Pathological Denial

What do you think of the Bush administration's solar shield plan, Tim? Do you think this is the plan they have in mind: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-11/uoa-ssm110306.php

Note this: "It seems feasible that it could be developed and deployed in about 25 years at a cost of a few trillion dollars. With care, the solar shade should last about 50 years. So the average cost is about $100 billion a year, or about two-tenths of one percent of the global domestic product."

Not exactly timely or cheap, is it!

There's pathological denial and then there's pathological defamation. Anyone who reads the whole of the thread would be in no doubt that Lambert is making it up and deliberately quoting what was said by both me and Peiser out of context. For the record, Peiser wrote to me and said that he did not withdraw the totality of his criticism of Oreskes, just some aspects of it, yet Lambert claims Peiser has totally withdrawn on the basis of an undocumented claim on the Media Watch website.

Young claims:

>Lambert claims Peiser has totally withdrawn on the basis of an undocumented claim on the Media Watch website.

As is obvious from the discussion, I made no such claim, and neither did Media Watch. Peiser withdrew his claim that there were 34 abstracts that disputed the consensus and now concedes that there was only one.

If Young wants to pretend that MW is wrong and Peiser maintains that there are more than that, he has to produce an email from Peiser listing them.

Try all you like Tim I'm still not going to go to OnlineOpinion or care about Graham Young's deep, deep thoughts on anything, sorry!
That he heatedly thinks Benny Peiser's opinion should be something of importance to the world of climate science tells you all you need to know about his scientific nous.

Defamation would be calling Tim Lambert "deeply dishonest" and not apologising for it you pathological twit Young!

I've read the entire thread (twice!).

Graham Young deliberately misrepresents Tim Lambert by claiming that Peiser totally withdrew his claims. Clearly this is not the case as is easily demonstrated by reading the post.

Mr. Young has many interesting things to say, however on this issue, falls into the same trap as anyone arguing from a purely ideological perspective - relying on pedantry instead of empirical data.

Who are these people? If you claim that 34 abstracts support your position, and your position being a great amount of conflict in the literature, and there is no consensus, then you retract your statement about 33/34 abstracts, it isn't really splitting hairs to say that you have retracted the evidence for your claim. And if your original claim were based on that sampling of abstracts alone, then you have de facto retracted your claim.

This cannot be serious. I love that "blatant" is treated as a huge modifier of "deeply." I can't wait for "profoundly" to pop up. Wait, here it comes:

"Graham Young is profoundly ______________*"

*Redacted totally true, but fully supported by evidence here, negative term.

Peiser (Graham Young's extract):

Yes, I have indeed retracted part of my criticism of the Oreskes study. I made a methodological mistake in my initial analysis of her abstracts and have conceded that much.
Nevertheless, I do maintain that her study is flawed since her main claims are not backed up by the sample of abstracts she used. For a start, she cannot have analysed 928 abstracts as there are only 905 listed in the data bank she claims to have used. Her claim that "75% [of all papers] fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view" is certainly wrong as the majority of abstracts do not even deal with anthropogenic global warming. I have posted all the ISI abstracts Oreskes used on my website for those who want to check the core data: http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Oreskes-abstracts.htm

I see Dr Peiser still can't count - it's 900 without abstracts, not 905.

More to the point, since he was so spectacularly wrong about the "34", why should we trust him on his classification of paper's not dealing with AGW?

I also note that Peiser has changed his page. It used to include two abstracts: Fernau et al. (1993) and Gerhard & Hanson (2000). Which was rather funny since the first was not in the sample, i.e. not in the lists of abstracts. You'ld think he might have checked!

This is the annoying thing about the internet. As with the Adam Smith Institute, whenever a mistake is made the questionnable types simply remove the evidence.

I've been following the stoush over at OLO with both amusement and bemusement. It seems that Young has painted himself into a corner and doesn't have the nous to let it go. Certainly doesn't enhance the editorial credibility of the site, which has numerous redeeming features - despite a resident crew of assorted wingnuts among its regular posters.

Merryck Kirby - I undersatand that an image of every web page that has existed is cached somewhere, and that they are retrievable.

Pathological Denial
Category: Global Warming ⢠stupidity
Posted on: January 29, 2007 10:42 PM, by Tim Lambert

There's denial and there's pathological denial.

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Lambert, I think you need to create special wanker category for tossers who are caught backtracking and then spend hours running around the internets to "splain" themselves.

Mr. Young, please don't give in. Don't budge an inch. It would ruin all the fun!

I am shocked -- SHOCKED! -- to learn that Roger Pielke Jr. has finally been caught in bed with the Republican party.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/1/30/24012/3177

Maybe this is why Roger is always noticed by people at Fox News and the Cato Institute.

Of course, Roger has been carefully doctoring his wikipedia entry so that it reads like an "honest broker" press release.

CJ Morgan, the Google cache updates itself. Whenever Peiser changed his page, it was long enough ago such that the Google cache has since over written the original version.

Luckily, I keep copies

"For the record, Peiser wrote to me and said that he did not withdraw the totality of his criticism of Oreskes, just some aspects of it, yet Lambert claims Peiser has totally withdrawn on the basis of an undocumented claim on the Media Watch website."

As documented in Peiser's email to Mediawatch, Peiser has withdrawn his MOST IMPORTANT claim, which is the one Bolt relied on to make his incorrect assertion about Gore's statement. i.e. Bolt said:

"Gore claims that a survey of 928 scientific articles on global warming showed not one disputed that man's gasses were mostly to blame for rising global temperatures."

Gore was referring to the survey by Oreskes.

Bolt then claimed:

"In fact, as Dr Benny Peiser, from Liverpool John Moores University has demonstrated, Gore relies on a bungled survey reported in Science.

Peiser checked again and found just 13 of those 928 papers explicitly endorsed man-made global warming, and 34 rejected or doubted it."

Gore's statement relates to those 34 out of 928 papers that supposedly reject or doubt man-made global warming (the "13 papers" claim that is not relevant to Gore's statement is also utter rubbish but not relevant here).

However, this is what Peiser writes in his email response to Mediawatch's questions:

"MW: > do you know whether the 928 articles she studied were included in the 1117 articles you studied?

Peiser: Yes

MW: > This indicates that you selected your own sample group.

Peiser: As I explained above, I included *all* documents (i.e. 1247) whereas Oreskes only used "articles" (however, there are only 905 abstracts in the ISI databank)

MW: > It implies that, given this methodology, the 34 articles you found that "reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the observed warming over the last 50 years" may not have been included in the 928 articles randomly selected by Prof Oreskes. Is this possible?

Peiser: YES, THAT IS INDEED THE CASE. I only found out after Oreskes confirmed that she had used a different search strategy (see above). Which is why I NO LONGER MAINTAIN THIS PARTICULAR CRITICISM."

So Peiser no longer maintains that his 34 articles (or whatever number he now claims) were actually on Orekes' list of 928 articles. His claim is now that the 34 or whatever articles were on his (new improved :-) list but not on Oreskes' list.

Bolt was talking about the 928-paper, i.e. Oreskes', list, not Peiser's list. Peiser states that he no longer maintains this criticism of this 928-paper list, so Bolt is dead wrong.

"That (Young) heatedly thinks Benny Peiser's opinion should be something of importance to the world of climate science tells you all you need to know about his scientific nous."

Indeed. His scientific claims show he has little or no capability for substantial logical thought. The only thing he's half good at is a personality sideshow and he's not very good at understanding the details of that either.

"Whenever Peiser changed his page"

i.e. Peiser's Oreskes abstracts page. There's something strange about that page with web.archive.org . It isn't listed in the archiver at all.

I see Dr Peiser still can't count - it's 900 without abstracts, not 905.

Well, that'll teach me. That should be 28 without abstracts, and 900 with abstracts (or 901 depending on how you count it).