Global warming and scientific consensus

[EternalOptimist]

What proportion (roughly) of serious scientists who support the man-made global warming position is saying that they are 100% sure that global warming will occur and is man made?

All of them as far as I am aware. All of the sceptical scientists believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and will result in warming , as far as I am aware. The debate is about the scale, the integrity and the danger.
My view is that if you want to look at a greenhouse gas, you should be looking at water vapour, and if you look at water vapour it will be lost in the noise of natural variability anyway.

CO2 is a red herring, we are teaching our kids that black is white and using scare tactics to do it

[BlasterBates]

Indeed and they all make predictions. I think Easterbrook reckons CO2 warming will be small fraction of the warming the IPCC predicts.

Judith Curry used to accept the IPCC opinion but has now rejected it. She doesn't know whether it will be cooler or warmer at the end of the century, so she's on a crusade to clean-up climate science. She also accepts Co2 warming.

[sasguru]

CO2 is a red herring, we are teaching our kids that black is white and using scare tactics to do it

Anyway I suppose your kids must have learnt a bit from your rubella risk analysis.
I'm very curious about how you went about it.
Please could you expand?

[EternalOptimist]

Interesting. Could you provide more detail with some figures?

No. It was twenty five years ago and I forgot to archive the sql database I ran my model on.

Basically it boiled down to this
danger to her of the jab - remote chance of brain damage
danger of not - remote chance of flu like symptoms

danger to her kids of jab - none
danger to her kids of not - chance of downs or other problems


I made a judgement based on not knowing whether she would ever have kids, and not knowing whether their would be medical advances that would eliminate that risk when (if) the time came.

[Old Greg]

But you don't need to quote Fred Singer, what about

Professor Judith Curry

Professor Don Easterbrook

Professor Balll

and here is a new guy on the block

coaps.fsu.edu | Ryan Maue's Seasonal Tropical Cyclone Activity Update

just to name a few, and they have tremendous academic reputations.

But what makes their criticism poignant is that they are accusing the scientists you believe of dishonesty.

Doesn't that ring alarm bells?

We're not talking about scientific disagreeement, but dishonesty.

Lets revisit that:




Now that is quite an accusation. So a professor with high standing comes out with a statement like that, but you still accept their view without question?

But also to address global warming...

I have no problem with scientists taking a contrary position. Indeed that is an important part of progess in scientific thought. What is a mistake in science is to put undue or unequal weight on the views of scientists who dissent from an overwhelming view. I mentioned vaccination because the media leapt on the MMR controversy giving undue weight to the dissenting opinion. The same happens with climate change. Another mistake is to give undue weight to individual papers, rather than looking at literature reviews and systematic reviews that will examine the combined data of different papers to form a more robust analysis. This is the approach taken by homeopaths. These are extreme examples, but climate change, and the position taken by the media are on this continuum. Another alarm bell is where a key challenge to a consensus (or near consensus of you prefer) is that the consensus is driven either by a dishonest conspiracy to get funding, or by individuals acting independently, but dishonestly in unison to get funding.

Extract from one assetion of consensus (or near consensus if you prefer):

'Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.'

Expert credibility in climate change

Why put so much weight either on the 2 - 3% or to others less qualified (like BB's civil engineer dam-builder - forget his name).

[sasguru]

No. It was twenty five years ago and I forgot to archive the sql database I ran my model on.

Wow you wrote some SQL to do this? Impressive.
Must have bene a very complicated model.

[EternalOptimist]

Wow you wrote some SQL to do this? Impressive.
Must have bene a very complicated model.

does your head go right to the top of that hat ?

[sasguru]

Why put so much weight either on the 2 - 3% or to others less qualified

It's called selective bias - it happens when you've made up your mind independent of the evidence.
Then you have to scrabble around looking for research that supports your position, while ignoring the mass of evidence that goes against it.
Its very common and that is what BB et.al. suffer from.

[Old Greg]

It's called selective bias - it happens when you've made up your mind independent of the evidence.
Then you have to scrabble around looking for research that supports your position, while ignoring the mass of evidence that goes against it.
Its very common and that is what BB et.al. suffer from.

Mrs OG is a cognitive neuroscientist, and one of her specialist fields is decision-making, so she keeps me up to date with cognitive biases. They're quite amusing.

[TimberWolf]

It's called selective bias - it happens when you've made up your mind independent of the evidence.
Then you have to scrabble around looking for research that supports your position, while ignoring the mass of evidence that goes against it.
Its very common and that is what BB et.al. suffer from.

A posher term is cognitive dissonance.

True.

It is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology.

HTH