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1
otoc  Apr 28, 2016 • 3:43:22am

Nice job cd1177. On the point of consensus, a paper recently came out that supported cook and trashed the sceptic view that there is none. There is consensus and the only argument against uses flawed methods.

2
Big Beautiful Door  Apr 28, 2016 • 4:34:46am

Excellent article. Kudos.

3
KerFuFFler  Apr 28, 2016 • 9:01:09am

The deniers seems to think that there is no point paying attention to this risk unless we are 100 % certain (as opposed to 97%) that global warming is real. What other risk would we consider treating this way? Is Russian roulette a safe bet because only one of the six chambers is loaded?

If you were driving and saw a sign that a bridge had a 5% chance of collapsing, would you cross the bridge rather than taking the detour? So, you might if you were in a big hurry in an emergency. But would you if your kid was in the backseat? With climate change, all our kids are in the backseat.

4
CriticalDragon1177  Apr 28, 2016 • 10:08:38am

re: #1 otoc

Nice job cd1177. On the point of consensus, a paper recently came out that supported cook and trashed the sceptic view that there is none. There is consensus and the only argument against uses flawed methods.

Sorry, but could you reword that last sentence. I think I might be having some trouble understanding what you meant.

5
CriticalDragon1177  Apr 28, 2016 • 10:12:12am

re: #3 KerFuFFler

The deniers seems to think that there is no point paying attention to this risk unless we are 100 % certain (as opposed to 97%) that global warming is real. What other risk would we consider treating this way? Is Russian roulette a safe bet because only one of the six chambers is loaded?

If you were driving and saw a sign that a bridge had a 5% chance of collapsing, would you cross the bridge rather than taking the detour? So, you might if you were in a big hurry in an emergency. But would you if your kid was in the backseat? With climate change, all our kids are in the backseat.

Good point! That’s a very dangerous attitude to have when we have overwhelming evidence that we are in serious trouble. Just about any reason we had to doubt the idea that pumping all that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would cause global warming is gone.

6
CriticalDragon1177  Apr 28, 2016 • 10:15:26am

Another potential problem caused by climate change that I forgot to mention is that due to sea level rise, some Island nations may even cease to exist within the next few centuries, if we don’t stop this.

Will Pacific Island Nations Disappear as Seas Rise? Maybe Not
news.nationalgeographic.com

I should have brought that at some point, since it only makes my case even stronger, that this is a real problem, and we have to do something about it.

7
otoc  Apr 30, 2016 • 3:44:05am

re: #4 CriticalDragon1177

Sorry, but could you reword that last sentence. I think I might be having some trouble understanding what you meant.

My apologies for not being clear. I needed to wait until I had the time to sit at a computer to pull some links. A hard task when answering on an iPhone.

The skeptics use Tol as “proof” that there is no consensus. A more recent paper from Cook (2016) supports the Cook (2013) study you mentioned while continuing to trash Tol’s study. So there is consensus. The only argument against consensus uses flawed methods.

Research shows — yet again — that there’s no scientific debate about climate change

While the consensus has been documented by many studies over the years, the most widely cited is a 2013 paper led by John Cook of the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute. The study examined thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers and found that, among those papers that took a position on the causes of climate change, 97.1 percent of them supported the idea that global warming is caused by humans.

Earlier this year, however, University of Sussex professor Richard Tol published a comment criticizing the 2013 study and suggesting that 97 percent may be too high a figure. In his comment, Tol returned to some of the published research on the consensus and re-examined the accompanying data, noting that Cook’s paper did not include studies that took no position on climate change, and that surveys including scientists who don’t study climate tend to have somewhat lower rates of consensus.

After examining the comment, however, Cook and a team of other researchers concluded that these arguments were problematic at best. In their new paper, they re-examined the published literature on the climate consensus, finding that the 97 percent calculation remains a robust and well-supported statistic.

“The biggest flaw [in Tol’s argument] is that he misrepresents many of the other studies on the consensus,” said Cook, lead author on the new paper.

“He tries to argue that our paper is an outlier — is different to all the other studies in their estimates of the expert consensus,” Cook said. “But the way he arrives at the expert consensus is by using groups that include non-experts, which is a classic technique to try to obtain lower estimates of the scientific consensus.”

It’s true that scientists who don’t study climate also don’t accept the scientific consensus as strongly. But this variability is to be expected when non-experts are included, the authors of the new paper explain.

8
CriticalDragon1177  Apr 30, 2016 • 5:07:46am

re: #7 otoc

Okay, thanks. That’s kind of what I thought you were saying, but it wasn’t clear to me.


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