Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

It's a paradox, is it not, that some posters to this thread who cannot parse its title's meaning then criticize another — for not being so obtuse?

…Can I presume, from the lack of replies, that most here would tend to agree with Lewandowsky and Cook and, so, won't consider their "sins"…? (Not wanting to "cast the first stone" and all that!)

Science reporting is -I agree- abysmally bad, usually. But so is science education — even of specialists who might be expected to know something. (Oreskes comes to mind, immediately.) Should K-12 teachers be taught basic science?
Would someone take a poll: What, in the theory of evolution, implies progress?

To all the responders you were being obtuse. Live with it.

ersi, it is not my fault that you are uninformed about many things. (Nor is it your fault that I am.) But your predilection to dismiss what you aren't familiar with is —at least, to me— anti-rational behavior!

Something as trivial as "some modern science is no better than the most egregious media blather"? Well, I am definitely not uninformed about that, thank you very much. The question is if you have anything enlightening to add to this, such as that your stated names and titles are such a case.

I linked to the papers in question… They're not long, or difficult to read and understand. And they've been discussed on a number of specialty blogs, and in most major newspapers.
What more do you want — to begin a discussion?

As I've said, quite a few scientists and academic institutions acquiesce or even support them.

Again I ask you, why post in this thread if you have no interest in its topic?

You want the op-ed version… It'll have to wait for tomorrow.

(I don't understand why you won't read the papers themselves. But I'm willing to "save you the trouble"; although I, for one, wouldn't accept such… That's just me, I guess.)

Despite numerous indicators of a consensus, there is wide public perception that climate scientists disagree over the fundamental cause of global warming (GW; Leiserowitz et al 2012, Pew 2012). In the most comprehensive analysis performed to date, we have extended the analysis of peer-reviewed climate papers in Oreskes (2004). We examined a large sample of the scientific literature on global  CC, published over a 21 year period, in order to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW).

[…] analyzing  928  abstracts,  published  in  refereed  scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords
“climate change” (9).
The 928 papers were divided into six categories:

   
• explicit endorsement of the consensus position,

   
• evaluation of impacts,

   
• mitigation  proposals,

   
• methods,

   
• paleoclimate analysis, and

   
• rejection of the consensus position.

(list format added)


Of  all  the  papers,  75%  fell  into  the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current  anthropogenic  climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

The Cook Consensus paper begins with the statement:

Quote

Despite numerous indicators of a consensus, there is wide public perception that climate scientists disagree over the fundamental cause of global warming (GW; Leiserowitz et al 2012, Pew 2012).

Lots of people take the problem to be a straighforward increase of temperature, but this gets the whole issue fundamentally wrong.

The problem is industrial contribution to the greenhouse effect, not anthropogenic global warming.

We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.

Quote from: ersi on 2014-08-23, 06:59:36

Lots of people take the problem to be a straighforward increase of temperature, but this gets the whole issue fundamentally wrong.

I beg to differ. Many people seem to have trouble with the concept that global warming automatically implies that local temperature fluctuations mean little by themselves. Besides which, the local temperature in some regions might well drop while it would still rise globally. Some people also seem to have memory issues. But the global rise in temperature is a fairly straightforward trend.
[...]
Nevertheless, a rose by any other name would smell as sour.

And I beg to differ for several important reasons. First, the thing already had a name. Renaming it only obfuscates the whole topic. Second, the old name is better, more descriptive.

Greenhouse effect entails that the atmosphere grows more violent with hurricanes and typhoons as more loose energy is injected into the system.

The rising sea level is also not simply rising. It produces waves over the entire hydrosphere, tsunamis not directly attributable to earthquakes, but to complex causes. Greenhouse effect describes the complex dynamics of the phenomenon as it is, while global warming makes it appear linear, which it isn't.

Can't agree with the new name, sorry.

The Internet is full of references to global warming. The Union of Concerned Scientists website on climate change is titled "Global Warming," just one of many examples. But we don't use global warming much on this website. We use the less appealing "climate change." Why?

[…]

In place of inadvertent climate modification, Charney adopted Broecker's usage. When referring to surface temperature change, Charney used "global warming." When discussing the many other changes that would be induced by increasing carbon dioxide, Charney used "climate change."

Definitions

Global warming: the increase in Earth’s average surface temperature due to rising levels of greenhouse gases.

Climate change: a long-term change in the Earth’s climate, or of a region on Earth.

Within scientific journals, this is still how the two terms are used. Global warming refers to surface temperature increases, while climate change includes global warming and everything else that increasing greenhouse gas amounts will affect.

[…]

But global warming became the dominant popular term in June 1988, when NASA scientist James E. Hansen had testified to Congress about climate, specifically referring to global warming. He said: "global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming." […]

But temperature change itself isn't the most severe effect of changing climate. Changes to precipitation patterns and sea level are likely to have much greater human impact than the higher temperatures alone. For this reason, scientific research on climate change encompasses far more than surface temperature change. So "global climate change" is the more scientifically accurate term. Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we've chosen to emphasize global climate change on this website, and not global warming.

What's the old name? In what language?

Everyone knows the economic conjuncture goes (or seems to go) ever upward as a trend while having downers along the way. No one seems to have a problem understanding that you can have steadily rising sinusoidal functions like x-sin(x) that aren't strictly linear.* I don't see why temperature would suddenly bring out a lack of understanding. I don't see why temperature would suddenly bring out a lack of understanding.

I can agree that the global warming or "climate change" is an aspect of it, but limiting the phenomenon to warming or change is reductive and deceptive. All controversy is due to loss of context that occurs along with the reduction.

@Belfrager
Oh, so "consensus" is like a project or a movement similar to a political party. Well, inasmuch it is that, the science becomes less relevant indeed. Oakdale's sources make it be about politics and for him political controversies are lots of fun, but not for me. I will stick to the science and stay away from the politics.

Politics? What I've linked to it's the only analysis I could find about all the scientific papers regarding climate published the last ten years or so. The conclusions are evident.

To not participate it's certainly a right and, sometimes, the wise thing to do, but relating man driven climate change I prefer to have an active position against the continuation of a crime.

And I mentioned politics because, even without looking, the project feels like Greenpeace.

And what do you mean active in this case? Doing speeches? Distributing leaflets? Buying the right book?

The references in the end of the sentence are meant to prove the scientific disagreement over the fundamental cause of global warming, right?

Quote from: ersi on 2014-08-22, 22:59:36

The references in the end of the sentence are meant to prove the scientific disagreement over the fundamental cause of global warming, right?

Nope. Not even close...

ersi, you might as well join -- one side or the other: The rhetoric is all that you're capable of responding to.

The Consensus Project is but one of the sites with which Cook is affiliated...