Fake News - Global Warming Consensus

[basilio]

Having said that, please be aware that the image in your post might be subject to a couple of potentially valid criticisms. My recollection of the 66ish% "no position" was that it included abstracts where no statement of a position could be explicitly or implicitly identified in the abstract. Some (although not terribly many) authors responding to the invited self assessment indicating a position. Please also note that there exist important distinctions between phrases such as "Took no position" and "no stated position" and "no position stated".

Another criticism is that the bar graph simply shows "66.4% NO", immediately followed by "32.6% YES" etc. A casual observer, neglecting to read the fine print, would very likely misunderstand this to mean that 66.4% stated a negative position on AGW.

Very nice work Cynic. Just picked the big lie in that poster.

Many, MOST abstracts of a scientific paper do not explictly state a positon on AGW . Abstracts are short and attempt to give an overview of the main points of research. In many/most cases, particularly in the last 10 years the writers would have accepted that AGW was real because in the broader scientific world that is the belief.

This issue would be particularly significant if the paper was not related direct to climate science but on the effects of changing climate in local ecology, glaciology, patterns of land use and so on.

Long story short - As Cynic points out the "No Stated Position" in the Abstract is not a No to AGW.
This question of course was further explored by the consensus researchers.

The researchers asked the authors of papers that did not have an explicit support of AGW in the Abstract to self rate their view of CC as expressed in their paper. This was overwhelmingly positive. The details can be seen in the original paper. Graphicly it was represented as follows .


Table 5. Comparison of our abstract rating to self-rating for papers that received self-ratings.


Position Abstract rating Self-rating
Endorse AGW 791 (36.9%) 1342 (62.7%)
No AGW position or undecided 1339 (62.5%) 761 (35.5%)
Reject AGW 12 (0.6%) 39 (1.8%)
Figure 3 compares the percentage of papers endorsing the scientific consensus among all papers that express a position endorsing or rejecting the consensus. The year-to-year variability is larger in the self-ratings than in the abstract ratings due to the smaller sample sizes in the early 1990s. The percentage of AGW endorsements for both self-rating and abstract-rated papers increase marginally over time (simple linear regression trends 0.10 ± 0.09% yr−1, 95% CI, R2 = 0.20,p = 0.04 for abstracts, 0.35 ± 0.26% yr−1, 95% CI, R2 = 0.26,p = 0.02 for self-ratings), with both series approaching approximately 98% endorsements in 2011.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024/meta

But in the end the heart of the issue is
1) Is the world becoming much hotter than it has for tens of thousands of years ?
2) What is the understanding of science as to the reasons for this situation ?
3) Do we have any capacity to change the course of the current increase in global temperatures ?
4) What consequences can be forseen as a result of this temperature increase and what do we need to do to address these problems?

 

[cynic]

The problem I have cynic is knowing that it was abstracts that were being reviewed, not the papers written by the scientists.

An abstract is a brief summary of a research article, thesis, review, conference proceeding, or any in-depth analysis of a particular subject and is often used to help the reader quickly ascertain the paper's purpose.
This was a common complaint amongst the scientists that their papers were misquoted, edited or otherwise interfered with to massage an outcome.
So I am aware the 'no position' stance may have also been manipulated to achieve the outcome in the summary (abstract) as demanded by the powers that be. It appears the authors of the abstracts not the papers are the ones being counted in these percentage groups. There is a group of one hundred people who wrote the abstracts for the YES group as well as I can ascertain but it is made very hard to understand. I understand these summaries/abstracts are written behind closed doors at the IPCC.
It is a really slimy bit of shifty, fudging, statistical house of cards they have built. If this was a company and a really good auditor went in, I reckon the CFO would face a prison sentence for illegal representation.

So to actually fully and truthfully represent this on a simple graph would be nigh on impossible.

I largely agree and do sympathise with what you are trying to achieve.

I do like what you have done, because it does highlight, in a very simple format, that less than 1 in 3, of the abstracts, could be identified as endorsing (whether implicitly or explicitly) AGW.

As you have mentioned, there are numerous other criticisms that could reasonably be levelled, but to capture them all would require a much larger body of charts and commentary.

I read the entire paper myself, some time ago, and still struggle to understand how Cook Et al. didn't get laughed out of academia!

 

[Ann]

OK cynic, how is this? It gave me a chance to fix the file so it is no longer fuzzy....darn jpg.

 

[Ann]

I read the entire paper myself, some time ago, and still struggle to understand how Cook Et al. didn't get laughed out of academia!

He is currently calling for biased volunteers to do another count. He may try to massage new figures to cover his rear end. There are massive litigations planned, I believe, so they may be letting him dig his own grave. He is most definitely their weakest link. Once he is put under an audit, no doubt he is a gonner. In fact once the whole GW mob is put under an audit it is going to be spectacular! No doubt it will go down in history as the world's biggest con! All the scientists and researchers who have had their papers altered will be pointing the auditors in all the right places.

 

[Ann]

Very nice work Cynic. Just picked the big lie in that poster.

Grasping at straws basilio, there is only one 'Big Lie' here and that is the Global Warming Myth.

 

[Smurf1976]

It used to be individual states had their own electricity generation and they used to vie with each other for manufacturing in their own states. The government in their wisdom decided to monopolize electricity into a national grid and then privatize it. The competition was gone, so was cheap power and then manufacturing. Now, not only is there no competition or cheap power

You win the award for being one of the very few who grasps the real nature of how we ended up in this mess.

Vic, Tas, NSW and Qld were fiercely competitive on price. The others had disadvantages of natural resources but they still gave it a red hot go and minimised the gap.

These days with the "competitive market" there's essentially no pressure to reduce costs, the focus having instead shifted to profit through revenue maximisation whereas in the past the focus was on minimising the price.

My view on the role of the CO2 issue is that there's no real point worrying about it so long as the other, larger, problems aren't resolved. I suspect the real reason so much fuss is made about it politically in Australia is that it conveniently distracts attention from the real truth which neither side wants to admit. They made the mess. That so few people understand it all makes that deception rather easy to continue.

 

[cynic]

Very nice work Cynic. Just picked the big lie in that poster.

Thanks for the compliment, (why am I now beginning to regret not having used the private message facility when communicating with Ann?).

Many, MOST abstracts of a scientific paper do not explictly state a positon on AGW . Abstracts are short and attempt to give an overview of the main points of research. In many/most cases, particularly in the last 10 years the writers would have accepted that AGW was real because in the broader scientific world that is the belief.

basilio, if not explicitly stated, how could you possibly know what the broader scientific world truly believes?

This issue would be particularly significant if the paper was not related direct to climate science but on the effects of changing climate in local ecology, glaciology, patterns of land use and so on.

Long story short - As Cynic points out the "No Stated Position" in the Abstract is not a No to AGW.

Yikes!! basilio agrees with me on something climate change related!!(damn it! I must have made a mistake somewhere!!)

This question of course was further explored by the consensus researchers.

The researchers asked the authors of papers that did not have an explicit support of AGW in the Abstract to self rate their view of CC as expressed in their paper. This was overwhelmingly positive. The details can be seen in the original paper. Graphicly it was represented as follows .

basilio, you seem to have rather conveniently overlooked the fact that, of the 8547 authors emailed, only 1200 (approx. 14%) responded. 11 of those responses were excluded from further consideration, resulting in only 2142 papers, being considered ,as having received self ratings, from 1189 authors.
In effect this meant that self ratings, by 1189 (out of the original 29083) authors was considered for 2142 (out of the original 11,944) papers!!!
So less than 5% of authors, and less than 19% of papers, received self ratings!!!

Table 5. Comparison of our abstract rating to self-rating for papers that received self-ratings.


Position Abstract rating Self-rating
Endorse AGW 791 (36.9%) 1342 (62.7%)
No AGW position or undecided 1339 (62.5%) 761 (35.5%)
Reject AGW 12 (0.6%) 39 (1.8%)
Figure 3 compares the percentage of papers endorsing the scientific consensus among all papers that express a position endorsing or rejecting the consensus. The year-to-year variability is larger in the self-ratings than in the abstract ratings due to the smaller sample sizes in the early 1990s. The percentage of AGW endorsements for both self-rating and abstract-rated papers increase marginally over time (simple linear regression trends 0.10 ± 0.09% yr−1, 95% CI, R2 = 0.20,p = 0.04 for abstracts, 0.35 ± 0.26% yr−1, 95% CI, R2 = 0.26,p = 0.02 for self-ratings), with both series approaching approximately 98% endorsements in 2011.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024/meta

But in the end the heart of the issue is
1) Is the world becoming much hotter than it has for tens of thousands of years ?
2) What is the understanding of science as to the reasons for this situation ?
3) Do we have any capacity to change the course of the current increase in global temperatures ?
4) What consequences can be forseen as a result of this temperature increase and what do we need to do to address these problems?

[/QUOTE]

 

[SirRumpole]

These days with the "competitive market" there's essentially no pressure to reduce costs, the focus having instead shifted to profit through revenue maximisation whereas in the past the focus was on minimising the price.

Anything we can do about it now ?

 

[explod]

Grasping at straws basilio, there is only one 'Big Lie' here and that is the Global Warming Myth.

With zero degrees in the arctic in their last winter when the normal temperature is supposed to be 40 to 60c below I can assure you that global warming is no myth.

Cause can be argued but not the sudden warming.

 

[Ann]

Anything we can do about it now ?

Heck yes Rumpy, support coal fired power stations.

 

[cynic]

With zero degrees in the arctic in their last winter when the normal temperature is supposed to be 40 to 60c below I can assure you that global warming is no myth.

Cause can be argued but not the sudden warming.

The last time I checked, the globe consisted of a lot more than just the arctic.

 

[Ann]

With zero degrees in the arctic in their last winter when the normal temperature is supposed to be 40 to 60c below I can assure you that global warming is no myth.

Cause can be argued but not the sudden warming.

It is not sudden explod, the temp last year was a double top from 2019. We all know what happens after a double top if you happen to be a chartist. Down baby down.

Thanks for the compliment, (why am I now beginning to regret not having used the private message facility when communicating with Ann?).

I am really pleased you didn't cynic, basilio fed me an awesome line which just begs to be a poster. Coming soon.....

 

[luutzu]

It is not sudden explod, the temp last year was a double top from 2019. We all know what happens after a double top if you happen to be a chartist. Down baby down.

I am really pleased you didn't cynic, basilio fed me an awesome line which just begs to be a poster. Coming soon.....

Did you just use technical analysis to predict the weather?

I've heard of people using the weather, or the stars and the moon, to predict financial asset prices... I guess you could argue that the weather will affect certain stock prices, like ice cream or ag.

But to take charting pattern recognition, apply it to weather event. That's a first.

 

[luutzu]

OK cynic, how is this? It gave me a chance to fix the file so it is no longer fuzzy....darn jpg.

View attachment 90468

Maybe the aim of those 66.4% that took no position on climate change weren't aiming to prove or disprove the causes of climate change. Scientific studies do have an aim to all the maths and statistics and stuff you know.

for example, The aim of this study was to measure the frequencies of bush fires in winter over the past two decades. We found that there's an ever increasing frequency of bush fires in winter, more so than the previous two decades.

 

[Ann]

Did you just use technical analysis to predict the weather?

I've heard of people using the weather, or the stars and the moon, to predict financial asset prices... I guess you could argue that the weather will affect certain stock prices, like ice cream or ag.

But to take charting pattern recognition, apply it to weather event. That's a first.

No I don't think it is a first luu, I think a few astrophysicists have done it for quite a while. I guess there are or were a few Gann exponents who predicted events. I remember the late chartist who posted here Trader Paul predicted the rise of Oil, long before it ever happened. He was maligned and harrassed but he was a very polite lovely man who knew he was right so no matter how much he was attacked, he knew he was right. I don't think he really cared about the dills who accosted him.

 

[Smurf1976]

Anything we can do about it now ?

It's too late now in my view unless someone's willing to do something radical.

Radical as in a forced corporate reorganisation of several entities, some of which are listed companies and some of which are owned by foreign governments, and with compulsory acquisition and sale of assets as part of that.

Don't be too surprised if something like that actually happens. I'm very sure I'm not the only one thinking that way but it would probably need a major "trigger" event of some sort be it technical or economic.

The method of generation is very much a secondary thing. There's no point in government building a coal-fired plant when the cost of its output will be quadrupled by the time it reaches consumers anyway and another company will simply close an existing plant in response to the government's new one.

Building lots of wind and solar similarly doesn't fix the price problem although it would likely bring forward a crisis, by bringing about an earlier shutdown of an existing coal-fired plant, which acts as the trigger to resolve the entire issue.

An issue in all that is there is now a requirement to give three years' notice of closing a generating facility. Add in the drama with AGL's announced closure of Liddell and don't be at all surprised when the next such closure involves no prior announcement but rather, the sudden "failure" of existing plant which a few weeks later is announced as uneconomic to repair.

 

[Smurf1976]

But to take charting pattern recognition, apply it to weather event. That's a first.

I've certainly spotted various T/A patterns in a chart of water storage levels in the past.

It happens yes.

 

[Smurf1976]

Right now in SA Pelican Point power station has half the plant online and running at ~70% of capacity. Meanwhile just across the water, they're literally just a few km apart, good ole Torrens Island A station also has a machine online running at ~60% of capacity and 3 of the B station units each running at ~50% of capacity.

An immediate cut to both CO2 emissions and operating costs could be achieved simply by transferring some load from Torrens Island to fully load the more efficient Pelican Point plant which is more efficient as such but also suffers a greater efficiency loss at partial load than Torrens Island does. In layman's terms - if you're going to run something at partial load then Torrens Island is a far better place to do it than Pelican Point.

An engineer would never have thought to do otherwise, it's just commonsense. Market doesn't do that however.

There's the problem and my point is about the workings of the market not anything that someone is doing wrong. There is just no point worrying about the merits of coal versus solar so long as we have a market which produces silly outcomes.

 

[Ann]

There is just no point worrying about the merits of coal versus solar so long as we have a market which produces silly outcomes.

Solar doesn't nor will it have the kind of grunt of coal. You want industry you need coal.

 

[Smurf1976]

Solar doesn't nor will it have the kind of grunt of coal. You want industry you need coal.

No matter what the technology it still needs an efficient system of management, organisation, transmission, distribution, retail etc if it is to deliver economical power to consumers.

There's no point building a new coal plant just so we can back off its output during the peaks so as to force open cycle gas turbines on and spike the price.