As it was pointed out before the reality is that so far in this latest “debunking” only one mistake can be taken as serious.
So, it is silly to talk about a rate of increasing errors.
Remember, you are still counting on misleading or lying reports.
I will get to rest later, but here you have to realize that as Nature and others have reported, scientists did demand to the reporter to not misinterpret the scientists reports, to no avail.
There is a decent opinion piece in the WSJ today on this very issue (called “Climate Change and Open Science”). The piece discusses Phil Jones’s statements to the BBC that “‘the vast majority of climate scientists’ do not believe the debate over climate change is settled” and states that Phil Jones “acknowledges there’s no consensus.”
Even before linking I can tell you that what the WSJ is saying is BS.
So, an indecent opinion piece.
On edit,:Ok, just looked, they also fall for the “statistically significant warming since 1995. He said there was more warming in the medieval period” Misleading point and BS.
As the Australian reporter says in the video:
“Always check: Find where the information comes from. Is the source reliable? Does the information you have been given accurately reflect the information from the source?”
This was already reported, the BBC already posted several days ago the interview with Phil Jones on February 13.
The WSJ vomited the reheated baloney from the Daily Mail on the 21st. The explanation why the Daily Mail reporter was misleading and false was already in post #164
By this time, one should be demanding the WSJ for journalistic malpractice, or at least ignore them until they print a retraction (not holding my breath for that).
Wait, are you saying the WSJ is wrong about what Phil Jones said, or that Phil Jones is wrong, or what?
Also, on a different topic, what would it take for you personally to think there is no longer a consensus among scientists re: AGW?
As it is a theme already, you could had fooled many. 
you really do not sound like an agnostic with that OP.
You may think that bit of Gish Gallop may be convincing, but it actually demonstrates the ignorance levels that you have:
Someone has misled you about DDT.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/02/ddt3.php
Someone has mislead you about Thalidomide
http://www.marchofdimes.com/professionals/14332_1172.asp
As for the bees, gee just because you are up north the southern states should be happy? However, lets be generous and grant you a point here.
The Chernobyl point is a good one, so one can grant you that.
So, we have 2 out of four.
But we also have to add the say so in the OP:
As the research of Dr Jones was confirmed by others, and almost all of the points presented in the OP were based on misleading and false reports, the answer is
NO.
2 out of 5 is still not a passing grade
And AGW does exist
When that consensus vanishes? Not speaking for GIGO, but he seems a reasonable sort of fellow, sort of thing I would expect a reasonable fellow to say.
But here’s the thing, as I alluded to upstream: that consensus was not poltical, it was not ideological, and it was by no stretch of the imagination an instant hit. Scientists resist the Big Idea, as do most of us. But we can be moved by persuasion, an apt analogy, a spark of wit. They seem actually to despise such skills, so much of their prose seems shaped by the same dulling hand, ruthlessly determined to commit boredom and stupefaction.
Science did not leap upon AGW with glad cries and a scattering of confetti, the consensus was formed upon the more or less unwilling audience by the hard empirical demands of their shared calling. AGW won that consensus not by persuasion, nor advertising. Heaven knows it wasn’t because great capital concerns rushed to shower money upon the researchers!
This is accentuated by the nature of the science, like biology, climatology is much more inductive than chemistry or physics, the scientist is hampered by his inability to perform experiments on so vast a question as the Earth’s climate. You can’t cut a slice of the climate off, go to your lab and fuck around with it. The reproducible result, that most sacred of grails in science, is pretty much out of the question, you don’t get to say “Lets crank up solar output by 10%, see what happens!” You can’t do it, and even if you could, we wouldn’t let you.
Therefore, opinion must change slowly, you simply don’t have the opportunity of shattering a lovely theory with a single ugly experiment. Einstein famously wiped the floor with his detractors when his exact calculations for light refraction were proved to be right. That is the wonderful of advantage of such science, but it simply isn’t possible for climate science.
The current consensus for AGW was slow in coming, the tormenting drip drip drip of facts took a while to take effect. And for that consensus to disappear would take at least as much mental energy and time. Since it is nearly impossible to conceive of a single experiment that could unravel all of that inductive reasoning in one swell foop.
In a nutshell, get used to it, get over it, or change your mind.
Le sigh. Yes, I forgot. You are but an impartial observer, he who sits around and drinks in the science. It doesn’t matter one bit that AGW just oh so neatly fits into your politicial philosophy, like a dick in a condom.
In this thread it is clear that the WSJ and the deniers are attempting to mislead and lie to their readers, are you saying that that fits the political philosophy of the conservatives?
What I see is that ideology can blind and make intelligent conservatives deny or minimize the positions that they had before:
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/02/11/mccain-hannity-climate-change/
It’s amazing to see the absolute mountain of evidence simply rejected by those whose political ideologies refuse to let them look at things honestly. And let’s not kid ourselves here - almost nobody who isn’t a political conservative denies global warming. It’s a religion to them, the way creationism is. That means they think it’s OK to lie in order to preserve their worldview.
The arguments are even the same as the creationist ones:
Evolution / global warming is just a religion! (Perfect example of psychological projection.)
There are lots of scientists who believe in creationism / are skeptical of global warming! (I.e., a tiny fraction of a percent, and many of them don’t even study relevant fields.)
There’s no peer reviewed articles because the journals are controlled by atheists / liberals.
Etc.
And that last one is the real issue here. At it’s core, it’s a conspiracy theory, no different from “the Jews control the world’s banks” or “Bush caused 9/11 / deliberately allowed it to happen” or “Evolution is an atheist plot”. This conveniently allows the True Believer to ignore any evidence they like. After all, that evidence comes from them, doesn’t it? And if nearly all of a group of people who are in a position to know something disagree with you, that’s just proof of the conspiracy.
Note how easily some will say, “even scientists can fall into group-think” but conclude, “they are suffering from group-think”. This neatly side-steps that messy “claims require evidence” part of forming beliefs. If it might be possible that they’re all wrong, then they’re all wrong. QED.
Well Blackknight, allow me to blow your mind. I am not a social conservative or a theist/deist. I have no doubt that evolution is a fact (within the scientific meaning of the word–i.e., it’s the best theory we have now, it stands up to the evidence, there’s lots of evidence that it has stood up to, and it has made predictions that turned out to be true).
But, at this point, I’m still agnostic on all aspects of AGW. And every day something else is published that pushes me away from the completely pro-AGW position.
Ok, now here is clear evidence that you are willing to swallow misleading information, good to keep in mind for future debates. Anyone who has read post #164 and checked the video already knows the misleading and lying bits coming from the Daily Mail and copied by the WSJ.
And, only by ignoring history (already posted too!) is that one can say that AGW is not the best theory that we have now.
“Einstein overturned Newtonian mechanics with a better theory, not with a public relations campaign attacking inertia as a stupid leftist plot.” -from the XKCD message board.
When the peer-reviewed research is no longer overwhelmingly consistent with the AGW hypothesis, and when a credible alternative hypothesis is put forth that explains the observed data equally well or better.
If you’re imagining that “scientists arguing over details and the implications of specific results” equates to “loss of scientific consensus about the general validity of the hypothesis”, you’re kidding yourself. We’ll never reach a point where scientists stop arguing over the details and the implications of specific results; as jshore pointed out, that’s just how scientific research works.
Scientific knowledge that all the relevant researchers completely understand and agree upon in all its details is scientific knowledge that is no longer being published about. (And in fact, such knowledge would not be publishable in a research journal; editors would reject a paper about it as lacking any original contribution).
“Scientific consensus” consists not in total agreement and lack of controversy but in the predominance of the consensus hypothesis as the default current explanation for certain observed phenomena. This 2004 article in Science describes some of the features of the consensus concerning AGW:
What climate change deniers and skeptics don’t seem to recognize is that ANY SCIENTIST WHO MANAGED TO COME UP WITH A NEW THEORY THAT OUTPERFORMED THE AGW HYPOTHESIS WOULD BE A FUCKING GOD. Seriously. S/he would go down in the history books as “the author of the critical breakthrough that revealed a hitherto unsuspected fundamental aspect of climate science.” The article title and journal name in which the successful hypothesis was first published would be household words among researchers.
To put it in terms of your favorite metaphor, Rand Rover, research scientists masturbate to that kind of daydream. If a researcher or a journal editor had serious cause to think they had such a breakthrough at hand, they would abandon the consensus position in a heartbeat.
But they’re not abandoning it. Because they don’t in fact see any preferable alternative theories to AGW out there at present. Accepting an imperfect but mainstream hypothesis as the default explanation for lack of anything better may not seem very sexy, but 99.999% of the time it’s what scientists do, and it’s what they’re doing now with AGW.
I almost did not reply to this because by now it should be clear that the Daily Mail and the WSJ misrepresented Phil Jones and by now they are lying* about what he said.
What **Kimstu **said.
*(The original Q&A was already posted several days ago by the BBC, the WSJ making the same mistakes as the Daily Mail shows complete incompetence at least, but I will have to go for lying as they are purposely ignoring the source and the scientists)
Have you tried looking for any?
IPCC Underestimated Ocean Temperatures And Sea Level Increases By 50 Percent, Says Study
Actually, as you well know, a number of alternative theories have been proposed. The cosmic ray theory was tested and found wanting. Milankovich cycles have been checked. The sunspot theory is currently under test. This is one of the problems with the CO2 theory: we lack the ability to test it. We just have to take it on faith. That’s not good science.
Yes, I know that alternative theories have been proposed. However, none of them so far has outperformed the AGW hypothesis in explaining observed data on global temperature.
Nonsense. Provisionally accepting a hypothesis because it is currently the best explanation we have for the observed data is not the same thing as “taking it on faith”.
Nor is the AGW hypothesis “untestable”, any more than theories about galaxy formation in the early universe, or continental drift, or the evolution of early hominids on earth are “untestable”.
Sure, we can’t test them by running repeated controlled experiments the way we do in many lab sciences, but we can still test their predictions against the data that we collect.
I’m not trying to downplay any of the uncertainties or unanswered questions in the AGW hypothesis; it’s still a very incomplete theory and may yet have to be drastically modified or even (less probably, but not inconceivably) rejected altogether in favor of a substantially different hypothesis.
In the meantime, though, it amounts to willful ignorance to call the AGW hypothesis “not good science”. On the contrary, AGW is not only a perfectly legitimate scientific hypothesis but currently the best scientific hypothesis available to describe current climate trends. It would be silly to try to pretend that it’s thoroughly established or infallible, but it’s even sillier to try to pretend that it somehow shouldn’t be accepted by researchers as a reasonable working hypothesis.
Holy shit that *Nature *article is damning.
Outright statements that:
-
The IPCC is a victim of group-think resulting from government engineering
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That consensus is manufactured and not real.
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That dissenting views on climate change were marginalised
4)That media have become cheerleaders for the non-sceince that his mess produced.
What I find most intriguing is that AGW dupes who trumpeted every Nature opinion piece on the strengths of the IPCC and global warming have blithely ignored these minor criticisms.
Even Nature * is declaring that the IPCC structure is so hideously flawed that any consensus is engineered by goverment stooges and any dissenting views are marginalised.
Isn’t it about time the AGW cheerleaders started admitting that maybe there is something to such claims. To stop the ad hominems that everybody who voices such opinions is a “denier”?
I think it’s especially rich watching all the patsies condemning* Rand Rover** as a paranoid “denialist” for making statements that are pretty much in line with the statements made in Nature. To put the Nature article into the vernacular, the facts are fucked. The IPCC is a cabal of self serving scientists patting itself on its own back in order to allow the goverments that appointed them to enact legislation aligned with govt policy.
But when RR makes those asame statemnts he’s a crazy fucking conspiracy theorist. Shit, I’m no fan of RR, but to say that someone is paranoid for agreeing with an article published in a journal as prestigious as Nature is a little much, even by the high standards of the AGW cheerleaders we usually get in these “debates”.