Friday
Nov052010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill That SciAm survey
Nov 5, 2010 Climate: IPCC Climate: WG3 The recent Scientific American survey on climatology issues has been widely criticised, and the powers that be at the magazine must be regretting ever launching it now that the results are out. As Climate Change Dispatch reports, 81% think that the IPCC is corrupt and 65% think we should take no action over climate change.
Reader Comments (26)
Quelle surprise...
Presumably consensus is not the favourite scientific buzzword anymore
Now that *is* interesting. And I'm a bit surprised at the scale of the (negative) response - not that I had any idea how it would go.
Yet another internet poll goes horribly, horribly wrong...
"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
Abraham Lincoln
Love it. Despite the best efforts of a hugely overmanned PR machine the catastrophiliacs have been unable to scare the public from independent thought (although they have created an expensive mess which is the next item on the agenda).
So, does this reflect the views of the whole SciAm readership, or is it mostly another product of internet-poll canvassing? Either explanation seems plausible.
I'm sure it's just that the issue was getting a lot of airplay on sceptic blogs.
Did Bob 'lightning' Ward participate?
@Don Pablo de la Sierra
The problem is, you can fool most of the people most of the time. That's what they count on.
That said, the comments are worth reading.
1 Should climate scientists discuss scientific uncertainty in mainstream forums?
No, that would play into the hands of the fossil-fuel lobby. 3.0% 157
Yes, it would help engage the citizenry. 90.1% 4,673
Oh dear , looks like Bob has his work cut out for him.
But remember folks only trained scientists can have a valid opinion on the climate , and they only if it’s the right ‘opinion’ .
SciAm have this to say on the outcome:
"It's unfortunate—although in hindsight not surprising—that certain people would take the opportunity to manipulate the results by repeat voting."
Surely watermellons would not stoop so low!
"More alarming, when the green buyers were then given a chance to cheat on a computer game, and lie about it to the scientists in order to win more money—basically, to steal—they did. Buyers of conventional products did not. And in an honor system in which they took money from an envelope to pay themselves their winnings, the green buyers stole six times more than the conventional buyers did."
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/03/08/environmental-hypocrisy.html
His Grace:
I'm not so sure. Obviously there's an activist-bias with such things - only those exercised about the issue bother to fill out the form. But the fact that there are so many more activists on the broadly sceptical side by now is hugely significant - and bound to affect the totality of public opinion as time progresses.
It reminds me of last Christmas, at my sister's, with a goodly smattering of in-laws, who were of very different ages and backgrounds. We had one, fierce discussion of the AGW issue. It was fierce only because we were competing to say what a fraud it was! Not everyone spoke - some just listened. Nobody at all tried to defend what is still, laughably, called the mainstream view. Even I was listened to, carefully, as I explained Climategate and the rest, A rare experience I assure you!
Through such means the word gets out. I was the only one there who'd studied Maths at Cambridge or anything like it. Rightly or wrongly, that affected it. The guy who wrote Crossing the Chasm understood the importance of the early committers, the influencers. Multiply it across the world ... and this poll tells you more about the future than you might think. The game's up, barring totalitarian use of the coercive force of government.
And, as I was saying to Josh the other day (and he was saying back to me), this means among other things that The Hockey Stick Illusion has a very big future indeed. A slow burner, I think they call it.
Maybe some publishers/advertisers etc will now realise that continued support for the EcoFascists is not the correct business decision.
David Cameron still won't get it though, will he?
@ZT
"Did Bob 'lightning' Ward participate?"
He's a bot, didn't you know?
I was just communicating to some friends that James Delingpole gets far more support than the Moonbigot. See their respective blog articles about last night's Channel 4 programme on greens.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100062459/why-being-green-means-never-having-to-say-youre-sorry/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/nov/05/stewart-brand-pesticide
Yep - it's not unknown for the Greens to cheat on polls - this article on Deltoid for instance where Tim Lambert is urging readers to vote on a poll as to whether Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" should be shown in Australian schools with comment no. 3 advising how to register multiple votes.
May explain why the poll with a 53% no vote on 3196 votes with 20 hours to go (comment 24) ended up with a 61% yes vote on 5133 votes (so that in those closing hours yes votes outnumbered no votes by more than 4 to 1).
Interesting article on Deltoid though particularly as one of the commenters (8) included a direct link to the judge's findings on AIT - which was in direct contrast to what Tim Lambert was trying to claim.
It never ceases to amaze me at how CAGW proponents always seem to accuse others of what they themselves are most guilty of.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/10/an_inconvenient_truth_to_be_sh.php
If you can fool some of the people some of the time, it's usually adequate!
People should take the SciAm poll with a pinch of salt!
I mean even Dung voted.
I wonder if the same two skipped all eight questions. If so, why TF did they bother?
Haha. The power of the blogosphere strikes again.
John in France & Political Junkie
The problem is, you can fool most of the people most of the time. That's what they count on.
If you can fool some of the people some of the time, it's usually adequate!
I quite agree, but when you push it for more than say six months, people start to notice and after a couple years, most of them are wise to the lie. I think that has clearly happened to Global Warming or whatever they are calling it this week. And trying to find a new cause célèbre with Ocean Acidification is falling on deaf ears.
And this is not to say that they won't find a new cause célèbre because they always do. It just will not have anything to do with CO2. Maybe they will decide that there is too much nitrogen in the air.
Marion: It never ceases to amaze me at how CAGW proponents always seem to accuse others of what they themselves are most guilty of.
It never ceases to amaze me too, how CAGW proponents always seem to accuse others of what they themselves are most guilty of.
It never ceases to amaze me how liars, fraudsters and usurpers always seem to accuse others of what they themselves are most guilty of.
Having said which, I thought the poll and its results were extremely interesting and encouraging, for all that WUWT commenters noted the poll's unscientific inexactitude. Commonsense at last given a place of honour. I've been waiting a long time.
I stopped buying Scientific American about 15 years ago when the editors became absolute wing-nuts over global warming hysteria. No matter what surveys tell them, these editors are forever going to be CAGW wing-nuts. A once good general science magazine is doomed to obscurity, yet another casualty of the green/Gaia/enviro-loons.
Sad; I learned a lot about science from Scientific American as a kid.
Internet polls are every bit as exacting and valid as slicing open some goat's intestines...