Lots of Ink: Two angles in that PNAS report that says climate-is-changing crowd bigger, better than nay-sayers
Well, surprise surprise. After a Stanford research team divided up the world’s published climate scientists into two groups, with rough markers to label them into those who doubt anthropogenic climate change as sketched by the likes of the IPCC, and those who buy it, differences emerged. The believers are way more numerous, and they are on average considerably more accomplished in pertinent fields. They publish more, in better journals, things like that. Well duh on the statistics. Less clear is whether all the individual assigned to one the two polar categories belonged on their assigned ‘side’. A few mislabelings wouldn’t change the overall statistics much but they could misrepresent people of more nuanced opinion. Plus, if one is a conspiracy theorist of the first water, skewed stats would only show that the warmists are so out of control they have taken over the means by which scientists get tenure at top institutes, get published, or just get dissed. And since an author is Stephen Schneider – and he submitted it for publication as an academy member – but as he also is an accomplished scientists who is outspoken on global warming and already makes skeptics blow the coffee out of their noses in derision, his authorship alone is tinder for argument.
The report was in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a few days ago. If it had come out in the middle of climategate when anything at all pertinent brought excess reaction, it would have been bigger news, one suspects. But all in all, not much coverage in the traditional outlets in the standard fashion. And the reaction tends more to be in blog mode even when associated with media outlets.
Stories :
- CBS News – Charles Cooper: Climate Change Researchers: Not all Expertise is Equal ; Structured to take aim at an easy target – refutation of denialism as representing much of a schism among serious climate scientists. But using as its illus of that crowd a picture of Sarah Palin is a cheap shot. She represents the deluded audience, in the public, for arguments that the science is teetering in the balance, pro or con. She’s not a member of the crowd that this study examined.
- NYTimes – Justin Gillis (Green blog): Study Affirms Consensus on Climate Change ;
- AAAS ScienceNow – Eli Kintisch : Scientists ‘Convinced’ of Climate Consensus More Prominent Than Opponents, Says Paper ; Kintisch smartly calls some of those researchers in the gray area between the poles – not terrified of climate change or at least willing to poke holes in some of the science arguing its seriousness, but not denialists either. Such as Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr., and Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry. But while his sources poke some holes in how specific scientists were sorted, unfairly in some cases and in a way that might be called a black list, they don’t do much to alter the statistical meat of the report.
- BBC – Pallab Ghosh : Study examines scientists’ ‘climate credibility’ ;
- NYTimes (Dot Earth blog) Andrew C. Revkin: Notes form the Whaling and Warming Wars ; A catchall column by the thoughtful and non-vitriolic Mr. Revkin, with most of its effort aimed at this paper’s impact.
- USA Today – Doyle Rice: Report: 97 percent of scientists say man-made climate change is real ;
- Orange County Register – Pat Brennan: Global warming? 97 percent of experts agree ; He throws in that, so far, 2010 is the warmest year ever recorded. I’ll throw in this chart of, so far, the huge melt-off of last winter’s arctic ice pack. There is, one must add, broad doubt this year will wind up a record. But so far, so bad.
- Collide-a-Scape – Keith Kloor: The Climate Experts ; Noted climate blogger and enviro-archaeology reporter, NYU adjunct j-school professor Kloor provides a deep list and synopsis of blog responses to study.
Grist for the Mill: PNAS report ;
Other Climate War News:
- Sunday Times (UK) : IPCC Correction ; The paper essentially takes back and apologizes for a whole story it wrote during the height of climate gate and the free-fall the IPCC took in its public reputation due to exaggerated, un-refereed errors in some part of its past reports. The IPCC, it says here in effect did, after all we said about it, behave responsibly in saying that climate change poses perils for the Amazon basin rainforest.
- Guardian – Roy Greenslade: Sunday Times apologises for false climate story in a “correction’ : Greenslade provides a link to the original Times piece – which has disappeared from its site.
Pic source ; whole cartoon here,
- Charlie Petit
