Friday
Sep132013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill In the Australian
Sep 13, 2013 Climate: other I have an article up in the Australian based on my GWPF report on the Cook et al "Consensus" paper.
A close examination of what was done shows the paper is built of straw. The authors’ basic approach was to review the abstracts of scientific papers on the subject of climate change, assessing the extent to which they endorsed the global warming “consensus”. However, this first required a definition of what that consensus was about: there is widespread agreement, including among sceptics, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that humankind is therefore capable of warming the planet, so the main focus of debate is over how much warming may take place.
You can read the whole thing here.
Reader Comments (14)
Ah, the 'peer review' cosh . . .
And actually, I'm perfectly qualified to peer-review Andrew's paper, and it seems fine by me. Any other peer-reviewers out there? I'm sure we have plenty.
Well the mods buggered that up. Carry on . . .
Don't feed the troll Capell!
Well, is it 97% or 99% as our great leader Barroso pronounced while getting tetchy with Farage?
Anyway, how many scientists are we talking about?
This is the error matrix from the Cook paper raw data (rat1 is first time when someone rated a paper, rat2 was the second time they did it):
rat2
rat1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
0 0 0 1 2 38 1 0 0
1 0 0 66 38 13 1 0 0
2 1 27 0 430 235 4 0 0
3 2 15 337 0 1510 3 2 0
4 13 7 138 904 0 25 2 0
5 0 0 1 4 32 0 3 4
6 0 0 0 0 9 10 0 3
7 0 0 1 1 0 1 2 0
Read the row across row marked '1' under rat1 and the column under '1' in rat2. These are 167 papers rated as "explictly supporting consensus with explicitly statement that man is causing >50% warming". Each time they did it, they couldn't reproduce it.
Using their system if they could not rate papers correctly for the most clear group of the hard consensus, what chance there is, of reliably identifying a soft consensus?
Granting them they identified *anything* in this paper, is being generous.
Excellent work your Grace..but..the initial lie escaped and still spreads..
And the sheepeople repeat it without checking..or caring..
Good work, Mr. Bishop.
Always a pleasure to have your work published in the local press.
BTW, for next time, it's The Australian (note capital T). Its circulation is small, but it is read by every politician, business figure and mover or shaker in this wide brown land. Not to mention by nobodies like your humble correspondent.
Yes CO2 is a GHG, yes humans emit CO2 through burning of fossil fuels, but the relationship between CO2 and rising temperatures is now, after 15 years of static/cooling trend, statistically invalid. So, how can humans be warming the planet based on their CO2 emissions?
[O/T]
[O/T]
Does anyone know any other branch of science that has needed such a paper to garner support for its conclusions? Or is it another first for climatology: to accompany the verification of a hypothesis with computer models, rather than experiment.
Bish, how could my post be off topic?
It directly relates to something you said in your original post.