Well if you can use highly questionable and ideologically skewed websites as the basis for your arguments, you can't really object if we do the same can you?
I won't hold it against you for using such sites because, let's face it, it's pretty much all you've got. But it's good to hear someone on your side of the argument admit that
at least some of your sources are "highly questionable and ideologically skewed". However...
The only website referenced in my post is
IOPscience. If you think IOP is a biased site, I suggest you look a little further into the matter. There was also a secondary reference to Environmental Research Letters (a journal). If you think THEY are "highly questionable and ideologically skewed", I again suggest you've failed to do your homework.
So in rebuttal:
The new paper from climate clowns Cook & Nuccitelli et al has just been published open-access online in Environmental Research Letters.
I haven't seen Cook or Nuccitelli calling anyone "clowns". This must be a trait of superior intellectual prowess and debating rigour that I'd somehow missed.
According to the authors, of 11,944 climate abstracts from 1991-2011, "66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW [anthropogenic global warming], 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming."
No. The "authors of 11,944 climate abstracts" made no such statement. This is a quote from Cook & Nuccitelli's abstract, used without giving proper credit.
Of the only 32.6% of papers that endorsed AGW, one would expect 100% endorsement of AGW by the authors of those 32.6% of papers, yet Cook finds somewhat less agreement of 97.1% even amongst scientists who already endorsed AGW in their papers.
No. I have just re-reviewed Cook et al's letter and I do not find this point nor do I find the value 97.1% applied anywhere to self-assessment results.
A more pertinent point along these lines is that a significant number of authors whose abstracts were rated as expressing no opinion or rejecting AGW, stated when asked that their papers (ie, not just the abstracts that Cook et al rated)
supported the IPCC position. In Table 5 we see that the rate of IPCC endorsement went from 36.9% (per abstracts) to 62.7% (per self-ratings). The rate of no-position abstracts was found to be 62.5% but dropped to 35.5% among the self-rated evaluations. That is,
more than half the authors whose abstracts had been rated to express
no position stated that their papers
expressly endorsed the IPCC position. And, finally, supporting your side's claims of growing disagreement, the number of papers rejecting the IPCC position in their abstracts
tripled when authors were surveyed, going from 0.6% to 1.8%.
Even if one trusts the methods of Cook & Nuccitelli et al, who have repeatedly been shown to distort & torture data and apply inappropriate statistical methods,
Where? By who?
their paper only indicates a 32.6*0.971 = 31.6% non-consensus endorsement of AGW in the climate literature.
Again, NO. Your math is incorrectly applied. They found 32.6% of ALL abstracts to endorse AGW. Those endorsing papers made up 97.1% of all papers EXPRESSING AN OPINION. Multiplying those two numbers produces a meaningless value.
Over and over again the folks on your side of the argument keep trying to claim that not expressing an opinion is equivalent to rejecting the IPCC position and the theory of AGW. IT IS NOT. Anyone who says so, implicitly or explicitly
IS LYING TO YOU
And within this paragraph is the link again to this very well researched summary at Wattsupwiththat:
cook Nuccitelli | Search Results | Watts Up With That?
Wattsup, however, is a highly respected investigated and research site often quoted by those both on the left and right and cannot be legitamately accused of ideological bias.
Where in
GOD'S name did you get
THAT idea?!?!?
A few days ago I suggested you look up the technical qualifications of Anthony Watts, Willis Eschenbach, Bob Tisdale, Steve McIntyre and Christopher Monckton. I'm going to take a wild guess that you didn't do that.
Anthony Watts never finished college. There is actually some doubt whether or not he ever attended. He was a television weatherman who started a company providing weather-related computer graphics to local news outlets around the country and got quite rich. He got a bug up his butt about urbanization around NWS weather stations causing higher temperature readings - his original hypothesis was that this Urban Heat Island effect (UHI) was the actual cause of perceived global warming. That, of course, turned out to be complete nonsense but he's milked it for all its worth. Watts is NOT highly respected. Investigations of his work and almost all the third party material he hosts, have shown it to be seriously and consistently flawed. NO ONE among actual climate scientists quotes or cites Watts save when writing about the follies of climate change deniers. Sorry to bust your bubble, but as far as real science goes, Watts is less than nobody. Do feel free to look him up yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Watts_(blogger)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Watts_(meteorologist)
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Anthony_Watts
http://www.desmogblog.com/anthony-watts
http://www.webcommentary.com/php/ShowAuthor.php?id=wattsa
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Anthony_Watts
http://www.whoislog.info/profile/anthony-watts-1.html