
and ‘wrong’ to that adopted in [an earlier study]: dividing publishing climate
scientists into ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’. It seems to me that these people are
still living (or wishing to live) in the pre-2009 world of climate change discourse.
Haven’t they noticed that public understanding of the climate issue has moved
on?12[/ul][/list:u][/color]

rationalwiki.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts

I never said it was. What I said was that for a non-expert, doing a Bayesian sort of assessment of a truth claim, it vastly increases the probability that a particular position is true if there is a clear, broad and long-standing consensus… which is exactly why the denier community gets so riled up every time another consenus study comes out saying basically the same thing.

Well, you said all this stuff. I agree with practically none of it. Do you want me to respond to it or not? But in any case, I’ll hold off on that response 'til my post at the bottom of p 64 in the “Global Cooling” ( lol ) thread gets answered. This discussion is a waste of time, anyway, for the simple reason I pointed out above.

[quote=“jotham”][quote=“BigJohn”]
jotham: please give us some links to peer-reviewed sources. Otherwise we cannot actually evaluate your “offerings” beyond that of casual opinion of a motivated-thinking layman.
I am talking about the numbers. Back up your numbers please or STFU. :cactus:[/quote]
There is now a peer-reviewed source recently released after you wrote this post. [/quote]

jotham: that article:

Consensus, What Consensus?

was from which peer-reviewed journal? Please state some basic source info.

Do you understand what peer-reviewed means? It means that an expert in a given field publishes a report, study or analysis that has been and will be reviewed and critiqued by qualified experts in that field.

It is not the same thing as an editorial, opinion piece, or blogpost.

A peer-reviewed article is published in a peer-reviewed journal. Think of it like “appellation d’origine contrôlée” for wine.

So, just like the wine, you must disclose the provenance and standard.

You can’t just take a piss and call it rosewater because you like roses. Sorry, but that’s why you should go back and finish your degree. :smiley:

Furthermore, “it is possible to show” means shit. Show us what someone has shown, using accepted scientific methodology.

You guys are still arguing with someone who doesn’t understand what the words theory, facts, proof, and peer reviewed mean. Honestly, if we are to respect true knowledge in this world as we should, because scientific understanding is a hard fought and continuously challenging battle, we have no choice but to dismiss people’s opinions when they have proven to be meaningless. Why do you guys care so much about how dumb certain people seem to be? You’re arguing with people who don’t deserve a forum to debate, they haven’t earned it.

Good point!

But then should we retire from the field and let the retards dominate the information byways? Should we stand back and let morons, ideologues, cynical manipulators and fools blather on as they will, papering the Internet with their bullshit? Obscuring the issue with their crap?

I think not.

[quote=“BigJohn”][quote=“jotham”][quote=“BigJohn”]
jotham: please give us some links to peer-reviewed sources. Otherwise we cannot actually evaluate your “offerings” beyond that of casual opinion of a motivated-thinking layman.
I am talking about the numbers. Back up your numbers please or STFU. :cactus:[/quote]
There is now a peer-reviewed source recently released after you wrote this post. [/quote]

jotham: that article:

Consensus, What Consensus?

was from which peer-reviewed journal? Please state some basic source info.

Do you understand what peer-reviewed means? It means that an expert in a given field publishes a report, study or analysis that has been and will be reviewed and critiqued by qualified experts in that field.

It is not the same thing as an editorial, opinion piece, or blogpost.

A peer-reviewed article is published in a peer-reviewed journal. Think of it like “appellation d’origine contrôlée” for wine.

So, just like the wine, you must disclose the provenance and standard.

You can’t just take a piss and call it rosewater because you like roses. Sorry, but that’s why you should go back and finish your degree. :smiley:

Furthermore, “it is possible to show” means shit. Show us what someone has shown, using accepted scientific methodology.[/quote]
You didn’t read it? The Global Warming Policy Foundation.

That is a think-tank, not a peer reviewed journal.

I guess the “retards” kinda sorta missed the fact that the view was endorsed by the head of the Tyndall Center.
This is the UK’s official government center for research on climate change.

What was that about retards again? I think that it is awfully cute when retards try to act like scientists…
I think that we all know to whom I am referring here…

:loco: :whistle:

[quote]But then should we retire from the field and let the retards dominate the information byways? Should we stand back and let morons, ideologues, cynical manipulators and fools blather on as they will, papering the Internet with their bullshit? Obscuring the issue with their crap?

I think not.[/quote]

After a certain point, yes. As I said back near the beginning, when dealing with morons who will never change their mind no matter what evidence comes forth the victory comes through public opinion. Trust me, reading through these threads makes it perfectly crystal clear who’s on the intelligent side of this debate. So much so that I am finding it nearly impossible to read anything from Jotham and Fred in any other threads on any other topics without outright laughing.

You can’t reason people out of what they were not reasoned into. Evidence, proof, and a mountain of peer reviewed papers won’t do a thing vs these guys. All that can be done is give them a platform for debate to get them to articulate their ignorant opinions and basically have them out themselves…