(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)
Objection: All those institutional position statements are fine, but by their very nature they paper over debate and obscure 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 present a united front. The best indicator of what individual scientists think is in the current scientific literature, where new and different is the paramount value and scientists are free to express their own ideas, as long as they're supported by 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 those resulting abstracts 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, and
- rejection of the consensus position.
The details can be read here. Oreskes' key finding is that none of the 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.)
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Comments
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Rctner Posted 11:59 pm
03 Mar 2007
Indeed a lot has happened, not all of which is acknowledged by the IPCC, and some of which casts doubt on the idea that mankind is causing global warming. On 2 Feb 2007, the IPCC agreed the SPM to AR4, based on "secret" scientific papers, which will be published in May 2007. An unofficial copy of these papers shows that the IPCC neglects the work of Henrik Svensmark and others, on the role of cosmic rays. Strictly speaking, the IPCC is correct. The data on the effects of ions in the lower atmosphere was not published until 8 Feb 2007, in Proceedings of the Royal Society A. The book The Chilling Stars was not published until a week later. The paper Cosmoclimatology: a new theory emerges. Astronomy & Geophysics 48: was not published until after 2 Feb 2007.
It will be interesting to see what the IPCC publishes in May 2007 on extraterrestial forcings. They can ignore Svensmark's landmark work; in which case their "scientific" documents will be out of date, incomplete, and arguably inaccurate. Or they can include Svensmark's work; in which case they will undermine the theory that anthropogenis global warming is real.
We await May 2007 to see what the IPCC actually does.
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Burgess Laughlin Posted 3:47 am
04 Mar 2007
One of the many sub-issues is the issue of "consensus."
Did the study cited in the article above examine only abstracts or did it also examine whole papers?
If only the former -- as some GW denialists claim -- wouldn't that tend to leave out comments of dissent?
One of the reasons I am asking this is because I am beginning to get a glimmer that one repetitive controversy is over methods used.
P. S. -- Can someone point me toward a list of notes documenting Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth? I thought I would start with that because so many people have recommended it to me.
Burgess Laughlin
http://www.aristotleadventure.com
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Rctner Posted 12:48 am
05 Mar 2007
THE GORONS (courtesy of Lord Monckton)
1. Some of the errors in Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth ·
Gore, aiming to undermine the significance of previous warm periods such as that of the Middle Ages, promoted the 1,000-year "hockey stick" temperature chart (debunked by McIntyre & McKitrick, 2005).
· Gore showed heart-rending pictures of the New Orleans floods and insisted on a link between increased hurricane frequency and global warming that is not supported by the facts (IPCC, 2001, 2007).
· Gore asserted that today's Arctic is experiencing unprecedented warmth while ignoring that Arctic temperatures in the 1930s and 1940s were as warm or warmer (Briffa et al., 2004).
· Gore did not explain that Arctic temperature changes are more closely correlated
with changes in solar activity than with changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations (Soon, 2005).
· Gore did not explain that the Sun has been hotter, for longer, in the past 50 years than in any similar period in at least the past 11,400 years (Solanki et al., 2005).
· Gore said the Antarctic was warming and losing ice but failed to note, that this is only true of a small region; the vast bulk of the continent has been cooling and gaining ice (Doran et al., 2004).
· Gore mentioned the breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf, but did not mention peer-reviewed research, which suggests the ice shelf, did not exist 1,000 years ago (Pudsey & Evans, 2001).
· Gore hyped unfounded fears that Greenland's ice is in danger of disappearing. In fact its thickness has been growing by 2 inches per year for a decade (Johanessen et al., 2005).
· Gore falsely claimed that global warming is melting Mt. Kilimanjaro's icecap, actually caused by atmospheric dessication from local deforestation, and pre-20th-century climate shifts (Cullen et al., 2006).
· Gore said global sea levels would swamp Manhattan, Bangladesh, Shanghai and other coastal cities, and would rise 20ft by 2100, but the UN estimate is just 7in to 1ft 5in. (IPCC, 2007; Morner, 1995, 2004, Singer, 1997).
· Gore implied that a Peruvian glacier's retreat is due to global warming, failing to state that the region has been cooling since the 1930s and other South American glaciers are advancing (Polissar et al., 2006).
· Gore blamed global warming for water loss in Africa's Lake Chad, though NASA scientists had concluded that local water-use and grazing patterns are probably to blame (Foley & Coe, 2001).
· Gore inaccurately said polar bears are drowning due to melting ice when in fact 11 of the 13 main groups in Canada are thriving, and polar bear populations have more than doubled since 1940 (Taylor, 2006).
· Gore said a review of 928 scientific papers had shown none against the "consensus". In fact only 1% of the papers were explicitly pro-"consensus"; almost 3 times as many were explicitly against (Peiser, 2006).
· Gore showed a link between changes in temperature and in CO2 concentration in the past 500,000 years, but did not admit that changes in temperature preceded changes in CO2 concentration (Fischer et al., 1999).
If you are interested in discussions of the pros and cons of global warming, there are very few places where you can get both sides of the argument discussed dispassionately. Two I know of. One is Prof. Benny Peiser's CCNet ((JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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rmckeon Posted 10:21 pm
18 Mar 2007
(my interest is because the second and third categories could just take the consensus as given without necessarily providing direct evidence in its favor, so I'd prefer a breakdown by each category rather than having the first three grouped together)
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Bengt Washburn Posted 7:51 am
06 Nov 2007
Are there any surveys of non climatoligist scientists who have reviewed IPCC report?
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