Bishop Hill Goot paper on consensus
Jun 4, 2011 Climate: HSI Climate: Models Climate: Sceptics Murray Goot of Macquarie University reviews papers on the scientific "consensus" on climate change. This is a reasonably balanced piece and not just because it mentions The Hockey Stick Illusion a couple of times.
In essence Goot's paper looks at the Oreskes and Anderegg studies as well as considering the polls of climatological opinion run by von Storch and Bray and concludes that there is a consensus that the majority of recent warming is down to CO2. I don't doubt that a majority of people working in the area of climate do think that way. The problem is that most of them only believe this because they have read about it in the IPCC reports. Perhaps of more interest are the views of the handful of people working on detection and attribution. Here, though, I imagine we would find absolute unanimity on the question of mankind's role in global warming, but even this would be unconvincing to many in view of the poor performance of the models against observations over the last decade.
Goot's consideration of the allegations of difficulties in getting sceptic views published is also interesting:
It is certainly possible that a sort of closed-shop is at work, with the majority of those who side with the orthodoxy applying tougher standards to those that challenge orthodox views than they apply to those like themselves who work within the consensus, and that the differential publication and citation figures reflect this. But those who insist that this is the case provide no systematic evidence for it. Of course, arguments from first principles apart (see, for example, Guston 2006, 383, for a Kuhnian gloss), the operation of a closed-shop is always difficult to show.
The point about the difficulties of demonstrating a closed shop is a good one, but one point that is worth making here is that it is not only sceptics who have claimed that the scientific literature is largely closed to them. Several of the Climategate emails suggest that mainstream climatologists believed that they had successfully shut off most journals to sceptics too.
It's one thing to lose "Climate Research". We can't afford to lose GRL.
The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there, but these guys always have "Climate Research" and "Energy and Environment", and will go there if necessary.
There is a very strong implication in these messages that all the other journals which publish climatology papers were closed to sceptics. I think we can probably say that there is something of a consensus on this question.
Reader Comments (13)
I am of the opinion that most of those people who are in a position to create or influence policy are persuaded by the precautionary principle, not the science.
The PP is easier to swallow and enables those who are persuaded to ignore the ups and downs of the debate.
Until this flawed principle is exposed, the establishment will continue to support the otherwise unsupportable energy policies currently being pursued.
Goot, get out, regard:
Cheshire solar feline grin.
Fur, far as I see.
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The skewing of the grant structures towards support of research to confirm the warming and it's effects also acts as a primary limiter on the availability of skeptical papers to be pubished.
The challenge for sceptics is in separating two distinct forms of consensus, and separating the breadth of potential futures that can be inferred from them. There is the consensus of opinion and the consensus of scientific evidence.
The former appears to exist, but is as meaningful as a consensus of opinion among priests on the question of god's existence. The latter is far less clear, and continues to carry prohibitively significant uncertainty.
There appears to be, broadly speaking, a consensus of evidence that man can, and probably does, have an impact on climate - land usage, deforestation, CO2 to the tune of a degree per doubling from pre-industrial levels etc) - but there is a notable absence of a consensus of evidence to suggest that these either have had damaging effects or carry catastrophic potential.
In order to support these alarming predictions, advocates for action against CO2 rest entirely on the consensus of opinion rather than a consensus of evidence. That is to say that alarmism is non-scientific and faith-based, while its proponents pretend it is science-based.
I respect that people have faith in things that are not, or cannot be, proven. I don't begrudge Christians or Muslims their faith. But I do feel that it is important for them (and us) to recognise that their beliefs are not scientific in foundation, and I feel that it is important in this world to distinguish between those things that one believes despite a lack of evidence to support the belief and those things which are tangible and based on scientific evidence. Without this distinction between what is faith and what is science, we risk slipping back centuries of mankind's advancements in reasoning.
The world changes and religions rise and fall - society- and even empire-toppling faiths without more than superficial reason or rationale - but I suspect that none of us could or would have predicted that the greatest challenge to centuries of scientific advancement would come from within the scientific establishment itself, nor that the idol of the new religion might be in the form of the power and predictions of a man-made, silicon-based computer. Yet, unless there is a determined and adamant return to strictly observational, evidence-based sciences, there remains the potential for this challenge to science to go unanswered.
Any Australian seeing the name 'Garnaut' in the URL would shudder at the probable content -- Ross Garnaut is "chief climate change adviser" for the Labour Federal Government which is trying to ram through an unpopular and pointless 'carbon tax'.
The "Popular" Press is always the Last to change. (... as has been noted numerous times in the past, there is more of radical socialist politics than unadulturated science in the world of climatology.) "Go Web, young man, and grow up with the world." Go Web!
If by detection and attribution, you mean actual falsifiable tests of Enhanced Greenhouse Effect (EGE), then there are several:
1) Failure of the planet to warm globally to the degree models said it would.
(After 23 years of failure, the inference is that their "hindcasts" have failed
to properly model recent decades climate change, and therefore "project" false temp ranges.)
2) Failure to measure or detect the tropical lower tropospheric Hot Spot, as Ben Santer's
climate physics work predicted in AR4 and before.
3) Failure to measure recent record warming in the US state-by-state record high temperature records; by this measure, the hottest decade is still the 1930s, not 1990s or 2000s.
4) Failure of the US records to find decreased diurnal temperature range - which increased CO2 SHOULD produce - when temperature measuring station quality is controlled for only the highest quality (ie, least corrupted by LUC/UHI), stations. (ie, the current Pielke, Sr and Watts Paper in GRL.)
This needs to be repeated with likely temp data sources from the Aussie, New Zealand, and British surface records, as per US rubrics.
5) The failure to find decreasing out-going radiation that satellites measure because of CO2 scatter (ie, see Linden & Choi 2011, the improved L&C version originally from May 2009/)
If the posited mechanism for global warming is falisified, then what happens to man-mad global warming fears? Poof.
DOES ANYONE care to add to this list?
@ Peter Dunford
you are very right.
This is a reviewer's comment to a paper by Garth Paltridge, eminent meteorologist and climate scientist, who still follows the scientific method (see more here )
Simon
Spot on. Could not have said it better myself.
Hope you don't mind if I quote you.
"precautionary principle"
Using the PP, the United States "MUST" launch a nuclear first strike against Great Britain as GB "may" launch one on the US. :-)
Patagon's short comment, two above, surely gets to the heart of the skeptics 'plaint: sound science means taking account of uncertainty, measuring the difference of scientific methods, and gauging which are rock-solidly sound - versus the dodgy, speculative and unfoundedly alarmist.
The skeptic's brief is thus two-fold: no seat at the table of science (and thereby policy-making), and not following best practices of science (ie, AGW alarm is unscientific pablum, well-dressed up and papered over).
Therefore, the logical question: does Goot's paper advance the skeptic's case? To whom?
More signs of confected "concensus" - and that the Apocalypse is nigh:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/05/3235873.htm?section=justin
I found it difficult to read this piece, especially because the matter of how many climate scientists can dance in agreement on the head of a pin is irrelevant to any argument about climate science. Since Galileo, the fallacy of argumentum ad populum has been well established, and it is rather surprising that Murray would be engaged to explore whether the fallacy holds in this particular case.
What worried me more was that Murray both cites me and gets it horribly wrong. In the middle of a titanic sentence of 159 woards, Murray included the following parenthetical remark (on p6):
'(Bray and von Storch 2007, fig. 30; badly misrepresented by Kellow 2007, 73, a defender of Peiser)'
I found this a surprising remark, because Hans von Storch was kind enough to write to me to tell me that my book was accurate in the elements with which he was familiar. How then had I 'badly misrepresented' fig. 30 in Bray and von Storch, 2007?
The answer is that it would have been extremely difficult for me to have misrepresented anything in Bray and von Storch, 2007, because that manuscript was received for publication in May 2007, when my book was already in press.
In fact, I quoted Dennis Bray as he was quoted in the Sunday Telegraph, on 1 May 2005 — fully two years before the submisison by he and Hans von Storch of the paper to which Murray Goot refers. The Sunday Telegraph states:
'Prof Dennis Bray, of the GKSS National Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, submitted results from an international study showing that fewer than one in 10 climate scientists believed that climate change is principally caused by human activity.'
My book on p73 states:
'Science published a correction by Oreskes (Oreskes,2005), but it refused to publish a letter from Dr Benny Peiser which showed that her numbers could not be replicated, and another from Dr Dennis Bray reporting a survey ofclimate scientists showing that fewer than one in ten considered that climate change was principally caused by human activity. Dr Bray told the UK paper the Sunday Telegraph that Science had informed him his paper ‘didn’t fit with what they were intending to publish.'
The issue was Oreskes mis-stating her methodology, stating in her paper that she searched for 'clmate change' rather than the search term she actually used: 'global climate change'. I stated in my book:
'But a search of the ISI database using ‘climate change’ produced 12000 papers, and Oreskes was forced to admit after science journalist David Appell (the owner of the blog where Mann had first mounted his defence) challenged her on his website (within 12 days of publication) that she had used the three keywords ‘global climate change’, which reduced the return by an order of magnitude.'
Note who nailed Oreskes on the deceit: David Appell was no friend of cliamte sceptics.
I have been seriously misrepresented by Murray Goot, and I think he owes me an apology.