…I expected no less mores from you, Sang! 
Either way, the 97% figure itself is not important and remains a strawman. Oh yeah, there was more than one survey that arrived at the conclusion that there is a general consensus among climatologists that the current global warming is manmade. Duarte and fellow travelers only want to single out Cook. Why is that?
If the 97% figure is not important, and a strawman — why do you continue to use it? Mere credulity, or a milder variant of The Big Lie technique of propaganda?
Yes, there have been a few "studies" reaching (a less compelling) conclusion of consensus among climate scientists… As Duarte says (elsewhere on his site, a little more than half-way down the page, titled Climate science is biased, but right)
Over the last few months, I've been alarmed by what I've discovered in looking into the research on the climate science consensus. There's clearly a consensus on AGW, but many of the research reports on the consensus are remarkably shoddy, clearly biased, and would not survive a social science review process. In some cases, the researchers seem to have no training in how to conduct such studies, because they're political activists, not researchers. Since the consensus will be there no matter what, it's amazing that people feel the need to inflate it, to rig it.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (2014) broke my heart, by releasing a wildly unscientific report that cherry-picked only the studies that gave it the inflated consensus figures it wanted -- many of which are so bad as to be inadmissable. When scientists want to review a body of research, they conduct a meta-analysis that includes all the research that meets certain criteria of rigor and validity. The AAAS strangely chose not to perform a meta-analysis -- they simply ignored most studies, and cherry-picked four studies that gave them the inflated, shock-value numbers they wanted. Among the four was an obsolete one-page study from 2004 that doesn't clearly describe its methods (Oreskes, 2004, yes, really, one page long). That is, they skipped past all the more recent and credible studies from the intervening decade (e.g. Harris (2007), Bray and van Storch (2008), and others) to reach all the way back to a junk study from 2004. I've never seen such behavior – we clearly can't do anything with mysterious one-pagers from 2004. This isn't what I expected.
It's clear that some climate scientists bring their politics into this. They leap to policy prescriptions and seem unaware of their ideological assumptions. Scientists are surprisingly not well-trained in separating ideological assumptions from descriptive facts, and don't seem to run bias-correction algorithms on themselves. Climate science displays many of the classic signs of groupthink, and the tenor of the debate is disturbingly hostile and malicious as a result.
Duarte is a "fellow traveler"?
Here's what he wrote following the above-quoted paragraphs:
That AGW is true has no inherent implications for policy. For one thing, severity or magnitude will matter. If the warming is only 1° C, that's a very different scenario than a 6° C change. Global warming is not a dichotomous or binary thing – it's a matter of degree, in every sense. You need to do some serious work to get from 1) AGW is true, to 2) Do something! We might value economic prosperity more than some increment of climate stasis. We'd also have to establish whether we owe the people of 2100 a very specific band of temperatures, and a very specific range of sea levels -- that's not obvious. We'd have to decide whether government should be an open-ended, unconstrained, intergenerational welfare-maximization engine, or a protector of individual rights on human lifespan timescales. There is a substantial body of evidence detailing the harms of giving government a coercive role in economic life -- see public choice theory, rent-seeking, regulatory capture, the knowledge problem, general economics, Hayek, Buchanan, Easterly, Cowen, Mankiw, Caplan, Epstein, the history of the 20th century, etc. (and many economists disagree with them -- I'm puzzled why economics isn't more unified.) There will be deep philosophical and ethical differences on whether we have the right to coerce billions of people for an unclear likelihood of preventing a 2-4 C increase in global mean surface temperatures by 2100. None of this is self-evident -- people will disagree.
It seems to me that your problem is with that last phrase: Disagreement with
your views is anathema…
As with some prominent climate scientists, the Party Line must be toed!
Carry on, Comrade!
————————————————————————————————————————————
@
Jaybro: But… But! Disagreement is
not allowed! It's
heretical…
Surely, you understand why that
must be so in climatology, no?
Topic: Anthropogenic Global Warming (Read 206888 times)
