97% of what agree climate change is real. Refuting Obeyme with facts not fiction.
The real purpose here is to introduce for those that do not use it - another source of Objectivist thought which I found doing a quick google to answer a question in another thread.
One of those cases where you remember but are not quite sure from where or the exact words. Hey...the brain gets old after 31 years of being 39 ...Cut it some slack. Looking for some further information on causality I ran across this article. but only put the first page. Enjoy I love beating up on Senior Politicians whose staff has failed them...
It's not true that 97% of scientists Agree that Climate Change is Real, Man-Made and Dangerous,” but Environmentalist Leaders Dogmatically Repeat It
Posted on October 11, 2015
1
In May of 2013, Barack Obama put out a tweet that said:
Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.
This claim is often repeated by environmentalists and the Left, and is most definitely false. Alex Epstein, writing for Forbes, destroyed this claim in his article, “‘97% Of Climate Scientists Agree’ Is 100% Wrong”.
From Epstein’s article:
One of the main papers behind the 97 percent claim is authored by John Cook, who runs the popular website http://SkepticalScience.com, a virtual encyclopedia of arguments trying to defend predictions of catastrophic climate change from all challenges.
Here is Cook’s summary of his paper: “Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97 percent [of papers he surveyed] endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.”
This is a fairly clear statement—97 percent of the papers surveyed endorsed the view that man-made greenhouse gases were the main cause—main in common usage meaning more than 50 percent.
But even a quick scan of the paper reveals that this is not the case. Cook is able to demonstrate only that a relative handful endorse “the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.” Cook calls this “explicit endorsement with quantification” (quantification meaning 50 percent or more). The problem is, only a small percentage of the papers fall into this category; Cook does not say what percentage, but when the study was publicly challenged by economist David Friedman, one observer calculated that only 1.6 percent explicitly stated that man-made greenhouse gases caused at least 50 percent of global warming.
Where did most of the 97 percent come from, then? Cook had created a category called “explicit endorsement without quantification”—that is, papers in which the author, by Cook’s admission, did not say whether 1 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent of the warming was caused by man. He had also created a category called “implicit endorsement,” for papers that imply (but don’t say) that there is some man-made global warming and don’t quantify it. In other words, he created two categories that he labeled as endorsing a view that they most certainly didn’t.
As Alex Epstein details, some of the scientists whose papers were mischaracterized by this paper objected to the misrepresentation. There is more to Epstein’s article that is worth reading, so I definitely recommend reading the whole thing when you have time.
Continue reading →
or in this case link to and use the author's name and pub date or title to find the whole article
One of those cases where you remember but are not quite sure from where or the exact words. Hey...the brain gets old after 31 years of being 39 ...Cut it some slack. Looking for some further information on causality I ran across this article. but only put the first page. Enjoy I love beating up on Senior Politicians whose staff has failed them...
It's not true that 97% of scientists Agree that Climate Change is Real, Man-Made and Dangerous,” but Environmentalist Leaders Dogmatically Repeat It
Posted on October 11, 2015
1
In May of 2013, Barack Obama put out a tweet that said:
Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.
This claim is often repeated by environmentalists and the Left, and is most definitely false. Alex Epstein, writing for Forbes, destroyed this claim in his article, “‘97% Of Climate Scientists Agree’ Is 100% Wrong”.
From Epstein’s article:
One of the main papers behind the 97 percent claim is authored by John Cook, who runs the popular website http://SkepticalScience.com, a virtual encyclopedia of arguments trying to defend predictions of catastrophic climate change from all challenges.
Here is Cook’s summary of his paper: “Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97 percent [of papers he surveyed] endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.”
This is a fairly clear statement—97 percent of the papers surveyed endorsed the view that man-made greenhouse gases were the main cause—main in common usage meaning more than 50 percent.
But even a quick scan of the paper reveals that this is not the case. Cook is able to demonstrate only that a relative handful endorse “the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.” Cook calls this “explicit endorsement with quantification” (quantification meaning 50 percent or more). The problem is, only a small percentage of the papers fall into this category; Cook does not say what percentage, but when the study was publicly challenged by economist David Friedman, one observer calculated that only 1.6 percent explicitly stated that man-made greenhouse gases caused at least 50 percent of global warming.
Where did most of the 97 percent come from, then? Cook had created a category called “explicit endorsement without quantification”—that is, papers in which the author, by Cook’s admission, did not say whether 1 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent of the warming was caused by man. He had also created a category called “implicit endorsement,” for papers that imply (but don’t say) that there is some man-made global warming and don’t quantify it. In other words, he created two categories that he labeled as endorsing a view that they most certainly didn’t.
As Alex Epstein details, some of the scientists whose papers were mischaracterized by this paper objected to the misrepresentation. There is more to Epstein’s article that is worth reading, so I definitely recommend reading the whole thing when you have time.
Continue reading →
or in this case link to and use the author's name and pub date or title to find the whole article
For anybody who is interested in supporting truly Objectivist endeavors, I could not recommend this one more highly. Buy his book "The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels", which is where the article stemmed from. Support him any way you can.
"Are we taking a safe, docile, benevolent environment and making it hostile, or are we taking a hostile environment and making it safe?" Alex Epstien.
Then he screens the resulting papers to determine if they indicate whether or not human activity is influencing the change. As you, and the article, point out he doesn't analyze how much -- this is based on abstracts after all.
He finds that roughly 34% indicate an opinion as to whether humans are causing change. Of this 34% the overwhelming number, 97% to be exact, say yes.
The same data could be accurately be used to say that "Of the papers that have phrases related to climate change in the abstract, 33% indicate that humans are a source".
And, of course these are papers in a field where the government is funding a lot of 'research' on the problems of climate change not actual scientists.