Promoted by Brendan

From Breaking: Less Than Half of all Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory

Hat tip to the US Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works. Your tax dollars at work!

In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the "consensus view," defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes' work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.

Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."

The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the "primary" cause of warming, but it doesn't require any belief or support for "catastrophic" global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.

So there you have it. Even if we completely accept the contention of a consensus on AGW based on the now famous Naomi Oreskes review, a comparable review of the papers being published in the most recent 3 years suggests that the consensus has evaporated in light of more recent understanding and research.

Schulte's survey contradicts the United Nation IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which gave a figure of "90% likely" man was having an impact on world temperatures. But does the IPCC represent a consensus view of world scientists? Despite media claims of "thousands of scientists" involved in the report, the actual text is written by a much smaller number of "lead authors." The introductory "Summary for Policymakers" -- the only portion usually quoted in the media -- is written not by scientists at all, but by politicians, and approved, word-by-word, by political representatives from member nations. By IPCC policy, the individual report chapters -- the only text actually written by scientists -- are edited to "ensure compliance" with the summary, which is typically published months before the actual report itself.

By contrast, the ISI Web of Science database covers 8,700 journals and publications, including every leading scientific journal in the world.

An excellent point. The IPCC report was actually written by a small number of people and the actual part of the report typically quoted in the media was actually written by politicians. Then, after the politicians have had their say the actual scientific chapters are edited to make sure that they don't contradict the politicians version. Yep, that ensures clear and accurate scientific representation to me.

If we follow a few of the links provided in the above mentioned post, we find this little gem:

New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears

6) A July 2007 review of 539 abstracts in peer-reviewed scientific journals from 2004 through 2007 found that climate science continues to shift toward the views of global warming skeptics. Excerpt: “There appears to be little evidence in the learned journals to justify the climate-change alarm.” (LINK )

Note: I plan to review the above post in more detail in a separate diary.

The link above takes you to the following:

“Consensus”? What “Consensus”?
Among Climate Scientists, the Debate Is Not Over

Abstract

It is often said that there is a scientific “consensus” to the effect that climate change will
be “catastrophic” and that, on this question, “the debate is over”. The present paper
will demonstrate that the claim of unanimous scientific “consensus” was false, and
known to be false, when it was first made; that the trend of opinion in the peer-reviewed
journals and even in the UN’s reports on climate is moving rapidly away from alarmism;
that, among climate scientists, the debate on the causes and extent of climate change is by
no means over; and that the evidence in the peer-reviewed literature conclusively
demonstrates that, to the extent that there is a “consensus”, that “consensus” does not
endorse the notion of “catastrophic” climate change.

I actually found the paper to be an interesting read. There is much in there to satisfy the contrarians, but at times it does tend to nit pick which will give the AGW advocates something to complain about as well. Read the paper and decide for yourself. The main points that I found interesting in the paper were:

1. It reviews the history of the nor famous Naomi Oreskes review, her methods, and why they were chosen.
2. It highlights how Al Gore exaggerated the potential impact of the Arctic and Greenland thaw by about 12,000 percent (yes, 12,000 percent).
3. What Oreskes actually claimed was that 75% of the abstracts she reviewed either explicitly or implicitly supported the consensus view (which she defined as humans are having some impact on warming, no catastrohpe required), the other 25% took no position, and that none of them disagreed with the concensus position.
4. The paper then runs through a list of things that Oreskes got wrong, according to her critics, many of which were simply nit picks on how she classified something versus how the critics would classify them.
5. Apparantly a Dr. Benny Peiser wrote to Science on several occasions to highlight some of the inaccuracies in Oreskes' paper. While initially asking him the revise his text they later simply refused to publish his letter because "After realizing that the basic points of your letter have already been widely dispersed over the internet, we have reluctantly decided that we cannot publish your letter. We appreciate your taking the time to revise it." Supposedly Peiser was careful not to release his findings beforehand.
6. At the time that Science published Oreskes' paper they had received (and rejected) a research paper giving the results of a survey of 500 international climate scientists which found that "a quarter of respondents still question whether human activity is responsible for the most recent climate changes."
7. The paper also provides a number of examples of abstracts which appear to contradict Oreskes contention.
8. The paper provides a nice summary table of Dr. Schulte's results and provides a few of the counter consensual abstracts. *
9. The paper then goes on to rip James Hansen as an outright scaremonger and provides an updated copy of the graph than Hansen used to kick off the entire debate. ** If one notes the observed data that occur beyond the 1988 date when the graph was prepared you will see that they track very closely to the CO2 Stabilized plot in spite of the fact the CO2 has continued to rise. It's almost as if the extra CO2 didn't matter!
10. The paper goes on to counter the 2,500 scientists can't be wrong meme for the IPCC report by highlighting a number of errors which were "corrected" after the fact and never reviewed by any of them.
11. Finally, it also counters the "All leading scientific bodies are in agreement" meme. ***

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The Russian Academy of Sciences and the US Association of State Climatologists are just two of the scientific organizations that have trenchantly expressed serious doubts about the imagined “consensus” on climate change. They have recently been joined by the Administrator of NASA, who has said that it is arrogant to make the Panglossian assumption that today’s climate is the best of all possible climates, and still more arrogant to assume that any of the more or less futile remedial measures which have been advocated will make any significant climatic difference. The Administrator ought to know: for it is his organization that gathers much of the weather data via satellite upon which the rickety edifice of the climate-change “consensus” is constructed.