The Consensus Myth: 97% of Nothing
Post by Anthony Cox
The major argument supporting the man made global warming scam [AGW] is that a vast majority of legitimate climate scientists support it while only a motley crew of eccentrics and cranks oppose it. In actual fact the support for AGW is entirely bureaucratic. By that I mean that all the major organisations which publically espouse AGW are in effect bureaucracies with government affiliated or appointed heads who keep tight muster on the underlings and enforce conformity.
A classic case is the case of Dr Clive Spash. Spash was a senior scientist at the CSIRO. At the time when then PM Rudd was advocating an ETS Spash wrote a paper critical of the ETS. After conflict with the CSIRO bosses, including Megan Clark, former CEO of Rothschild Australia, Spash was left no alternative but to resign.
A similar situation has also occurred with Dr Phil Watson of the NSW Department of Environment and Hertitage. Watson wrote a peer reviewed paper which showed sea level rise was not consistent with AGW. This was duly reported; and then contradicted by Dr Watson’s bosses.
The point is a consensus is very easy to create by a few examples and slap-downs of underlings. Pretty soon all the other little Indians get the message and put their heads down and toe the company line. And if they don’t toe the line then their work can be just censored as Dr Lord found out.
Despite this the lie of consensus persists. A couple of widely disseminated papers purporting to have established a consensus by stringent scientific methods are repeatedly quoted by alarmists to prove there is a consensus.
The first is the infamous 97% of all climate scientists support AGW effort. The paper by Doran and Zimmerman effectively based its conclusions on a survey population of just 79 individuals. The Doran and Zimmerman [Doze] survey is of course a farrago, a dolt’s nose-pick and can be ridiculed on a number of counts including the sample size of 2 vagrants, 34 bureaucrats and various odds and sods. Another good account of Doze is here:
However, the Schneider effort has far greater pretension to academic quality and validity; Schneider’s effort is here [and what a fitting research epitaph it is];
Schneider states that their selection criteria for distinguishing between climate research winners and deniers/losers was 2-fold:
“We tallied the number of climate-relevant publications authored or coauthored by each researcher (defined here as expertise) and counted the number of citations for each of the researcher’s four
highest-cited papers (defined here as prominence) using Google Scholar. We then imposed an a priori criterion that a researcher must have authored a minimum of 20 climate publications to be
considered a climate researcher, thus reducing the database to 908 researchers.”
highest-cited papers (defined here as prominence) using Google Scholar. We then imposed an a priori criterion that a researcher must have authored a minimum of 20 climate publications to be
considered a climate researcher, thus reducing the database to 908 researchers.”
At the risk of being unscientific I would point out at this juncture that Miskolczi’s 3 papers from 2004, 2007 and 2010, which are groundbreaking and unrebutted to an almost Einsteinian extent have had no citations at all, although I could be wrong. So, despite the fact that Miskolczi was a senior NASA atmospheric physicist and one of the world’s leading experts in analysis of radiative balances in the atmosphere his work has not been cited. How could it be by pro-AGW papers when it contradicted the AGW consensus?
If one stops even for a brief moment and considers how group-think works one can readily see how the mutual reinforcement would enable pro-AGW ‘scientists’ to dominate such a survey given that they, as the climate-gate e-mails eloquently demonstrated, effectively control the main climate publishing venues. When you throw in vast political support, vast financial rewards and Kafkaesque treatment of dissenters [again Miskolczi is a salutory example since he lost his job at NASA after his work was published] then you can see that an effective scientific monotone, as found by Schneider, will result.
The unfortunate thing is that Schneider’s egregious paper is being readily used by politicians like Combet to justify his government’s position on AGW. This is not a consensus but censorship; and it is censorship which is propping up the scam of AGW.
UPDATE:
Luboš Motl writes:
There is no consensus: This counter-point #3 is clearly obsolete: (John) Cook (Skeptical Science) tries to argue that 97% climate scientists endorse something - it sounds like a TV commercial. Most of his graphs are obsolete, too - the current support for various AGW-related statements is close to 1/2 of the figures he copied in an "optimistic" moment for his favorite political movement. The reality is that most scientists disagree with the basic tenets of the AGW orthodoxy - and even people like Phil Jones now agree that nothing unprecedented is going on with the climate right now (including no statistically significant warming in 15 years, and the existence of a medieval warm period), while Kevin Trenberth has agreed that the climate hasn't warmed and the popular models are inconsistent with this fact - what a travesty. There still exist large bodies of climate scientists who prefer to promote the panic - because they've been hired to do so or because it results from their political biases (which are mostly leftist in the Academia). The funding for climate science has increased 10-fold in the last 10- 20 years - purely because of the possible threat - which means that 90% of the people (or 90% of the funding) is working on proofs of this pre-determined conclusion. At any rate, these discussions provide us with no evidence for the actual science - they're just about an attempt of the largely political movements to intimidate the scientists in the very same way in which Nazis wanted to intimidate the "Jewish science" by the consensus of the "Aryan scientists". Einstein would tell them that it's enough to find one scientist to prove Einstein wrong.
