Cook's progress

I have an opinion piece in Canada's Financial Post, taking a look at the global warming consensus as revealed in a series of studies, including the Cook one.

Once the methodology used by Cook and his colleagues is understood, it becomes abundantly clear that the consensus it describes is a very shallow one; the results add up to little more than “carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas” and “mankind affects the climate.” These are propositions that almost everybody in the climate debate accepts; the argument continues to be over how much greenhouse gases have affected us in the past and how much they will affect us in the future, and whether any of this represents a problem.

By coincidence, John Cook has been given the right of reply to my piece last week in the Australian looking at the same question. There's a lot of huffing and puffing, but I don't think he nails it.

Speaking Nuccitello

Readers will recall that I recently wrote a briefing paper for GWPF on the Cook et al 97% consensus paper. Today Dana Nuccitelli has written a post in which he translates my paper into his own idiosyncratic language, Nuccitello. Readers may struggle with Nuccitello at first, but you will get the hang of it, I'm sure.

For example, many of you may find it hard to work out how it is possible to discuss my paper, with its consideration of the nature of the 97% consensus, under the heading of "consensus denial". Once you see that this is merely a translation into Nuccitello, all becomes clear.

The same blog post has further examples of this strange language. In Nuccitello, those who helped themselves to the documents that Skeptic Science's admins left open to public view are "thieves". And where I quoted participants on the forum as saying

Click to read more ...

Cli-fi

A propos of my earlier posting about "Cli-fi", take a look at what Brian Micklethwait found in his local bookshop.

In the Australian

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.

The no-response response

Skeptical Science has published a defence of the Cook et al Consensus paper. Yours truly is mentioned, but in such an obfuscated way as to suggest that they know they've been rumbled:

There have been a number of contrarians claiming that they are part of the 97% consensus, which they believe is limited to the position that humans are causing some global warming. The first error in this argument is in ignoring the fact that the data collected in Cook et al. (2013) included categories that quantify the human contribution, as Andrew Montford and the GWPF recently did, for example.

This is an aggressively illogical set of statements, which seems to me to deliberately try to confuse, by conflating the subject of the Cook paper - abstracts of papers - with the views of individuals.

The Cook survey did indeed include categories for papers that quantified the human contribution. It also included categories that did not. The few papers that quantify the human contribution were categorised accordingly. Most papers do not quantify the human contribution, and Cook et al included most of these within categories that made them part of the consensus. This led to the nonsense of one of Shaviv's papers being classified as supporting the consensus.

The consensus as defined by review of abstracts of papers is therefore a shallow one that includes papers that do not quantify the human contribution and Cook et al know it but can't bring themselves to say it out loud.

Benestad et al rejected

The Benestad (Cook, Nuccitelli) et al paper on "agnotology", a bizarre concoction that tried to refute just about every sceptic paper ever written has been rejected by Earth System Dynamics

Based on the reviews and my own reading of the original and revised paper, I am rejecting the paper in its current form. The submission is laudable in its stated goals and in making the R source code available, but little else about the paper works as a scientific contribution to ESD. While I think as an ESDD publication at least a discussion was had and the existence of the R routines has been brought to the attention of the various interested communities, the manuscript itself is not a good fit for this journal and would need substantial further revisions before being ready (if ever) for this journal.

Which is all fine and well, but then you get the paragraphs below, which seem to me to be almost as strange as the Benestad article itself:

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Motivated reasoning and the climate scientist

Judy Curry has a must-read post about some of what goes on behind the scenes in the climate science community:

Motivated reasoning affects scientists as it does other groups in society, although it is often pretended that scientists somehow escape this predicament.

Motivated reasoning has been put forward as the reason why educated conservatives reject the consensus on climate change science.  This post examines the thesis that motivated reasoning by climate scientists is adversely impacting the public trust in climate science and provides a reason for people to reject the consensus on climate change science.

Read the whole thing.

Diary dates

In Unthreaded, Paul Matthews notes a couple of dates for your diaries:

Tamsin is on Radio 4 tonight at 8pm, along with Lawson and others, in a programme about science and politics.

There is a "Google Hangout" (whatever that means) tomorrow at 9 EDT which I think is 2pm our time, on the science/advocacy debate, with Judith C, Richard B and Gavin S.

Tamsin and the hornet's nest

I've been otherwise engaged in the last 24 hours so I missed all the excitement over Tamsin Edwards' post at the Guardian's Political Science blog, in which she calls for scientists to steer clear of political advocacy.

I believe advocacy by climate scientists has damaged trust in the science. We risk our credibility, our reputation for objectivity, if we are not absolutely neutral. At the very least, it leaves us open to criticism. I find much climate scepticism is driven by a belief that environmental activism has influenced how scientists gather and interpret evidence. So I've found my hardline approach successful in taking the politics and therefore – pun intended – the heat out of climate science discussions.

Judith Curry has an excellent round up of the responses around the web.

What goes on in schools?

Earlier this week I had a very pleasant lunch with John Shade of the Climate Lessons blog, who was down in my neck of the woods for a holiday.

Our conversation turned to what is taught about climate change and environmentalism in schools. While we are both aware of plenty of dodgy stuff in curricula, course materials and school-facing activist websites, we were less able to put our hands on evidence of what is actually said in the classroom, or the extent to which activist material is used.

Is anyone able to throw any light on this question, either through personal experience or, better still, from data?

Kelly on unbridled enthusiasm

Mike Kelly has a letter in Nature this week:

With more than US$1 trillion spent globally on research and development in 2007 (see go.nature.com/5wdd9p), sheer scale seems to be corrupting the scientific enterprise as individuals take ever more extreme measures to stand out.

For instance, parliamentary reviews of the 2009 'Climategate' scandal at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, reported evidence of scientific misconduct (see go.nature.com/d6bdco). The allegations included questionable journal refereeing to promote a particular scientific line (see also Nature http://doi.org/ftb9hc; 2010). Instead, journals should be supported as places where unsettled science is refined by open debate. But, compared with 30 years ago, they do seem less willing to publish negative results or cautionary reviews that temper unbridled enthusiasm — perhaps because of ratings wars.

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Ben Pile on Nucc and the consensus

Ben Pile has a must-read guest post at the Making Science Public blog, covering l'affaire @afneil and the attempts to keep sceptical arguments off the airwaves. Here are a couple of quotes by way of a taster.

The emphasis on expertise is intended to permit only the expression of authorised opinion: not even the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is allowed to speak. Because when he does, the public debate is revealed to be merely a battle of received wisdoms. Can we imagine this in any other discussion about public life? Should Andrew Neil be allowed to challenge ministers on unemployment figures or other economic metrics? After all, he’s just a journalist.

In spite of all the criticism levelled against him, then, Andrew Neil, in just one show, has done more to promote an active understanding of climate science and its controversies than has been done by the Carbon Brief blog, academics at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and elsewhere, Bad Science warriors, and a legion of Tweeters who claim to speak for science have done in their entire existences.

Dana's vested interest

Anthony has the low down on Dana Nuccitelli's vested interest - it turns out that he works for a big company working in the environmental services area called Tetratech.

Given all the fuss the Guardian makes about the alleged funding of sceptics by big oil, it's hard to see that they can credibly retain Mr Nuccitelli's services.

Then again, if you take on a columnist with a penchant for reviewing books he hasn't read, it is possible that you consider such niceties as consistency a bit superfluous.

100% of poll respondents don't believe Mr Davey and the CCC

Peter Atherton of investment bank Liberum Capital reports the result of a light hearted survey of investors.

...we decided to carry out a pop quiz asking investors to vote on which of the propositions below seemed the more credible:

• A. Liberum Capital / RWE: £150bn of investment to 2020 = circa 30% increase in power bills (or 19% dual fuel according to RWE); or
• B. UK Government / Committee on Climate Change: £150bn of investment to 2020 = 11% reduction in dual fuel energy bills.

The results are in..................

We had 55 separate responses. The headline result was follows:

• A: 100%
• B: 0%

Although not a serious survey, as Atherton goes on to explain, it is possible to draw some conclusions.

...what this poll does show is that the government is failing to convince a key constituent (the equity market) that its affordability projections are plausible. Nor given RWE’s intervention (and feedback on our research we received from the other leading utilities) does it appear that the major utilities find government assertions convincing either. This represents a dramatic failure by the government on what is the central issue on energy policy in the UK. So even if the government’s projections are actually correct, their failure to convince anyone outside Whitehall of the fact creates a major credibility problem.

Ed Davey on Sunday Politics

Ed Davey was given a pretty thorough interrogation by Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics today. Well worth a look, and probably due-a-line by line examination as well.

Update on Jul 15, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Alex Cull has prepared a transcript of the interview, which is available here.