Peiser admits to making a mistake

Posted by Tim Lambert on March 22, 2006
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Last year Benny Peiser claimed that on a literature search he found 34 papers “reject or doubt” anthropgenic global warming. I posted the abstracts and it’s very obvious that he misclassified most of the papers. Peiser left several comments on that post, but could not bring himself to admit that he had made mistakes. Now Sylvia S Tognetti has spotted that Peiser has finally admitted to making mistakes:

I accept that it was a mistake to include the abstract you mentioned (and some other rather ambiguous ones) in my critique of the Oreskes essay.

Better late than never, I guess.

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Comments

  1. #1 coby
    March 22, 2006

    Yes, I read that with interest as it was in response to a direct question of mine. I didn’t know it was a first, but wondered if I had just been unaware of previous retractions. I thought I had made a follow up comment thanking him for the admission but asking if he shouldn’t make that a more full and public retraction, but apparently not. The thread is long and under this article:
    http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/science_policy_general/000747politicization_101_.html

  2. #2 Bob
    March 22, 2006

    That’s a pretty weak retraction, more along the lines of, “Well, yes, I got all the facts wrong but my point is still the same”.

  3. #3 Meyrick Kirby
    March 22, 2006

    I notice that Peiser has still not retracted his statement that Oreskes got her numbers wrong, which she didn’t … he failed to replicate her study properly!

    Secondly he’s still pushing the following idea:

    It certainly deflected attention from my main criticism, i.e. that her claim of a unanimous consensus on AGW (as opposed to a majority consensus) is tenuous.

    This is of course utter bullshit … Oreskes made no such claim. She did claim that there was a unanimous consensus in her sample of 928 papers, but she did not, nor would she be able to, draw an inference to the population that said there is a unanimous consensus in the population.

  4. #4 Steve Munn
    March 23, 2006

    Well spotted Tim. I note that Murdoch attack dogs like Andrew Bolt have gleefully milked Benny Peiser’s study.

  5. #5 hank
    March 23, 2006

    The only thing we learn from anthropologists is …. um …. it’s not what you dig up, it’s where you throw the mud?