{"id":6421,"date":"2013-09-18T07:48:58","date_gmt":"2013-09-18T11:48:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/?p=6421"},"modified":"2013-09-11T10:09:26","modified_gmt":"2013-09-11T14:09:26","slug":"year-4-month-9-day-18-that-thesis-has-been-proven-invalid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/year-4-month-9-day-18-that-thesis-has-been-proven-invalid\/","title":{"rendered":"Year 4, Month 9, Day 18: That Thesis Has Been Proven Invalid"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Press-Enterprise (CA) editorializes mendaciously:<\/a><\/p>\n

Taking the temperature of climate scientists provides no useful information about the Earth\u2019s climate. Yet the claim that \u201c97 percent of scientists agree!\u201d has become the anti-carbon-dioxide crowd\u2019s No. 1 argument for why climate action can wait no longer. Those who set policy would do better to follow the facts than succumb to red herrings and peer pressure.<\/p>\n

Environmental Research Letters, an electronic journal of environmental science, in May published a paper by two climate bloggers. The paper, by, Dana Nuccitelli and John Cook, purported to \u201cquantify the consensus\u201d on climate change in scientific literature. They reviewed 12,000 published papers and concluded that 97 percent of the abstracts that took a position \u201cendorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the \u201cconsensus view\u201d into which the survey pigeonholes papers is extremely broad. And given the buzz the paper has generated, the climate czars in Washington should have had a few follow-up questions: \u201cWhat does this tell us about the role of humans versus natural variability?\u201d \u201cHow severe is the phenomenon you identify and what do you recommend that we do about it?\u201d \u201cWhat data lead you to that conclusion?\u201d And maybe even, \u201cWho are you guys?\u201d<\/p>\n

But no. President Obama \u2014 or those who fill his Twitter feed \u2014 immediately took up the cause, not only accepting the findings uncritically but exaggerating them: \u201cNinety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.\u201d <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It makes me sooooo tired. September 11:<\/p>\n

The editorial purporting to demonstrate methodological flaws in a recent study of the consensus among climate scientists is, ironically, far more factually-challenged than the research it tries to criticize. To begin with, the study wasn’t produced by a pair of “bloggers”, but by nine separate authors, all practicing professional scientists. Furthermore, this particular paper was deliberately confined to examining a significant discrepancy between popular perception and scientific opinion on climate change; it is inherent in the nature of such research to tackle one problem at a time.<\/p>\n

More significantly, while there are many aspects of climate change which remain still uncertain, human causation isn’t one of them.<\/p>\n

In politics and media, pre-existing political orientations often influence “factuality,” as was tragically demonstrated by the buildup to the Iraq war. But science doesn’t work that way: scientific method requires stringent self-correction as a way of getting at the truth. When climatologists all over the planet agree that humans are causing the greenhouse effect, this consensus arises from decades of steady examination and analysis of multiple types of evidence. Widespread agreement doesn’t prove that global warming is anthropogenic; rather, the evidence has created the agreement.<\/p>\n

Your column was ill-conceived, irresponsible and without foundation.<\/p>\n

Warren Senders\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Press-Enterprise (CA) editorializes mendaciously: Taking the temperature of climate scientists provides no useful information about the Earth\u2019s climate. Yet the claim that \u201c97 percent of scientists agree!\u201d has become the anti-carbon-dioxide crowd\u2019s No. 1 argument for why climate action can wait no longer. Those who set policy would do better to follow the facts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,44],"tags":[467,253,207,644,688,121],"class_list":["post-6421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-politics","tag-assholes","tag-denialists","tag-idiots","tag-media-irresponsibility","tag-scientific-consensus","tag-scientific-method"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6421"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6422,"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6421\/revisions\/6422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}