Paul Rosenberg’s Recent Comments

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  You're Being Unfair To Oreskes

  Oreskes is an expert in studying the history of science, yet you seemingly just assume that she's not really competent in doing her job, essentially treating her work as if it's not much different than Schulte's.

  As a journalist, I happened to interview Oreskes two years ago, and she made quite clear to me her purpose in conducting this survey:  She has studied fundamental scientific controversies (did her PhD on the initial consideration and rejection of plate techtonics in the 1920s, and a subsequent book on the reconsideration that followed decades later), she knew what they looked like, and she knew that global warming was not an example.

  You'll note that her own PhD research was based on a case where the scientific consensus was eventually shown to be wrong.  So she's quite well aware of the sometimes painful difference between  sound science (that much-abused term) and getting the right answer.  She is not in any sense a naive investigator.

  What she wanted to do was to demonstrate clearly, and scientifically for others what she knew intuitively from her own professional experience.  So she devised an experiment, a sampling of data to illustrate what is going on in the field.  It was not meant to be exhaustive, but it was meant to be rigorous enough to prove her point.  And that point was proven by the fact that no paper in the sample of 928 abstracts rejected the consensus view.

  Your misapprehension of Oreskes' purpose, methods and competence are visible in two passages:

  (1) You say:

  The entire approach of determining whether a paper supports or contradicts the consensus view based on a reading of the abstract by a non-expert is flawed. Note that this criticism also applies to Oreskes' original paper. While she got the right answer, I have always been uncomfortable with the methodology.

  But this presumes, above all, that your concerns matter for the purposes of Oreskes' original study, when in fact they do not.  Oreskes herself is aware of this problem and discusses it in her expanded discussion of her work here, for example:

  A few comments are in order. First, often it is challenging to determine exactly what the authors of a paper do think about global climate change. This is a consequence of experts writing for experts: many elements are implicit. If a conclusion is widely accepted, then it is not necessary to reiterate it within the context of expert discussion. Scientists generally focus their discussions on questions that are still disputed or unanswered rather than on matters about which everyone agrees.

  This is clearly the case with the largest portion of the papers examined (approximately half of the total)--those dealing with impacts of climate change. The authors evidently accept the premise that climate change is real and want to track, evaluate, and understand its impacts. Nevertheless, such impacts could, at least in some cases, be the results of natural variability rather than human activities. Strikingly, none of the papers used that possibility to argue against the consensus position.

  Furthermore, implicit in this passage is her choice of a categorization scheme that allowed the sorting of abstracts so as to avoid the problems you raise.  While a more refined analysis--as well as a larger sample--could have certainly yielded a more precise picture of attitudes in the field, this was not her purpose, as she herself clearly explained.

  (2)

  Another reason the analysis is rubbish is the keywords chosen: global climate change.... if I limit my search to the journals in which the vast majority of papers on the physics of climate are published ...

     1. Journal of Geophysical Research
     2. Geophysical Research Letters
     3. Journal of Climate
     4. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences

  ... I only get 18 articles. That's surprising, because these journals have published nearly 8,000 papers over this time period, and a significant fraction are on climate change.

  It turns out that most papers on global climate change do not actually use this term in the title or abstract.

  But limiting the search so severely is precisely what produces a manageable sample size.  And it produces results from a wide range of journals--precisely what is intended, since Oreskes begins with noting the existence of the consensus in bodies such as the IPCC, and asks if there might not be a process of marginalization at work.  If there were, it would likely show up in papers not published in the leading journals, so a sampling method that includes them is clearly called for, which is what her method does. This makes it all the more significant that she found no trace of an anti-consensus article.

  In short, there are certainly many things one could do to "improve" on Oreskes' work.  But the question is, why?  Her original question has clearly been answered.  The choice of how to improve her work--more refined analysis of papers, broader search terms, etc.--should be tailored to some further purpose (preferrably not beating a dead horse).  What should that purpose be?On Flawed new analysis purports to show that there's no scientific consensus on climate change posted 2 years, 2 months ago 34 Responses