Why we should listen to the 97%

[Abraham3]

This is a recording of Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M discussing some basic risk analysis issues regarding acting on climate change warmings. Have a listen. See what you think. Tell us about it.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iRAL3dWnSNg]Decision making under uncertainty - YouTube[/ame]

Muchas obligado.

Abraham

 

[skookerasbil]

Who cares?


The only % that matters is the 3% in blue there on the graph below!!! That little itty bitty blue sliver there that makes me laugh my balls off every time I see it!!!









THATS called..........not winning.


And there are about 450,000 other graphs just like it, all of which should be entitled, "THE K00KS ARE LOSING"

 

[skookerasbil]

 

[Abraham3]

If you listened to the recording and this is all you have to say in response, why in god's name do you bother? Is your existence so filled with ignominy and bleak despair that these tawdry bangles of other's wit are, to your mind, fitting? Turn around. See the sun. Walk till your feet are wet.

 

[westwall]

When it has been shown categorically that your 97% number is sheer absolute BS, why on Earth would anyone listen to ANYTHING these frauds have to say?

You need to get a clue there little clown. You and they are not credible. End of story.

 

[bripat9643]

This is a recording of Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M discussing some basic risk analysis issues regarding acting on climate change warmings. Have a listen. See what you think. Tell us about it.

Decision making under uncertainty - YouTube

Muchas obligado.

Abraham

The 97% claim is bullshit, just like everything else warmist cult members claim:

ICECAP

By Larry Solomon, The National Post

[SPPI Note: Also see the Dennis Ambler SPPI report.

How do we know there’s a scientific consensus on climate change? Pundits and the press tell us so. And how do the pundits and the press know? Until recently, they typically pointed to the number 2500 - that’s the number of scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those 2500, the pundits and the press believed, had endorsed the IPCC position.

To their embarrassment, most of the pundits and press discovered that they were mistaken - those 2500 scientists hadn’t endorsed the IPCC’s conclusions, they had merely reviewed some part or other of the IPCC’s mammoth studies. To add to their embarrassment, many of those reviewers from within the IPCC establishment actually disagreed with the IPCC’s conclusions, sometimes vehemently.

The upshot? The punditry looked for and recently found an alternate number to tout - “97% of the world’s climate scientists” accept the consensus, articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere have begun to claim.

This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers - in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout.

The two researchers started by altogether excluding from their survey the thousands of scientists most likely to think that the Sun, or planetary movements, might have something to do with climate on Earth - out were the solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists and astronomers. That left the 10,257 scientists in disciplines like geology, oceanography, paleontology, and geochemistry that were somehow deemed more worthy of being included in the consensus. The two researchers also decided that scientific accomplishment should not be a factor in who could answer - those surveyed were determined by their place of employment (an academic or a governmental institution). Neither was academic qualification a factor - about 1,000 of those surveyed did not have a PhD, some didn’t even have a master’s diploma.

To encourage a high participation among these remaining disciplines, the two researchers decided on a quickie survey that would take less than two minutes to complete, and would be done online, saving the respondents the hassle of mailing a reply. Nevertheless, most didn’t consider the quickie survey worthy of response - just 3146, or 30.7%, answered the two questions on the survey:

1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?

2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

The questions were actually non-questions. From my discussions with literally hundreds of skeptical scientists over the past few years, I know of none who claims that the planet hasn’t warmed since the 1700s, and almost none who think that humans haven’t contributed in some way to the recent warming - quite apart from carbon dioxide emissions, few would doubt that the creation of cities and the clearing of forests for agricultural lands have affected the climate. When pressed for a figure, global warming skeptics might say that human are responsible for 10% or 15% of the warming; some skeptics place the upper bound of man’s contribution at 35%. The skeptics only deny that humans played a dominant role in Earth’s warming.

Surprisingly, just 90% of those who responded to the first question believed that temperatures had risen - I would have expected a figure closer to 100%, since Earth was in the Little Ice Age in the centuries immediately preceding 1800. But perhaps some of the responders interpreted the question to include the past 1000 years, when Earth was in the Medieval Warm Period, generally thought to be warmer than today.

As for the second question, 82% of the earth scientists replied that that human activity had significantly contributed to the warming. Here the vagueness of the question comes into play. Since skeptics believe that human activity been a contributing factor, their answer would have turned on whether they consider a 10% or 15% or 35% increase to be a significant contributing factor. Some would, some wouldn’t.

In any case, the two researchers must have feared that an 82% figure would fall short of a convincing consensus - almost one in five wasn’t blaming humans for global warming - so they looked for subsets that would yield a higher percentage. They found it - almost - in those whose recent published peer-reviewed research fell primarily in the climate change field. But the percentage still fell short of the researchers’ ideal. So they made another cut, allowing only the research conducted by those earth scientists who identified themselves as climate scientists.

Once all these cuts were made, 75 out of 77 scientists of unknown qualifications were left endorsing the global warming orthodoxy. The two researchers were then satisfied with their findings. Are you?

 

[Abraham3]

The topic off this thread is not whether or not 97% of active climate scientists believe human GHG emissions are the primary cause of global warming. The topic of this thread is the simple and brief presentation by Andrew Dessler of a risk assessment of taking action against global warming.

I guess I can assume none of you have listened to it as none of you has made the slightest comment to make on the presentation. An impressive lot.

 

[FA_Q2]

The topic off this thread is not whether or not 97% of active climate scientists believe humans GHG emissions are the primary cause of global warming. The topic of this thread is the simple and brief presentation by Andrew Dessler of a risk assessment of taking action against global warming.

I guess I can assume none of you have listened to it as none of you has made the slightest comment to make on the presentation. An impressive lot.

I can’t view vids atm but will at a later time. My beef with something like this though is that none of the doomsayer’s predictions have come true – why are we to assume that future impacts are going to be so great that it requires widespread response? If you can answer that, then you also have to address one more reality here: not one single passable proposal to curb human activity results in any real changes. Typically, we are talking about a few percentage points at most. And those are usually measured relative to the nation and not the world where increasing emissions are the norm for developing countries. Those nations are not going to change those habits. So, in the end, even if we listen NOTHING changes.

One thing I do know, if the inevitable happens we are going to NEED a strong economy and new advanced technology to deal with it. If we obliterated those now for a few percentage of a change, when we need the means to effect real solutions there won’t be anything left.

 

[Abraham3]

The audio-only message attached to the OP in this thread takes less than 5 minutes to listen to. Sadly, no one here seems to feel as if they need to listen to anyone else's opinion, they've got their own and they're going to stick to it no matter what.

The crux of Dessler's message was:

If 97% of the experts in a given field all believe the same thing, it is PROBABLY correct. It is not proven correct. We cannot say it is KNOWN to be correct. But it PROBABLY is correct.

The harm that will be done should those 97% be correct and yet ignored is immense. For one thing, the harm will be IRREVERSIBLE within any timeframe meaningful to anyone alive now. The lifetime of CO2 and methane in an overheated world is many hundreds of years at the very least. If we do not stop it now, we will not be able to stop it in the future.

The harm that will be done should those 97% be incorrect and yet measures are taken is small. It is small for several reasons:

1) There are numerous co-benefits to moving away from fossil fuels
a) Reduce air pollution
b) Get an early start on the new energy and transport infrastructure that WILL be required at some point
c) It is REVERSIBLE. If we eventually discover that we can safely burn coal and oil, they will still be here. We can quite easily return to a fossil fuel economy and burn the shit out of that stuff.


Any thoughts on any of THAT?

 

[FA_Q2]

The audio-only message attached to the OP in this thread takes less than 5 minutes to listen to. Sadly, no one here seems to feel as if they need to listen to anyone else's opinion, they've got their own and they're going to stick to it no matter what.

The crux of Dessler's message was:

If 97% of the experts in a given field all believe the same thing, it is PROBABLY correct. It is not proven correct. We cannot say it is KNOWN to be correct. But it PROBABLY is correct.

The harm that will be done should those 97% be correct and yet ignored is immense. For one thing, the harm will be IRREVERSIBLE within any timeframe meaningful to anyone alive now. The lifetime of CO2 and methane in an overheated world is many hundreds of years at the very least. If we do not stop it now, we will not be able to stop it in the future.

The harm that will be done should those 97% be incorrect and yet measures are taken is small. It is small for several reasons:

1) There are numerous co-benefits to moving away from fossil fuels
a) Reduce air pollution
b) Get an early start on the new energy and transport infrastructure that WILL be required at some point
c) It is REVERSIBLE. If we eventually discover that we can safely burn coal and oil, they will still be here. We can quite easily return to a fossil fuel economy and burn the shit out of that stuff.


Any thoughts on any of THAT?

First, he makes an assumption that 97% of the scientists agree that:

• the earth is warming
• Humans are very likely the cause
• Future warming may be severe

Which is a bald faced lie. Brip already outlined why the 97% is bullshit. More importantly, if you take the statistical analysis at it face value, you notice that the 2 questions that are asked NEVER allude to the third point. Again, this is ANOTHER core element to the argument that the video makes.

IOW, the entire premise of the video that you are upset that no one is watching is based upon a complete fabrication. This alone is sufficient to disregard the asinine argument that he makes but we can go even FURTHER. The next step is to analyze the proposed ‘solutions’ that are being suggested and ask how much of an impact that they are going to make. In the video, he makes ANOTHER assumption that is incorrect, that the impacts of climate regulation are going to be small. That is absolutely false. All of the ‘small’ changes that are brought up have one thing in common – small impacts. Impacts that, when really looked at, amount to less than 1 percent of actual change. Is that going to do anything? Not according to ANYONE that believes AGW is going to be disastrous. Considering that, in order for the results to be disastrous in the first place, a feedback loop is required it is unthinkable that any of these changes amount to squat. In order to make real changes, we are going to have to completely remodel our economy and that is going to result in DRASTIC results. Lastly, he makes another MONUMENTAL asinine claim – that any changes occurring from AGW are completely irreversible. That is buffoonery. There was a time when people thought that the moon was impossible to reach or that the patent office was no longer needed because we had already invented everything. The fact is that no one knows what we are going to be able to do in ten or twenty years as technology moves faster every day.

There is one thing that I do know however. If AGW is going to cause drastic and deadly changes in our atmosphere we are going to NEED a strong economy and advanced technology to deal with it. There is no other way around that simple truth as the doomsayers have already stated that we cannot handle those changes with what we currently have.

The sad part is that the AGW believers seem to want to dismantle any method of dealing with that outcome out of sheer fear. Bad idea.

 

[daveman]

This is a recording of Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M discussing some basic risk analysis issues regarding acting on climate change warmings. Have a listen. See what you think. Tell us about it.

Decision making under uncertainty - YouTube

Muchas obligado.

Abraham

"We need to listen to the 97% because my funding is at stake!"

A. E. Dessler
Department of Atmospheric Sciences
Texas A&M University

 

[daveman]

This is a recording of Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M discussing some basic risk analysis issues regarding acting on climate change warmings. Have a listen. See what you think. Tell us about it.

Decision making under uncertainty - YouTube

Muchas obligado.

Abraham

The 97% claim is bullshit, just like everything else warmist cult members claim:

ICECAP

By Larry Solomon, The National Post

[SPPI Note: Also see the Dennis Ambler SPPI report.

How do we know there’s a scientific consensus on climate change? Pundits and the press tell us so. And how do the pundits and the press know? Until recently, they typically pointed to the number 2500 - that’s the number of scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those 2500, the pundits and the press believed, had endorsed the IPCC position.

To their embarrassment, most of the pundits and press discovered that they were mistaken - those 2500 scientists hadn’t endorsed the IPCC’s conclusions, they had merely reviewed some part or other of the IPCC’s mammoth studies. To add to their embarrassment, many of those reviewers from within the IPCC establishment actually disagreed with the IPCC’s conclusions, sometimes vehemently.

The upshot? The punditry looked for and recently found an alternate number to tout - “97% of the world’s climate scientists” accept the consensus, articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere have begun to claim.

This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers - in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout.

The two researchers started by altogether excluding from their survey the thousands of scientists most likely to think that the Sun, or planetary movements, might have something to do with climate on Earth - out were the solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists and astronomers. That left the 10,257 scientists in disciplines like geology, oceanography, paleontology, and geochemistry that were somehow deemed more worthy of being included in the consensus. The two researchers also decided that scientific accomplishment should not be a factor in who could answer - those surveyed were determined by their place of employment (an academic or a governmental institution). Neither was academic qualification a factor - about 1,000 of those surveyed did not have a PhD, some didn’t even have a master’s diploma.

To encourage a high participation among these remaining disciplines, the two researchers decided on a quickie survey that would take less than two minutes to complete, and would be done online, saving the respondents the hassle of mailing a reply. Nevertheless, most didn’t consider the quickie survey worthy of response - just 3146, or 30.7%, answered the two questions on the survey:

1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?

2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

The questions were actually non-questions. From my discussions with literally hundreds of skeptical scientists over the past few years, I know of none who claims that the planet hasn’t warmed since the 1700s, and almost none who think that humans haven’t contributed in some way to the recent warming - quite apart from carbon dioxide emissions, few would doubt that the creation of cities and the clearing of forests for agricultural lands have affected the climate. When pressed for a figure, global warming skeptics might say that human are responsible for 10% or 15% of the warming; some skeptics place the upper bound of man’s contribution at 35%. The skeptics only deny that humans played a dominant role in Earth’s warming.

Surprisingly, just 90% of those who responded to the first question believed that temperatures had risen - I would have expected a figure closer to 100%, since Earth was in the Little Ice Age in the centuries immediately preceding 1800. But perhaps some of the responders interpreted the question to include the past 1000 years, when Earth was in the Medieval Warm Period, generally thought to be warmer than today.

As for the second question, 82% of the earth scientists replied that that human activity had significantly contributed to the warming. Here the vagueness of the question comes into play. Since skeptics believe that human activity been a contributing factor, their answer would have turned on whether they consider a 10% or 15% or 35% increase to be a significant contributing factor. Some would, some wouldn’t.

In any case, the two researchers must have feared that an 82% figure would fall short of a convincing consensus - almost one in five wasn’t blaming humans for global warming - so they looked for subsets that would yield a higher percentage. They found it - almost - in those whose recent published peer-reviewed research fell primarily in the climate change field. But the percentage still fell short of the researchers’ ideal. So they made another cut, allowing only the research conducted by those earth scientists who identified themselves as climate scientists.

Once all these cuts were made, 75 out of 77 scientists of unknown qualifications were left endorsing the global warming orthodoxy. The two researchers were then satisfied with their findings. Are you?

AGW surveyors do their work just like AGW scientists...cherry-pick, massage, and distort.

 

[Abraham3]

Dave, have you ever heard the term "unsubstantiated assertion"?

 

[bripat9643]

The topic off this thread is not whether or not 97% of active climate scientists believe human GHG emissions are the primary cause of global warming. The topic of this thread is the simple and brief presentation by Andrew Dessler of a risk assessment of taking action against global warming.

I guess I can assume none of you have listened to it as none of you has made the slightest comment to make on the presentation. An impressive lot.

There is no 97%, dipstick. I just proved that claim is bullshit.

 

[bripat9643]

Dave, have you ever heard the term "unsubstantiated assertion"?

You mean like the claim that 97% of scientists support the bogus AGW theory?

 

[Abraham3]

First, he makes an assumption that 97% of the scientists agree that:

• the earth is warming
• Humans are very likely the cause
• Future warming may be severe

Which is a bald faced lie.

You should pay more attention before using the L word.

Brip already outlined why the 97% is bullshit.

No, he absolutely did not. He cut and pasted an article (IceCap) that, just as I mentioned in the Six Ways from Sunday thread, criticizes one and only one of the five different surveys that can be found in Wikipedia's article on the Scientific consensus on climate change and which all arrived at approximately the same value: 97%. Dessler may have overstepped his basis with the claim that 97% believed there would be severe future consequences, but I doubt it. The 2007 Harris poll found 41% of climate scientists believed that moderate impact would be suffered within 50-100 years and 45% believed the consequences would be "catastrophic". It is not reasonable to accept AGW and not accept that it creates a risk of severe consequences if left unaddressed. And to attempt to throw out the risk assessment because of this point is disingenuous. Dessler is presenting a risk assessment on different predictions. The primary risk of ignoring AGW when it is a valid theory is that the harm will be irreversible within many human lifetimes.

More importantly, if you take the statistical analysis at it face value, you notice that the 2 questions that are asked NEVER allude to the third point. Again, this is ANOTHER core element to the argument that the video makes.

Still only addressing one survey out of five.

IOW, the entire premise of the video that you are upset that no one is watching is based upon a complete fabrication.

That would be incorrect because you and BritishPatrick are unaware or intentionally ignoring the four other surveys.

This alone is sufficient to disregard the asinine argument that he makes but we can go even FURTHER.

I think your behavior here and that of BritishPatrick are far better described as "asinine" than Dessler's presentation. I think it's difficult to challenge the world's scientific community with the sort of education that your folks appear to have had (I'm no better) and not be asinine (but I'm not trying to challenge mainstream science).

The next step is to analyze the proposed ‘solutions’ that are being suggested and ask how much of an impact that they are going to make. In the video, he makes ANOTHER assumption that is incorrect, that the impacts of climate regulation are going to be small. That is absolutely false. All of the ‘small’ changes that are brought up have one thing in common – small impacts. Impacts that, when really looked at, amount to less than 1 percent of actual change. Is that going to do anything? Not according to ANYONE that believes AGW is going to be disastrous. Considering that, in order for the results to be disastrous in the first place, a feedback loop is required it is unthinkable that any of these changes amount to squat. In order to make real changes, we are going to have to completely remodel our economy and that is going to result in DRASTIC results.

As we shall see shortly down the page, you're an amazingly knowledgeable fellow when it suits the argument you're trying to make. And not when it's not. There have been small changes that had large impact on our energy usage. The relatively rapid switch away from incandescent lighting had dramatic effects on our energy usage. Smart grid enhancements will have at least as great an effect. Plug-in hybrid and EV transportation technology is showing signs of actually taking off. The growth rates of wind and solar are impressive. A meaningful return to nuclear power could have an enormous impact on our carbon footprint. It wouldn't hurt us to follow Belgium's lead and do a little more bicycling. And walking. And NONE of these things will have any large negative impact on our economy.

More importantly, NONE of these measures and NONE that have been suggested have - by orders of magnitude - as great a negative impact as doing nothing.

Lastly, he makes another MONUMENTAL asinine claim – that any changes occurring from AGW are completely irreversible. That is buffoonery. There was a time when people thought that the moon was impossible to reach or that the patent office was no longer needed because we had already invented everything. The fact is that no one knows what we are going to be able to do in ten or twenty years as technology moves faster every day.

Are you really suggesting we take the risk of putting off action now because we MIGHT discover some way to fix things down the road, after temperatures have risen 4 or 5 degrees, billions have lost their homes to rising sea levels and both food and water are becoming more and more scarce? Really? You've got some nerve calling anyone else "asinine".

There is one thing that I do know however. If AGW is going to cause drastic and deadly changes in our atmosphere we are going to NEED a strong economy and advanced technology to deal with it. There is no other way around that simple truth as the doomsayers have already stated that we cannot handle those changes with what we currently have.

How can you worry about the financial impact and yet cast aside the FACT that the earlier we start, the less it will cost? If we had joined the Kyoto Protocols and actually put some effort to this back then, we might have had a chance of keeping this under control without breaking the bank. But we've had too many naysayers with too much fossil fuel industry funding convincing people that it's okay for them to be lazy, to make no changes, to keep things just the way they are. Of course they go along. People are stupid in the long run.

The sad part is that the AGW believers seem to want to dismantle any method of dealing with that outcome out of sheer fear. Bad idea.

Were you planning on dealing with global warming with the aid of coal fired power plants and V8 SUVs? Care to explain how that works?

 

[Abraham3]

The topic off this thread is not whether or not 97% of active climate scientists believe human GHG emissions are the primary cause of global warming. The topic of this thread is the simple and brief presentation by Andrew Dessler of a risk assessment of taking action against global warming.

I guess I can assume none of you have listened to it as none of you has made the slightest comment to make on the presentation. An impressive lot.

There is no 97%, dipstick. I just proved that claim is bullshit.

You've done no such thing. There are currently FIVE surveys showing 97% support. The critique you posted (IceCap) only addressed one of the surveys and the critique was complete crap to begin with. How much statistics have you had son?

 

[Abraham3]

Dave, have you ever heard the term "unsubstantiated assertion"?

You mean like the claim that 97% of scientists support the bogus AGW theory?

No. I mean assertions like yours that are made with no substantiating evidence.

Look, if those were the worst surveys ever conducted, how low could AGW support be? 85%? 75%?

If you really want to tell me and Wikipedia we're full of shit, find us the objective surveys of climate scientists that SHOW A DIFFERENT RESULT. It can't be that hard and I know you've got the funding.

Unless, perhaps, you already know what you'd find.

 

[Abraham3]

This is a recording of Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M discussing some basic risk analysis issues regarding acting on climate change warmings. Have a listen. See what you think. Tell us about it.

Decision making under uncertainty - YouTube

Muchas obligado.

Abraham

The 97% claim is bullshit, just like everything else warmist cult members claim:

ICECAP

By Larry Solomon, The National Post

[SPPI Note: Also see the Dennis Ambler SPPI report.

How do we know there’s a scientific consensus on climate change? Pundits and the press tell us so. And how do the pundits and the press know? Until recently, they typically pointed to the number 2500 - that’s the number of scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those 2500, the pundits and the press believed, had endorsed the IPCC position.

To their embarrassment, most of the pundits and press discovered that they were mistaken - those 2500 scientists hadn’t endorsed the IPCC’s conclusions, they had merely reviewed some part or other of the IPCC’s mammoth studies. To add to their embarrassment, many of those reviewers from within the IPCC establishment actually disagreed with the IPCC’s conclusions, sometimes vehemently.

The upshot? The punditry looked for and recently found an alternate number to tout - “97% of the world’s climate scientists” accept the consensus, articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere have begun to claim.

This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers - in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout.

The two researchers started by altogether excluding from their survey the thousands of scientists most likely to think that the Sun, or planetary movements, might have something to do with climate on Earth - out were the solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists and astronomers. That left the 10,257 scientists in disciplines like geology, oceanography, paleontology, and geochemistry that were somehow deemed more worthy of being included in the consensus. The two researchers also decided that scientific accomplishment should not be a factor in who could answer - those surveyed were determined by their place of employment (an academic or a governmental institution). Neither was academic qualification a factor - about 1,000 of those surveyed did not have a PhD, some didn’t even have a master’s diploma.

To encourage a high participation among these remaining disciplines, the two researchers decided on a quickie survey that would take less than two minutes to complete, and would be done online, saving the respondents the hassle of mailing a reply. Nevertheless, most didn’t consider the quickie survey worthy of response - just 3146, or 30.7%, answered the two questions on the survey:

1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?

2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

The questions were actually non-questions. From my discussions with literally hundreds of skeptical scientists over the past few years, I know of none who claims that the planet hasn’t warmed since the 1700s, and almost none who think that humans haven’t contributed in some way to the recent warming - quite apart from carbon dioxide emissions, few would doubt that the creation of cities and the clearing of forests for agricultural lands have affected the climate. When pressed for a figure, global warming skeptics might say that human are responsible for 10% or 15% of the warming; some skeptics place the upper bound of man’s contribution at 35%. The skeptics only deny that humans played a dominant role in Earth’s warming.

Surprisingly, just 90% of those who responded to the first question believed that temperatures had risen - I would have expected a figure closer to 100%, since Earth was in the Little Ice Age in the centuries immediately preceding 1800. But perhaps some of the responders interpreted the question to include the past 1000 years, when Earth was in the Medieval Warm Period, generally thought to be warmer than today.

As for the second question, 82% of the earth scientists replied that that human activity had significantly contributed to the warming. Here the vagueness of the question comes into play. Since skeptics believe that human activity been a contributing factor, their answer would have turned on whether they consider a 10% or 15% or 35% increase to be a significant contributing factor. Some would, some wouldn’t.

In any case, the two researchers must have feared that an 82% figure would fall short of a convincing consensus - almost one in five wasn’t blaming humans for global warming - so they looked for subsets that would yield a higher percentage. They found it - almost - in those whose recent published peer-reviewed research fell primarily in the climate change field. But the percentage still fell short of the researchers’ ideal. So they made another cut, allowing only the research conducted by those earth scientists who identified themselves as climate scientists.

Once all these cuts were made, 75 out of 77 scientists of unknown qualifications were left endorsing the global warming orthodoxy. The two researchers were then satisfied with their findings. Are you?

AGW surveyors do their work just like AGW scientists...cherry-pick, massage, and distort.

Mr Solomon statements about the surveyor's motives are completely anally derived. He (and you) ignore the point that publishing climate scientists are THE most expert of the experts in the precise question under examination. Their's was not the only survey to find that the more folks knew about the climate, the more likely they were to believe AGW a valid theory.

 

[Old Rocks]

And there is not a single Scientific Society, not a single National Academy of Science, not a single major University that contests AGW. Not even in outer Slobovia. That is a damned impressive consensus. And that is not 97%, that is 100%.

Of course, our little tin hat wearers will immediate posit a worldwide conspiracy among all of these scientists. Anyone with more than a two digit IQ just has to be in on some kind of conspiracy!