Bishop Hill Clouting the consensus
Sep 8, 2014 GWPF I have a briefing note out at the GWPF, updating my earlier report on the Cook 97% consensus study with all the interesting new details that have emerged in recent months. Here's the press release.
London, 8 September: A new briefing note published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation examines claims made by a great many commentators across the world, including President Obama and Ed Davey, of an overwhelming consensus on climate change. These depend on research that has been subject to public and entirely unrebutted allegations that it is fraudulent.
Although the authors of the research claim to have shown that most climate change papers accept that mankind is responsible for the majority of recent warming, in fact the underlying study shows no such thing.
One senior climatologist described the paper as ‘poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed’. Another researcher called it ‘completely invalid and untrustworthy’, adding that there was evidence of scientific fraud.Andrew Montford, the author of the note, said: “It has now been shown beyond doubt that the claims of a 97% consensus on climate change are at best misleading, perhaps grossly so, and possibly deliberately so. It’s high time policymakers stopped citing this appalling study.”
You can read the note here.
Reader Comments (55)
Will Your Grace be going to the Cook meeting in Bristol on the 19th? Last I heard Anthony was coming over from Chico.
It was designed as a piece of propaganda to be used by politicians. It would only succeed if the politicians were either gullible incompetent or disingenuous. Given that those attributes describe 97% of politicians the strategy was pretty much guaranteed to succeed.
Reversing the process will be a tall order. What is the prospect of e.g. Lord Deben reading your piece Bish? Hope you send him the link then at least he cannot claim ignorance.
Be wasted on Ed Davey without you do it in pictures.
I don't know why Andrew Montford keeps flogging this dead horse.
The generally accepted paradigm is that insolation and plate tectonics drive climate, with CO2 changes driven by temperature under most natural conditions and acting as an amplifier of temperature change. Apply that to our current situation and you get AGW.
Arguing over the exact number of scientists who accept the paradigm is nit-picking propaganda. It does not matter whether it is Cook's 97% or Tol's 91%.
Anyone convinced the current paradigm is wrong should directly address the science and seek strong enough evidence to drive a paradigm shift.
I am reminded of Bush's "either you are with us or you are with the terrorists" statement. It appears to me that the SKS boys and girls would rally against that sentiment yet in a display of unparalleled hypocrisy apply it so totally to their worldview on climate matters.
Nice to have this summarised minus the odd language Monckton used in his version. You might want to add in Duarté's latest notes:
http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/cooking-stove-use-housing-associations-white-males-and-the-97
"I don't know why Andrew Montford keeps flogging this dead horse."
I suppose it has something to do with the scientific method, statistical rigour, repeatability, integrity, honesty, search for truth etc.
But then again who cares about these minor matters?
Entropic man
And your summary is what you believe the Cook paper to have used as the basis for its "consensus", is it?
One of the problems identified by the note - did you read it? - is that it does not say exactly what the "consensus" was about. Which meant that its recipients were all able to persuade themselves that 97% believed what they (the recipient) believed.
And what do you mean by "amplify"? By how much? Is there a consensus on the amount of amplification? If so, what is it?
But which consensus?
The consensus of paleoclimatologists who believed Mann's hockey stick graph truly represented past climate or the one that prefers to forget about it now since skeptics exposed it as more hokey than hockey?
The consensus that dismissed the skeptical idea that the pdo shift could have caused the pre-pause warming or the one that now embraces the concept to explain the subsequent pause that was predicted by skeptics?
The consensus that said Europe would get warmer with climate change leading to more heat waves or the one that said it would get colder due to an unphysical gulf stream shift?
The consensus that said the Antarctic should get warmer with manmade warming or the one that said the Antarctic was expected to be cooler anyway or the one that said they had now rejigged the data to show the Antarctic warms after all or the one that said the Antarctic cooling was now known to be caused by warming?
All they can seemingly agree on in this consensus is that they are always wrong and I'm not in the least skeptical of that.
In the GWPF note His Grace says, about a paper rated in Cooke et al as supporting the Consensus of the "Standard Definition"( ie that CLIMATE CHANGE IS MAN MADE AND DANGEROUS) which was written by an author( Shaviv) who has stated that he does not subscribe to that position :-
"The treatment of the Shaviv paper is particularly interesting: its author did not actively downplay global warming in the text because this would have made it difficult to get the paper through peer review."
This statement, if true, is a complete demolition of the peer review process conducted by the journal(s)? to which the Shaviv paper was submitted.
It would be most illuminating if His Grace could provide some information about the source of the information behind the statement.
EM
The 97% consensus is still being cited by politicians. People need to know that the number is not kosher.
WFC
I read Cook et al and Montford's note. I don't understand why he keeps on about this when he accepts the paradigm. His summary says that most people accept Cook's consensus, including most sceptics. Montford then spends 20 more pages saying much the same. Seems like wasted effort.
I define the consensus position as acceptance of the paradigm described though there is, as you would expect, endless argument over the details.
For example "amplify" in this context refers to climate sensitivity. The physics puts a minimum of about 1C/doubling to equilibrium for the direct effect. The additional forcing depends on how much secondary forcing you expect. The 20th century temperature record suggests a minimum of 1.6. Milankivich cycle data suggests about 4. The most pessimistic expectations about secondary forcing give 6+. IPCC settled on 3 +/- 1.5.
Bishop Hill
The number doesn't matter. The sceptics make a big fuss about it and the politicians react against it.
The real questions are
1) Is the science valid? On this,as you said, there is general agreement with the IPCC's position.
2) How much will our civilisation be affected and what should we do about it? This is a question for policy makers, which ultimately means the politicians.
Deciding science by vote is silly, but politics is all about votes, which is probably why you are making such a disproportionate fuss about a trivial issue.
@Entropic man: the Milankovich cycle only predicts 4x positive feedback if that warming is assumed to be from CO2. In turn that presumes no other explanation. But there is another explanation; reduction of cloud albedo by aerosols, the sign of the AIE is reversed; Sagan got that physics diametrically wrong.
You explain much recent warming and the end of ice ages by this second optical effect. Real CO2-AGW is near zero; until 'atmospheric science' realises that, it is condemned to go in increasingly tighter circles and we all know where that will end!
EM you really don't care do you?
Entropic man
The only "consensus" therefore is as regards the "other things being equal" , doubling ACO2 would be expected to increase surface temps by 1 deg over 100 years or so. Where the consensus breaks down is in considering what other things would not be equal, and the effects thereof.
BTW I think I'm right in saying that the latest IPCC report refrained from settling on any sensitivity figure.
'Poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed’. Don't forget we are talking about Climate Science here.
EM, why do you bother commenting on this? You're interesting on the science. Cook et al isn't science, it's propaganda. However, politicians think it's science - and the Bishop is trying to make clear to them that it isn't. It's not flogging a dead horse - it's cutting up the carcase so it can be carted away, before the smell makes the place uninhabitable.
The 97% statistic stinks so much that all who deploy it to deceive are defiled by it, and they are rendered more identifiable as ill-informed zealots.
The clouding of the consensus. The fog of CAGWar.
=========
Turned out nice
The driver of glacial cycles is most likely insolation changes at high Northern latitudes, amplified by secondary feedbacks of which CO2 and water vapour are the most significant.
The snag with regarding cloud as a negative feedback is that the default state for the planet is a hothouse some 5C warmer than the present. Strong cloud negative feedbacks should have prevented that if they existed. As our information improves, clouds are looking like a net positive feedback.
WFC
The lack of consensus is indeed in the sensitivity debate, and its consequences for our civilisation.
IPCC did not set explicit sensitivities, but they are implicit in the CO2 and temperature changes they projected.
Alan Reed, osseo
I have children and soon may have grandchildren. While the discussion of the 97% itself is trivial, BH is trying to use it leverage an inappropriate response to the climate change problem. That is why I care.
Counting papers was never going to do anything but confirm what anyone who reads the science already knew, viz, to use Richard Tol's response:
"There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct"
So the exact percentage is moot. But Duarte needs to switch to decaff:-, the few minor deviations from strict research protocol discussed in the leaked forum could never affect the arithmetic much, any more than the handful of disgruntled sceptics moaning about being miscategorised were more than a flea-bite on the mountain of evidence collected.
The shrill response to the paper has been quite a bit more interesting than the paper itself; remember that it had two main parts, this 'note' is all about the rating of abstracts by volunteers, the other half was rating of whole papers by their authors. By this method the number of studies that endorsed the consensus? Oh it was 97%.
The abstracts and the ratings are online at SkS; it would be the work of a few mandays to re-rate a statistically significant sample using a 'pristine' rating method and show the 97 number is bunk. Something Watts or Steve 'FOI' McIntyre could easily crowdsource in a week or less. Of course they won't and we know why they won't.
Hmmm. That makes me think - if ratings collected by poorly supervised and unqualified volunteers organised by a website with a particular position are unacceptable in the literature, what does that mean for surfacestations.org? ;-)
EM.....
"The snag with regarding cloud as a negative feedback is that the default state for the planet is a hothouse some 5C warmer than the present."
For the last 2.3 Million years the default climate has been for continental glaciation in both hemispheres with average temps 8 deg C below current average of +/- 15 deg C for 90% of the time and only 11 brief intervals of conditions as warm ( or warmer than) the Holocene InterGacial).
If you want to cite a period when hothouse was the default condition you have to go back to before the opening of the Drake Passage 34 million years ago.
David Whitehead
I earlier mentioned plate tectonics as a climate factor.
One of the factors permitting significant Arctic and Antarctic cooling and an icehouse Earth is the blocking of ocean currents carrying heat to high latitudes. The opening/closing of the Drake Passage is one example; open it permits a circumpolar Southern Ocean current which isolates Antarctica, closed it forces meridional currents which warm the continent..
In the North, the partial enclosure of the Arctic by America, Europe and Asia has a similar isolating and cooling effect. Without these, even Milankovich cooling is insufficient to produce polar icecaps/ice sheets and hothouse Earth conditions are normal, as happened until 2 million years ago..
EM....
The Plate tectonic arrangement presently in place ( as described by EM ) will continue to exist for at least several million years. This geography results in the default global climate being "Icehouse" and the possibility of a return to "Hothouse" global climate is vanishingly small.
Consequently atmospheric CO2 concentration is modulated by the temperature variations of +/- 8C between N.Hemisphere Glacial and InterGlaciial conditions.
The proposition that the global temperature is modulated by atmospheric CO2 concentration and this is driven by the very small proportion of CO2 flux resulting from fossil fuel combustion is , to say the least ,highly speculative and certainly unproven.
Entropic Man please explain
Why are your children being selfish to the planet by having their own children .E M You know full well the planet cant sustain them.Then unrestricted breeding of those extra Consuming Human Carbon Footprints .
That is the crime of Ecocide.
You're the one who claims to care about the planet.
David Attenborough he rightly did describe mankind as a plague on the planet.You,re adding to it.
Irresponsibly freely having children.You say you,re concerned about the impact mankind is having on the planet and you're proudly looking forward to having Grand Kids ,setting a bad example.
Mother Earth our planet cant afford you,re grand kids sorry.
Kate Middleton having another Royal baby is another burden on the British Taxpayer and Entropic,s future grand children is another burden on the planet.
Sep 8, 2014 at 11:41 AM | Entropic man
"Anyone convinced the current paradigm is wrong should directly address the science and seek strong enough evidence to drive a paradigm shift."
But Delingpole, Montford, Ridley, Lawson don't think the current paradigm is wrong. They all believe that CO2 is a warming gas. Yet 25% of all CO2 emissions were during the past 18 years and have caused no warming.
The Cook paper is propaganda. However they should stop bitching about it and apply scientific method to their own beliefs.
jamspid, are you proposing that only deniers be allowed to have kids?
Entropic man
As you say ... "projected". Not predicted, or forecast, but "projected".
There is a door at my Aunt's house, which records my height increasing from when I was a toddler. If I was to take those measurements and "project" them into the future, what height do you think I would now (many years later) be "projected" to be?
And (more to the point) of what value would such a projection be?
Do you seriously not remember when science was about making predictions - not projections?
I hope it's acceptable to link to my own brief comment on Cook et al' 2013: http://dereksorensen.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/ninety-seven-percent/
Whilst not as thorough as The Bish's note, it is a quite a bit shorter.
EM thank you.
I'm not so keen to leave my grandchildren a world where this Cook study passes for science.
David Whitehouse
There are precedents for CO2 driving temperature. Consider the snowball earth recoveries, the end of the Permean, the Deccan and Siberian Traps and the PETM.
All show signs of the sort of non-temperature related CO2 release we are carrying out, and all led to temperature rises. The Permean and PETM showed rises in temperature which severely disrupted the existing ecosystems.
I would prefer not to risk a repetition. The planet would survive, but our civilisation might not.
WFC
Please define for me the difference between a forecast, a projection and a prediction I find the difference obscure.
The IPCC is tasked to produce if/then scenarios; if we increase CO2 at a particular rate this is what we should probably expect.
Would you call this a forecast a prediction or a projection? And does the precise terminology matter?
EM
The quanta of CO2 releases by Deccan Trap and Siberian volcanism were entirely different from that of current anthropogenic releases of CO2 which only amount to 3-4% of total CO2 fluxes of biogenic and ocean released CO2 . By comparison volcanogenic CO2 releases in the Permian and Jurassic were several orders of magnitude larger than current total fluxes of which the anthropogenic component is small enough to be almost neglegable.
The causes for the PETM are not known and may or may not have been CO2 related - the event lasted about 85ka - quite short in geological terms
Entropic man
"Please define for me the difference between a forecast, a projection and a prediction I find the difference obscure."
You have that in common with many politicians and journalists, but I'll have a bash.
A forecast = I think this will happen in the near future, but only on certain (out of my control) conditions.
A prediction = if x and y is done, then z will be the result.
A projection = if I have a pencil, and the ability to see the way in which a graph is going, then I can use my pencil to draw a line which will carry on that graph in the same direction as before.
"The IPCC is tasked to produce if/then scenarios"
Is it?
Since when?
"....the snowball earth recoveries, the end of the Permean, the Deccan and Siberian Traps and the PETM..." were all more likely caused by the reverse of what caused the cooling in the first place. CO2 cannot cause cooling except by massive and sudden CO2 sinks appearing out of nowhere. Or you just could should look at the Younger Dryas and tell us what caused that since there is no correlation with CO2 whatsoever. Even the 'snowball Earth recovery' half-theory was ruled out by Lowell Stott by more careful and focused investigation. You cannot understand nature just by looking only at the parts of the data that confirm your dogma but rather by the data that contradicts it. This is the primary climate science fail! Taken as a whole, the data tells us in several different ways that whatever drives planetary temperature, it is certainly not CO2, which is at most a feeble, unmeasurable feedback. The reason why too many scientists prefer not to see this blindingly obvious conclusion has clearly nothing to do with the actual science.
WFC
Thank you. I tend to use prediction where you would use projection, and vica versa.
By your definition the IPCC is doing prediction.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up in 1988 to collate current science and advise government policy makers on the probable outcomes of different policy options. Hence the RCPs.
The IPCC does not itself decide policy. That is what we elect politicians to do.
David Whitehouse
The snowball earths started when weathering induced by mountain building ran CO2 right down; worldwide glaciation ensued. The weathering and the biosphere almost shut down. High albedo kept it cold until gradually increasing CO2 broke the freeze. Meets my criteria. Insolation was 6% lower then, so I doubt we can expect a repeat.
5C and 80ppm less puts us into glacial conditions. 5C and 80ppm more puts us into the Pliocene. The changes we observe now are enough to significantly change our climate.
JamesG
There are impact spherules scattered around the Arctic dating from the onset of the Younger Dryas. An impact at high Northern latitudes is looking more likely as the cause.
CO2 would not be involved.The search is on for a crater. Petroleum geologists prospecting a thawing Arctic may do the job, as they did at Chicxulub.
Could you give me a link to the Lowell Stott work? A quick literature search found him, but no papers matching your description.
Not particularly to anybody (who might call himself 'Entropic Man' or not):
This flogged horse most certainly is a dead one. Lot of people know that already.
However, not only is this particular flogged horse very dead, that same horse has been pointed at by many others as evidence of how healthy and in total harmony all their horses are. It has even been put forward as proof for the health of all of them.
I most certainly would say that all those who've held up this particular dead horse as an argument for how alive and kicking their stable of stallions is, have identified them selves as equally dead horses. And should (metaphorically, of course) be flogged in public for their endorsement.
There are definitely a whole lot of unflogged but dead horses still around out there, who pretend to be something entirely else!
;-)
EM
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-09/uosc-cdd092507.php
"Carbon dioxide did not end the last Ice Age:
Deep-sea temperatures rose 1,300 years before atmospheric CO2, ruling out the greenhouse gas as driver of meltdown, says study in Science."
JamesG
Yes I knowthat CO2 did not end the last glaciation. Milankovich changes in_Earth's orbit drove that. The warming temperatures then caused CO2 release from carbon sinks which amplified the change.
Incidentally, I saw no mention in Stott#s paper of CO2 and snowball earths, which was what you had said he discussed.
EM
I had always assumed that the IPCC was doing predictions (as its reports generally confirm), but Kevin Trenberth insist that they are only doing projections.
Does the different nomenclature matter? Yes of course it does ... how on earth can you discuss things (outside politics, obviously) unless the words you use mean the same thing to both of you?
Appropos your discussion re previous alleged CO2 amplification, if you look at the Vostok sample - the one which really kick-started the whole thing, from the public's point of view - you will find falling temperatures during periods of high ACO2, and rising temperatures during periods of low ACO2.
I would be interested if you can identify a single period where ACO2 appears to have amplified an existing warming tendency.
EM
Just to amend my previous post: " ... you will find falling temperatures during periods of high [and increasing] ACO2, and rising temperatures during periods of low [and falling] ACO2 ..."
EM
Regarding your last post citing Snowball Earth ( the Sturtian Glaciation of the Neo-Proterozoic) you are evidently relying on the speculation of Godders et al ( 2003) who MODELLED atmospheric CO2 based on the assumption that lavas resulting from intense basaltic magmatism were weathered under hothouse climatic conditions at the the commencement of the breakup of the Rodinia super continent around 735mya.
They ASSUMED a pre-glacial PCO2 of 280ppmv - conveniently equal to the most recent Holocene ice core level that can be measured - and concluded that Glaciation was initiated when CO2 levels fell below 135 ppmv - again conveniently about the same as ice core CO2 levels at the Last Glacial Maximum.
I think I will leave this exchange at this point - taking up too much time when I should be sailing!
Kaffman and Xiao ( 2003) concluded from the study of calcareous micro-fauna that CO2 levels in the Neo-Proterozoic atmosphere were 10 to 200 TIMES higher than contemporary concentrations - ie in the range of 3000- 60,000 ppmv. Moreover CO2 at the start of the Cambrian atmospheric CO2 has been estimated in the range 3000-more than 8,000ppmv.
It is this clear that the reduction of CO2 levels by 280-135= 145 ppmv by tropical weathering of basalt lavas , as postulated by Godders et al. Pierrehumbert and Hoffman and Schrag can not be seriously considered as the cause of the Sturtian glaciation given the enormously high levels of atmospheric CO2 at the time, as estimated by other researchers.
A wide variety of causes of the Proterozoic and Neo-Proterozoic glaciations have been postulated, ranging from attenuation of insolation as the solar system passed through dusty spiral arms of the galaxy, unusually high angles of rotational obliquity and variations in the cosmic ray flux.
The hypothesis of Goddens et al is based on MODELLING using ASSUMPTION about CO2 concentrations that are unsubstantiated and at odds with the conclusions of other researchers.
Interestingly enough Hoffman cited CO2 concentration changes through the snowball/hothouse cycle as the MOST IMPORTANT UNKNOWN.
Goddens et al's simplistic interpretation that minor changes of atmospheric CO2 concentrations were the cause of the glaciation and its passing does not convince - although it it certainly fits conveniently in the CAGW driven by anthropogenic CO2 emissions meme which is no doubt why you find it an attractive hypothesis.
By the way if you are so risk averse about anthropogenic CO2 I suggest you give up driving an automobile- especially with your children as passengers - this activity is much more dangerous that hypothesised CAGW.
However
EM, it does matter, because (1) it matters to know just how slovenly Cook et al's "research" was/is;
but, more importantly (a different point),
(2) the so-called "consensus" in response to the study's criteria/categories is so shallow as to mean nothing important at all.
Yet, the authors and their allies are so incompetent or dishonest (take your pick) that they continually conflate the trivial "consensus" (that humans have any impact on climate at all) with the alleged "consensus" on impending unprecedented human-caused world historic catastrophes. Yes, there is fairly widespread consensus on the former (whether 91% or 97% or some other figure), but the alleged "consensus" on the latter is far more problematic, and is most definitely not supported by Cook's study.
Cook is a charlatan, like several of his allies proved to be, and the sooner the serious people in the debate recognize this and discard his forms of mendacity, the sooner we all can get on with the real debates. But so long as Cook and friends are out there peppering the news media with their bogus claims, uncontested by many people who should know better, it is necessary to discuss and expose what is really going on.
"The IPCC is tasked to produce if/then scenarios"
Like:
If CO2 continues to increase then so will temperatures.
How do you think that is working out for them?
If CO2 continues to increase then so will temperatures.
How do you think that is working out for them?
Sep 10, 2014 at 2:29 PM | Unregistered Commenterclovis marcus
Rather well.
If you examine the Met Office Decadal forecast Fig 3 you will find that the current figures are within the 90% confidence limits of the CMIP5 model ensemble.
Glebwkinvara
Thank you for an interesting post. One thing you failed to mention was that solar insolation was 80W/M2 lower. To maintain temperatures above freezing would have needed extra CO2 relative to today's conditions.
I'm too tired to do the numbers now, perhaps tomorrow.
WFC
CO2 amplifies the warming trend at the beginning of every interglacial, as oceans and permafrost release extra CO2. See Story's paper linked above. It is also happening now.
Beware of reading too much into a single core such as Vostok. They suffer badly from internal variation and local effects so it is easy to see spurious patterns in what is actually noise Better an ensemble such as Marcott et al 2013. Multiple proxies give a clearer appreciation of what is signal and what is noise. In the Vostok core, much of the large and rapid variation is noise.
EM
The trouble with multiproxy studies is the statistical methodologies used to seperate (predetermined) "noise" from the (preordained) expected signal.
EM: Ok so you seemingly realise that climate manages to change all by itself and that many warming events and every cooling event in paleo history can only posit CO2 as a rather feeble feedback at best; not strong enough to prevent the natural cooling cycles on a macro scale so therefore not actually necessary to explain any warming event. And we know we just added CO2 in a large slug of 120ppm as a parabolic forcing yet the (mild) warming then stopped in 1997 to the surprise of climate researchers who had expected a corresponding parabolic rise in temperature and even spent 10 years denying there was a 'hiatus' until finally it could be denied no longer that nature was obviously far stronger than they had assumed. Given all of that refutation of the CO2-as-a-driver hypothesis (and at least three more independent refutations that I often repeat here) and given that skepticism of climate researchers would appear to be more than justified, why is it impossible for you to accept the obvious truth that thermageddon is just over-hyped hubris just like the acid rain scare? Is it that your pessimism stems from something other than the rather sparse science - perhaps by your worldview about fossil fuels, capitalism, population or some other eco-angst?