Why no one cares about global warming.

[GIGObuster]

This is why one favorite reply to the question of “so what are the National or international scientific bodies that reject anthropogenic global warming?” Is given at Rational wiki:

Climate change

A scientific consensus is reached when the vast majority of the scientists involved in a discipline broadly agree on the interpretation of the evidence pertaining to a specific scientific question. When this occurs the case can be considered to have been demonstrated and the burden of proof then falls on those who would dispute the consensus. The following national and international organizations are part of the consensus that global warming is a real phenomenon for which humans are responsible:

National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
The Royal Society of the UK (RS)
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS)
UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
And many more. 

Though some have taken non-committal stances, the vast majority of scientific bodies are convinced by the evidence.[14] In addition, those pinko tree-huggers at the Pentagon now rank global warming as a “destabilizing force” (damn enviro-weenies).[15][16]

National or international scientific bodies that reject anthropogenic global warming:

[Tumble weeds rolling]

The thing is that the idea that the critics gave that it is embarrassingly simple to debunk those surveys is the the real embarrassing idea, it only shows that they are not aware of how surveys work or are done in the first place, the real reason they are very useful comes not when they are considered alone, but when their results are compared with others studies or surveys. Also as pointed before the ones criticising the surveys continue to run into ether confirming them or making clear mistakes that undermine the criticism, some even can do both at the same time:

Deconstructing the 97% self-destructed Richard Tol

[Measure_for_Measure]

@Aji_de_Gallina

1. Scientific studies, of course, may have a sample size smaller than 77. Medical studies, especially before large-scale trials have, by definition, to be small. However, if you want to claim consensus of such a crucial and complex issue, 77 guys ain’t gonna be enough.

I replied to this earlier and provided a confidence interval. The 77 figure represents specialists in the field of climate science. The underlying population doesn’t exactly number in the thousands.

2. I’m so glad that you mentioned those three studies, because tearing them a scientific new one is so easy it’s almost embarrassing. Let’s see the problems.

I disagree with your characterization. Lobbing grenades at any scientific paper is easy (“correlation isn’t causality!”) but that’s not serious investigation.

Doran:
i) It’s a web-based by-invitation survey. I sincerely hope that AGW deserves more than that.

Er… you want a by-invitation method. The alternative involves terrible self-selection problems. Your criticism is sad-face. The fact that the study’s interface is on the web is not especially troubling, when the entire underlying population is almost certainly web-saavy.

There’s no bias there. None. You are embarrassing yourself.

ii) 10257 invitations, only 3146 responses. A 31% response rate is OK, but you have the problem of ascertaining if you haven’t, at the very beginning, introduces a bias by self-selection.

As you said, a 31% response rate isn’t bad as these things go. It does however suggest the need for more than one line of evidence, via a literature survey for example. Single studies often have one methodological problem or another, which is why you look for a set of them.

The consistency with the literature reviews is reassuring.

iii) 90% Americans. Unless 90% of Earth scientists are American, this is also uncorrected bias.

Sadface. Is there a reason why Australian climate specialists with a publication record would have systematically different opinions? If so, I’d like to see the evidence.

iv) Question 1 “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” I am surprised that it isn’t 100%, particularly with the cherry-picked date of pre-1800, the tail end of a particularly cold spell of the LIA.

Er… Pre-1800s is a date? I admit that 1400-1800 is sometimes called The Little Ice Age. But if that was driving the result, it should be pretty easy to uncover that via interviews with practicing climate scientists.

Nah, let’s stick with the speculative innuendo. Seriously, these pot shots are silly.

vii) The 97% come from 76/79 and 75/77 of those who “self-listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change”. An unrepresentative sample if there ever was one if your objective was to show broad consensus across Earth scientists.
So, “97% of scientists agree with AGW” is false.

That’s a reasonable clarification. The paper breaks down scientists by field: it notes that certain fields have levels closer to 50%. The 97% figure refers to published experts in climate science. It does not cover podiatrists or material engineers.

b) Anderegg et al.
i) “Though our compiled researcher list is not comprehensive nor designed to be representative of the entire climate science community, we have drawn researchers from the most high-profile reports and public statements about ACC” (my bolding). If the authors themselves say “it is not comprehensive nor representative” the whole paper fail insofar as it tries to show its results as representative.

You’ve basically dismissed any sort of evaluation of expert opinion here.

Science isn’t a democracy. It’s a dictatorship. The facts dictate. That’s why serious people don’t survey proctologists on the subject of global warming.

ii) Although many try to paint what they call UE (sceptics) as shills/ignoramuses without scientific relevance, the study show that the average number of citation is 105 (to 172 of CE (warmists)) and with an even finer-toothed comb it goes to 84 vs 133. Both numbers slightly higher than 60%. Not bad at all.
iii) “Our dataset is not comprehensive of the climate community and therefore does not infer absolute numbers or proportions of all CE versus all UE researchers. We acknowledge that there are other possible and valid approaches to quantifying the level of agreement and relative credibility in the climate science community, including alternate climate researcher cutoffs, publication databases, and search terms to determine climate-relevant publications.” (my bolding) Straight from the horse’s mouth.

Whatever. Here’s the money quote: [INDENT] 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, [/INDENT] Note that we’re taking the issue from another angle here: they consider whether the group most actively publishing supports the tenets of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 97% do. This goes beyond the two question problem you had difficulty with earlier.

The weaknesses of one study are addressed by another. Did you not catch that? Do you get that serious people assemble evidence and don’t just interpret it piecemeal?

c) Cook
i) “Despite numerous indicators of a consensus, there is wide public perception that climate scientists disagree over the fundamental cause of global warming ”. This is patently false. Even the most ignorant denier knows that the majority of scientists agree with AGW.

Cite? Also, you misprepresent the scientific consensus. It’s not a mere majority of specialists. It’s an overwhelming one.

ii) They only read the abstracts, not the paper. C’mon!

Now you are getting desperate. Previously we had a review of over 1000 papers. Now we have a wider review of over 10,000 abstracts. Both exercises are illuminating, in different ways.

Oh hell, I’m done here. Come back when you are able to conduct a real analysis.

[wolfpup]

It’s interesting that the consensus studies have themselves turned into a meta-debate – article in SciAm about that. It seems that the denialists who deny the science, when faced with studies showing an overwhelming consensus supporting the science, deny the studies that support the consensus that supports the science!

As a humble denizen of these forums who reads the scientific journals and has some understanding of climate science, one of my main observations in this regard is that I’ve never actually seen a scientific paper within at least the last ten years and probably much longer that actually challenged the consensus view on AGW in any way that was even remotely credible. A key word here being “credible”, because there is a small set of discreditable names that keep coming up – the same ones again and again – often sneaking their papers into second-rate journals or journals that are peripheral to climate science and which don’t do a good job of vetting. These papers are invariably junk and are quickly discredited on the basis of faulty data and/or faulty methodology, and have occasionally caused embarrassment for the journals that published them when it was discovered just how bad they were. Their authors usually turn out to be the same old crackpots whose background invariably includes some combination of being funded by the fossil fuel industry, being anti-regulation libertarians, and/or not being climate scientists at all but being bloggers or dilettantes pursuing some narrow vested interest.

The reality is that, imperfect though it may be, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides the most comprehensive overview of the state of climate science that is available today for policymakers and the general public, and the best way we have of moving forward on public understanding of the science and its implications. The IPCC doesn’t do original research – what it does is vet and review the current state of published knowledge in the field and summarizes the information from a policy-relevant perspective. Its members, collectively, comprise thousands of the most prominent scientists in their respective fields, and their findings are issued in four basic categories: periodic assessment reports on the science of climate change (Working Group 1), on vulnerabilities and adaptation (WG2), and on mitigation (WG3), and in addition, a category of special reports on selected issues, like the Special Report on Extreme [weather] Events (SREX).

Another way of looking at the question, then, is to look at the positions of major scientific bodies with respect to the findings of the IPCC. The statements and reports that have been issued by the US National Academy of Sciences are typical, as are joint statements periodically issued by the national academies of the major nations. The statements can be read at the link; here I will just say that the support of the IPCC position on AGW breaks down as follows:

Concurring with the IPCC:
The national science academies of 34 major nations, including the US National Academy of Sciences, three regional academies, and both the international InterAcademy Council and International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences. Among other major scientific bodies supporting the same consensus: the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, the United States National Research Council, the Royal Society of New Zealand, the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, the European Science Foundation, the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the European Physical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America, the European Federation of Geologists, the European Geosciences Union, the Geological Society of America, the Geological Society of London, the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, the American Meteorological Society, the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the Royal Meteorological Society (UK), the World Meteorological Organization, the American Quaternary Association, and the International Union for Quaternary Research. Also major international institutions related to biology, life sciences, and human health, and other professional societies.

Joining the consensus of major science bodies have been reports from the Pentagon, the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, and the National Intelligence Council.

All say, in essence, the same thing: the planet is warming due to increases in GHG emissions from human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, and the climate consequences will be dire if action is not taken to mitigate GHGs.

Non-committal:
The American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which once dissented from the consensus on climate change for obvious reasons, retracted their dissent in 2007 and now offers no definitive statement. Also without a position statement: the Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences, and the Geological Society of Australia.

Dissenting:
None. After 2007, no scientific body of national or international standing rejected the findings of human-induced effects on climate change.

[Aji_de_Gallina]

@Measure_for_Measure

I replied to this earlier and provided a confidence interval. The 77 figure represents specialists in the field of climate science. The underlying population doesn’t exactly number in the thousands.

Agreed. But my contention is that the headline “97% of all scientists agree” is wrong, “97% of climate scientist with large % of AGW papers agree” is the truth.

I disagree with your characterization. Lobbing grenades at any scientific paper is easy (“correlation isn’t causality!”) but that’s not serious investigation.

I didn’t mention correlation so…

Er… you want a by-invitation method. The alternative involves terrible self-selection problems. Your criticism is sad-face. The fact that the study’s interface is on the web is not especially troubling, when the entire underlying population is almost certainly web-saavy.

There’s no bias there. None. You are embarrassing yourself.

It introduces the bias of who decides to answer. Metastudies avoid this.

As you said, a 31% response rate isn’t bad as these things go. It does however suggest the need for more than one line of evidence, via a literature survey for example. Single studies often have one methodological problem or another, which is why you look for a set of them.

The consistency with the literature reviews is reassuring.

You mentioned three. Mention some more and we’ll look into them. BTW, I’m not denying the gigantic agreement in climate science on AGW.

Sadface. Is there a reason why Australian climate specialists with a publication record would have systematically different opinions? If so, I’d like to see the evidence.

Statistics 101 say that you choose your sample to reflect the population. Even if your unrepresentative simple gets the result right, it’s bad statistics.

Er… Pre-1800s is a date? I admit that 1400-1800 is sometimes called The Little Ice Age. But if that was driving the result, it should be pretty easy to uncover that via interviews with practicing climate scientists.

Nah, let’s stick with the speculative innuendo. Seriously, these pot shots are silly.

You seem to be forgetting that I and most sceptics agree with the question.
Do you disagree that the late 18th century was particularly cold (esp. in the Northern Hemisphere)?
I’m saying that “during the 20th century” or “in the last 100 years” would’ve been betters questions, NOT that they would’ve change the result.

That’s a reasonable clarification. The paper breaks down scientists by field: it notes that certain fields have levels closer to 50%. The 97% figure refers to published experts in climate science. It does not cover podiatrists or material engineers.

Since I’m reporting the paper YOU quoted, which contains no podiatrists or material engineers I fail to see what you want to say. The paper, maybe you have not read it, is only wiht Earth scientists. The population of people they used for their summary has large agreeement with both questions, undeniably; it simply fall way short of 97%.

You’ve basically dismissed any sort of evaluation of expert opinion here.

Science isn’t a democracy. It’s a dictatorship. The facts dictate. That’s why serious people don’t survey proctologists on the subject of global warming.

I have no idea why you mention proctologists as an answer to “not representative of climate scientists”. If the autor say it doesn’t represent climate scientists, your butt-doctor joke is irrelevant.
Facts dictate, but you seem oblivious to them. “Your” paper say climate scientists only.

Whatever. Here’s the money quote: [INDENT] 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, [/INDENT] Note that we’re taking the issue from another angle here: they consider whether the group most actively publishing supports the tenets of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 97% do. This goes beyond the two question problem you had difficulty with earlier.

The weaknesses of one study are addressed by another. Did you not catch that? Do you get that serious people assemble evidence and don’t just interpret it piecemeal?

Why then make a study about all climate scientists and then say “only this specific group matters”? You’re piecemealing it. I look at the full results that say 32 vs 64.

Cite? Also, you misprepresent the scientific consensus. It’s not a mere majority of specialists. It’s an overwhelming one.

I have no cite. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t believe that the majority of climate scientists agree with AGW. The stupid one may think it’s because of lizard-people or the ilumminati-Bilderberg and the may not fully grasp how gigantic the majority is, but no one really denies the majority exists (wheher they beleive it’s 80% or 99%).
I’ll ammed any quote to the contrary by clearly and unequivocally stating “It’s not a mere majority of specialists. It’s an overwhelming one.”

Now you are getting desperate. Previously we had a review of over 1000 papers. Now we have a wider review of over 10,000 abstracts. Both exercises are illuminating, in different ways.

Since I was talking about Cook et al. which reviewed only abstracts I fail to see why you mention other studies.

Oh hell, I’m done here. Come back when you are able to conduct a real analysis.

Sure, sure, honey…whatever gets you through the night.

@wolfpup

It’s interesting that the consensus studies have themselves turned into a meta-debate – article in SciAm about that. It seems that the denialists who deny the science, when faced with studies showing an overwhelming consensus supporting the science, deny the studies that support the consensus that supports the science! :D… (mega snipped)

I completely and unreservedly accept that the super-gigantic majority of climate organizations and scientists (over 90%) agree with the basic views of AGW theory. They may disagree on the level of warming or the political/econimic/social measure to combat it.

[GIGObuster]

@Aji_de_Gallina

I have no cite. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t believe that the majority of climate scientists agree with AGW. The stupid one may think it’s because of lizard-people or the ilumminati-Bilderberg and the may not fully grasp how gigantic the majority is, but no one really denies the majority exists (wheher they beleive it’s 80% or 99%).
I’ll ammed any quote to the contrary by clearly and unequivocally stating “It’s not a mere majority of specialists. It’s an overwhelming one.”

I guess the Aji is trying to claim his ideas are indeed of the “let us unboil eggs” variety. But I guess even a whiff of appearing to support that silliness does not show much of anything other than just being a bone for deniers that are in the audience of the skeptics or their peers. As I noticed, and many others are beginning to realize, most of the opposition out there is political in reality, not based on evidence.

Of course, posts like that one are not flattering at all to the ones that continue to deny even well supported items like the consensus, I’m just amused to notice the infighting that indeed is happening more and more among the “skeptics”.

[XT]

Just a drive by post with a video (sorry about that but I’m running around a lot today), but I really like this guy, and he goes into why he thinks people don’t believe in climate science and why we don’t do more about it. He’s also got a really good video on why climate change is pretty much a slam dunk if anyone wants to check out his channel.

I doubt the video will change any minds one way or another, but I figured I’d post it anyway.

[Measure_for_Measure]

@XT

Just a drive by post with a video (sorry about that but I’m running around a lot today), but I really like this guy, and he goes into why he thinks people don’t believe in climate science and why we don’t do more about it. He’s also got a really good video on why climate change is pretty much a slam dunk if anyone wants to check out his channel.

I doubt the video will change any minds one way or another, but I figured I’d post it anyway.

There are a number of proposed reasons the lack of political will expressed in the OP. They include special monied interests influencing the debate and legislators, the public’s resistance to adjustments to their lifestyle (an extreme version of which I refuted upthread), and cognitive psychology as reflected in XT’s link. They all play a role, but I’m inclined to emphasize the last one at present.
There’s an analogy to free trade policy. Both rely on technical argument, both create diffuse or remote benefits while costs are focused on particular groups. Both are not particularly popular with the general public. Yet free trade has passed though it has perhaps 40% public support. Why?

For whatever the reason, the elite are behind free trade. They could get behind rational climate policy. A tax on greenhouse gases is a tax on consumption, which favors the ultra-rich more than taxes on interest, dividends and/or wages. Consumption taxes are also pro-growth to some extent. Then again, carbon taxes could be paired with an expanded earned income tax credit, tax cuts for lower income brackets, public transport expansion, etc.

[Aji_de_Gallina]

@Measure_for_Measure

There are a number of proposed reasons the lack of political will expressed in the OP. They include special monied interests influencing the debate and legislators, the public’s resistance to adjustments to their lifestyle (an extreme version of which I refuted upthread), and cognitive psychology as reflected in XT’s link. They all play a role, but I’m inclined to emphasize the last one at present. …

How much of your disposable income would you be willing to relinquish in order to get the climate-change goals you desire?

[GIGObuster]

@Aji_de_Gallina

How much of your disposable income would you be willing to relinquish in order to get the climate-change goals you desire?

How much would you will be willing to pay to get clean water and a sewage system?

As Richard Alley and many economists reported, and based on previous big changes, not a whole lot; about 1% of GDP.

[elucidator]

@Aji_de_Gallina

How much of your disposable income would you be willing to relinquish in order to get the climate-change goals you desire?

To not spend my golden years in a Mad Max scenario as written by Cormac McCarthy? Just about all of it, pretty much…

[Measure_for_Measure]

@Aji_de_Gallina

How much of your disposable income would you be willing to relinquish in order to get the climate-change goals you desire?

Something that requires far less adaptation than each of the 2 oil crises of the 1970s on the cost side, and prevents eventual potential catastrophe on the benefit side is a pretty good deal.

In the worst case would I accept the equivalent of a $2 gas tax with the revenue staying in the US? Hell yes. Though I think what would be necessary would involve less than half of that.