Fake news: the math behind the "97%"

There is probably no better explanation of why this stat was cooked up than the op-ed by Lawrence Solomon in the Financial Post of Jan 3, 2011.

"How do we know there’s a scientific consensus on climate change? Pundits and the press tell us so. And how do the pundits and the press know? Until recently, they typically pointed to the number 2,500 — that’s the number of scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those 2,500, the pundits and the press believed, had endorsed the IPCC position.

To their embarrassment, most of the pundits and press discovered they were mistaken — those 2,500 scientists hadn’t endorsed the IPCC’s conclusions, they had merely reviewed some part or other of the IPCC’s mammoth studies. To add to their embarrassment, many of those reviewers from within the IPCC establishment actually disagreed with the IPCC’s conclusions, sometimes vehemently."

In other words, those in charge of the IPCC who would like to claim the authors of their report ran into a snag - the scientists who contributed data to this thought in some cases the conclusions were nuts. How then to portray confidence in the IPCC results?

Enter Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, writing her masters thesis in 2008 and her advisor, associate professor Peter Doran. Sadly what their report showed that of all the scientists polled, 75 out of 77 people getting climate grants think warming is man made and a problem. You can't even show all people getting climate grants believe the AGW hypothesis. And 99.9% reject it.

Maggie and her thesis advisor decided on online poll of scientists but the they started out ignoring any scientists unlikely to yield the "proper conclusion". Anybody having anything to do with space was ruled out and never mind this means all the climate researchers at NASA and CERN who have hard evidence the sun has more to do with warming than anything else.

Of these remaining scientists only about 30% bothered to answer the throwaway questions posed in a tiny online email survey - many scientists apparently reported it seemed trite and ignored it. These are the questions:

1 When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant? 2 Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

Only 90% answered the first question in the affirmative.

Only 82% answered the second question in the affirmative and that's with only 90% of the respondents (recall the other 10% presumably know it was warmer than now in: 1936, 1300 and 0AD) So roughly one in five people did not support the idea warming actually existed at all. Not entirely unreasonable when you realize the summer of 1936 was hotter then any summer since and it was evern more hotter in 1300 and even hotter yet in 0BCE.

82% doesn't sound that airtight so they excluded people that hadn't published a climate paper in a year. This took the number of respondents down from 3000 to 300 but the confidence percentage was still not newsworthy.

So, next round of cuts: limit responses to those who self identify as "climate scientists". Quoting the thesis itself:

"In our survey,the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2"

The moral of the story is if you can't show consensus then cherry pick and by this method they were able to identify 75 people in the whole world who believed warming is man made and disastrous.

The thesis is availeble here: http://probeinternational.org/library/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/012009_Doran_final1.pdf

It's a two page quickie, the first page has the 97% explanation.

Statistics can be useful when the questions asked are intelligent, the sample size large and random. This is a clear case of cherry picking to zero on on the desired answer. So, 97% (of 77 people on climate grants) think AGW is real and harmful.

99.97% of the rest of scientists (~10K) don't agree.

The latter is actually more meaningful than the former.

Cook et. al. (2013) have a more accurate breakdown of her "work":

...and trash it more formal sense and in greater depth; the statistical methods in Doran are now taught in university statistics classes at, at least my Alma Mater as how not to use statistics.

So in conclusion when you assert "97% of the worlds scientists support the AGW hpothesis" you're really saying "75 people out of over 10,000 agree" and you might as well say "99% of all scientists think AGW is batshit insane".

But what you're really saying is:

• I am gullible and will believe anything
• I don't check my sources. Don't listen to a thing I say ever from now on.

1) That is, the logical fallacy of the argument from ignorance.
2) That is, the logical fallacy of proof by authority.

In essense when somebody says "97%" they're admitting they know noting of climate and nothing of the mathematics the field of climate science is based on. Recall the warming hypotheis was from a model and the measure of a good model is how well it tracks reality. It neevr has of ocurse, the models blew up years ago and it's not warmer each year than the previous year like the models predicted, not have the ice caps or snow packs on mountains metled. In fact you will not be able to find a single prediction made by climate alarmists that ever came true.

Not a single one, ever.

Even if the statistic were true, so what? It's still the fallacy of the argument from ignorance and argument from authority. This is not a replacement for truth, it's an opinion. To restate in more compare terms: never confuse consensus for truth

"97%+ of geologists agreed the continents were stable. It was Settled Science. Hundreds of research papers supported it. Overwhelming consensus. And wrong. And, oddly (not really, if you think about it a moment), it was not a geologist but a meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, who ultimately showed all the mutually agreeing geologists they had it all wrong; the continents move." - Dr. Michael K. Oliver

This not evidence that would hold up in court. The only reason it holds up in the court of public mind is nobody bothered to check what the number meant. Percent? Percent of WHAT?

Not much it turns out. Note also this quote from Legates Et Al (2013)

"Students must understand not just what is known and why it is known to be true but also what remains unknown and where the limitations on scientific understanding lie. Fact recitation coupled with demonizing any position or person who disagrees with a singularly-derived conclusion has no place in education."
Learning and Teaching Climate Science: The Perils of Consensus Knowledge Using Agnotology
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11191-013-9588-3

Cartierism "We have nothing to learn from savages" In 1535 Jacques Cartier sailed from France to Canada and accidentally got stuck over the winter by mistake, they'd planned to return to France before the snow flew. They began getting sick from scurvy. Near death, Cartier sought help from the natives who gave them bark tea from the "tree of life" (Arbor vitae) and they got better and returned to France the following spring they told of their miraculous recovery unprecedented in sailing thus far and were told flat out: "We have nothing to learn from savages". Citrus as a cure for scurvy was discovered by the British Navy shortly after. Good ideas travel fast. In 1931 Pauling wrote his paper on the chemical bond and the fields of biochemistry, quantum chemistry and molecular biology wre founded. Observing Klenners clinical tiral tht cured 60 out of 60 poliopatients with intravensous asocic acid, he was then vilified by the vaccine industry. In 2008 Peter Levy sabed a man dying of flu that doctors wee abou to wpll th eplg on with inteavensous c andit di dnot his the news again until 2017 when a Doctor Marick in a norfolk hospoital began usingf ifd for ER sepsis and imprved reveb raed by 7500%. We have notng to leac form asvae sindeed, excoe thow to prologn life in ways we did not understant. H pylori Scientist proves H. pylori caused ulcers by drinking it. There were all sorts of theories on why stomach ulcers happen. On scientists having trouble getting people to listen when he had hard evidence a bacteria was the sole cause. So he drank some, on camera, got an ulcer than cured it. That's how ulcers work he asserted. 97 (or better) percent of doctors were sure it was not a simple and eaisly cured bacterium. The problem with that thinking is the fallacy of the argument from ignorance: if you don't know what causes it you don't know what doesn't either. "Don't know" means "you don't know". continental drift 100% of geologists were sure continents did not ever move. "97%+ of geologists agreed the continents were stable. It was Settled Science. Hundreds of research papers supported it. Overwhelming consensus. And wrong. And, oddly (not really, if you think about it a moment), it was not a geologist but a meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, who ultimately showed all the mutually agreeing geologists they had it all wrong; the continents move." - Dr. Michael K. Oliver komodo dragons It was long-believed that the mishmash of deadly bacteria was a weapon that the world's largest lizard used while stalking its prey. People used to think that a Komodo dragon would use its razor-sharp teeth to bite whatever it wanted to eat and then follow its victim until eventually a bacterial infection slowed the animal enough so the dragon could enjoy its meal. But around 2008 or '09, Scientists embarrassingly discovered large venom glands in the lower jaw of Komodo dragons. (Venom, obviously, can't be cured with antibiotics, since it's not a bacterium.)" - Underdone Comics.

solomon 97% cooked stats - The ‘scientific consensus’ about global warming turns out to have a lot more to do with manipulating the numbers How do we know there’s a scientific consensus on climate change? Pundits and the press tell us so. And how do the pundits and the press know? Until recently, they typically pointed to the number 2,500 — that’s the number of scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those 2,500, the pundits and the press believed, had endorsed the IPCC position. To their embarrassment, most of the pundits and press discovered they were mistaken — those 2,500 scientists hadn’t endorsed the IPCC’s conclusions, they had merely reviewed some part or other of the IPCC’s mammoth studies. To add to their embarrassment, many of those reviewers from within the IPCC establishment actually disagreed with the IPCC’s conclusions, sometimes vehemently. The upshot? The punditry looked for and found an alternative number to tout: “97% of the world’s climate scientists” accept the consensus, articles in the Washington Post, the U.K.’s Guardian, CNN and other news outlets now claim, along with some two million postings in the blogosphere. This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2008 master’s thesis by student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman at the University of Illinois, under the guidance of Peter Doran, an associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences. The two researchers obtained their results by conducting a survey of 10,257 Earth scientists. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers — in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout. 2013 Cook 97% of world scientists say AGW is real Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research. 2013 Legates 97% is 77 out of 77 - It's really 0.3% of world scientists Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change. Agnotology is the study of how ignorance arises via circulation of misinformation calculated to mislead. Legates et al. (Sci Educ 22:2007–2017, 2013) had questioned the applicability of agnotology to politically-charged debates. In their reply, Bedford and Cook (Sci Educ 22:2019–2030, 2013), seeking to apply agnotology to climate science, asserted that fossil-fuel interests had promoted doubt about a climate consensus. Their definition of climate ‘misinformation’ was contingent upon the post-modernist assumptions that scientific truth is discernible by measuring a consensus among experts, and that a near unanimous consensus exists. However, inspection of a claim by Cook et al. (Environ Res Lett 8:024024, 2013) of 97.1 % consensus, heavily relied upon by Bedford and Cook, shows just 0.3 % endorsement of the standard definition of consensus: that most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic. Agnotology, then, is a two-edged sword since either side in a debate may claim that general ignorance arises from misinformation allegedly circulated by the other. Significant questions about anthropogenic influences on climate remain. Therefore, Legates et al. appropriately asserted that partisan presentations of controversies stifle debate and have no place in education.