This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
Objection:
All those institutional position statements are fine, but by their very nature they hide the debate and the variety of individual positions. The real debate is in the scientific journals.
Answer:
This is a fair point. Group position statements are designed to smooth over debate and unite the different points of view that individuals may have. The best indicator of what individual scientists think is in the current scientific literature, where new and different is the paramount value and scientist are free to express their own ideas if they can support them with data and logic. What does the literature look like in terms of the climate debate? Sounds like a good topic for research.
Naomi Oreskes took on just this topic. She did an ISI database search with the keyword phrase "global climate change" and then surveyed all those abstracts she found that had been published between 1993 and 2003 in refereed scientific journals. There were 928. She then divided the papers into six categories:
- explicit endorsement of the consensus position
- evaluation of impacts
- mitigation proposals
- methods
- paleoclimate analysis
- rejection of the consensus position
The details can be read here. Her key finding is that none of these papers fell into the last category while 75% fell into the first three. This is a surprisingly robust consensus of opinion, especially considering that the start date was a full two years before the 1995 IPCC report, eight years before the more recent 2001 report.
A lot has happened since then, and none of it casts any doubt on the finding that the world is warming and it is primarily due to human actions.
(See this guide entry if ever Benny Peiser's name comes into the discussion of Oreskes' study.)
This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
"Position Statements Hide Debate" was first published here, where you can still find the original comment thread. This updated version is also posted on the Grist website, where additional comments can be found, though the author, Coby Beck, does not monitor or respond there.
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Naomi Oreskes picked 928 papers from over 10,000 and she picked them according to the abstract. Amazingly and shockingly she found only ones that agreed with her hypothesis. It was poor research on her part and reflects poorly on her abilities as a researcher. I could have just as easily found all the papers that disagreed with the hypothesis and garnered the opposite conclusion. Secondly, a concensus means nothing in science. Results of experiments that can be reproduced are the answer.
If rising global temperatures are do to rising CO2, then it can be proven. If we find a causual relationship between the rise of CO2 and the rise of global temperatures, we should do more research. There is the same causual relationship between sun spot activity and the rise of temperature, but maybe we could say that the rise in CO2 is due the sunspots? You could make that relationship.
Posted by: Shane | September 13, 2008 7:25 AM
Shane,
Your description of Oreskes method is of course completely wrong.
re: consensus - The point of determining if there is a consensus is so that non-experts in the field can be confident that the science is at a conclusive state. It is an important thing for non-scientists, not researchers in the field.
re: CO2 and sunspots - There is a well established causal relationship between CO2 and temperature founded in basic physical properties of radiative gases. The sunspot relationship is only a correlation and one that is failing now (record low sunspots, record high temperatures today)
Posted by: coby | September 13, 2008 8:55 AM
Coby,
Your dismissal of Shane's criticism of Oreskes' study is unfortunate. For anyone familiar with this it reflects a basic dishonesty on your part. Benny Peiser has repeated her study but was unable to duplicate it. See http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Oreskes-abstracts.htm
In short the database she used doesn't even have 928 abstracts for the criteria she used. And only 13 abstracts explicitly support "the consensus view".
Frankly I'm surprised it isn't higher than that, given the corruption that has occurred with the peer review process. But perhaps you are unfamiliar with this. Or, perhaps since it favors "the consensus view" you don't see it as corruption. At any rate, this piece by Richard Lindzen does a good job of chronicling this as well as the inherit bias in the IPCC - http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.3762.pdf.
Yet in spite of the "consensus" bias described by Lindzen, some peer reviewed papers that don't support "the consensus view" still manage to get through. In Jan, 2007, Madhav L Khandekar took the time to compile a number of these. Not that I expect you to take the time to actually read it, but here's the link in case you feel so inclined - http://friendsofscience.org/assets/files/documents/Madhav%20bibliography%20LONG%20VERSION%20Feb%206-07.pdf.
As for CO2 vs solar, to assert as you do above that there is a "well established causal relationship between CO2 and temperature". implying that CO2 leads to higher temperature is another form of dishonesty, isn't it? Historically, there is a well established causal relationship, but it is that rising temperatures result in higher CO2 levels, not the other way around. While it is likely that increasing CO2 leads to higher temperature, and both sides concur on that, it is nonetheless only theory. And there is large disagreement on the extent to which this would impact temperature. That temperatures in the last 15 decades have risen and fallen as CO2 has continued to climb, in fact, point to a fairly weak correlation between the two. This is far from a "well established causal relationship".
If you're going to be commenting on things of science, you should be more careful to leave your ideology behind and stick to the science. But then, there wouldn't really be a debate at all, would there?
To insist there's a consensus, requires ignoring all evidence to the contrary, and there is a lot of it. This is the epitome of bad science, which has historically used replication and debate to prove or disprove a hypothesis. In the true spirit of science, the skeptics want to keep the debate going. The dangers of acting prematurely to marshal considerable resources to thwart rising CO2 outweigh waiting a few years to see if the solar theories pan out or not. If they are correct we are heading into a cooling phase and this should be clear by 2010 or 2011. Given the CO2 contributions of China and India, waiting 2 or 3 more years before enacting any additional CO2 mitigation legislation in the West won't make any difference in the long term.
Witness the great Ethanol debacle, foisted on us in an effort to lower CO2. It has caused a great shift in corn from food to fuel, raising the price of corn worldwide and yielding a disproportionate burden on those who can least afford it. And has done virtually nothing to lower CO2.
Witness Kyoto. If all participating nations reached their target, temperature would have been a whopping .06C cooler in 2050, or something equally unmeasurable and insignificant. And it would cost billions to achieve this.
More knee-jerk reactions like these we don't need.
Posted by: Ty | October 15, 2008 6:24 PM
Hi Ty,
Sorry for the delay in publishing your comment, it was mislabled as junk and I am not very concientious when it comes to checking what's in the spam filter.
Your comment is very long and ranges over many topics, so my responses will be very terse.
WRT Shane, I was not unfair, his description of Oreske's methods is completely false as I simply stated.
WRT Pieser, please see this article, in short, he doesn't even believe his own study anymore.
WRT "lag vs lead" for CO2 and temperature, see here. In your discussion in general you are confusing correlational with causal. For example, the sunspot argument is really about correlation because direct measurements of solar intensity do not show enough change, they need some additional mechanism to cause such a large response. The causal aspect of CO2 is its uncontroversial radiative properties and the science focuses on this more than it appeals to correlation.
WRT CO2 rising steadily while temperatures have not, see this article. Your mentioning this only addresses the correlational argument, not the causal one, and the correlation is not expected to be exact on decadal scales due to natural variation. There are also other factors that influence the climate, so exact correlation on any scale is never a given.
WRT ethanol, I believe what has happened is better described as a cynical usage of climate change issues by a preexisting biofuels industry. I don't think many prominent green organizations or prominent energy experts thought it was all in all a good idea. The EROEI numbers were never good. It is however a cautionary lesson as you rightly present.
I don't recall anything I said that can be considered "ideological" in nature, so leave out the ad hom and let's stick to data and logic, shall we?
Thanks for the very substantive comment and if there is something in particular you feel needs a better answer, please focus on it in a shorter offering!
Best wishes.
Posted by: coby | October 23, 2008 3:52 PM