# wrote on Aug 8^th, 2013 at 6:43pm:

The Doran Survey.

Where the "97% of active climate scientists" nonsense originated.

# wrote on Aug 9^th, 2013 at 4:09pm:

From your failure to respond, I infer that you have no rational basis for your denial.

Given that scepticism is a rational philosophy, if your denial has no rational basis, is it scepticism? If your denial is not scepticism, are you a genuine sceptic?

You can easily establish your credibility by detailing your rationale. If you can't do that, then you might do yourself a favour by examining the reasons for your faith in a belief system that is not supported by the vast majority of the best qualified.

# wrote on Aug 12^th, 2013 at 3:18pm:

It's the one where the "97% of active climate scientists" nonsense started.
...

# wrote on Aug 9^th, 2013 at 4:09pm:

From your failure to respond, I infer that you have no rational basis for your denial.

Given that scepticism is a rational philosophy, if your denial has no rational basis, is it scepticism? If your denial is not scepticism, are you a genuine sceptic?

You can easily establish your credibility by detailing your rationale. If you can't do that, then you might do yourself a favour by examining the reasons for your faith in a belief system that is not supported by the vast majority of the best qualified.

greggerypeccary wrote on Aug 12^th, 2013 at 3:31pm:

The Cult of Climate Science Denial deemed it worth denying that there is a consensus. As a full member of that cult*, perhaps you can explain the significance of their denial.

The studies to which you object resulted directly from the denial of consensus. They are products of statistical analysis. Are you claiming that statistical analysis has no part in scientific method or that products of statistical analysis have no such part?

http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/Powell-Science-Pie-Cha...

* Given that you've repeatedly failed to validate your denial, can you honestly claim to be a sceptic?

Rider wrote on Aug 12^th, 2013 at 8:58pm:

Assertion does not evidence make.

That Scientific Global Warming Consensus…Not! – Forbes

By Larry Bell

So where did that famous “consensus” claim that “98% of all scientists believe in global warming” come from? It originated from an endlessly reported 2009 American Geophysical Union (AGU) survey consisting of an intentionally brief two-minute, two question online survey sent to 10,257 earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Of the about 3.000 who responded, 82% answered “yes” to the second question, which like the first, most people I know would also have agreed with.


Then of those, only a small subset, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals, were considered in their survey statistic. That “98% all scientists” referred to a laughably puny number of 75 of those 77 who answered “yes”.

That anything-but-scientific survey asked two questions. The first: “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” Few would be expected to dispute this…the planet began thawing out of the “Little Ice Age” in the middle 19th century, predating the Industrial Revolution. (That was the coldest period since the last real Ice Age ended roughly 10,000 years ago.)

The second question asked: “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” So what constitutes “significant”? Does “changing” include both cooling and warming… and for both “better” and “worse”? And which contributions…does this include land use changes, such as agriculture and deforestation?

the rest here
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/17/that-scientific-global-warming-...

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Here's a peer review ...

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Montford objects to a description of his work seeking to debunk climate science[4] but has a shaky grasp of objectivity at best

Response to Professor Hulme’s Comments

Before addressing this post, I would like to respond to some comments made by Professor Mike Hulme regarding a paper I co-authored, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, which was one of the topics discussed on Sunday Politics and in Pile’s post.  Professor Hulme said,

    “It seems to me that these people are still living (or wishing to live) in the pre-2009 world of climate change discourse. Haven’t they noticed that public understanding of the climate issue has moved on?”

With all due respect to Professor Hulme, his perception of the public understanding of climate science is not reflected in the polling data.  In fact, we discussed this in our paper (which is open access and free to download), http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article

    “…the perception of the US public is that the scientific community still disagrees over the fundamental cause of GW. From 1997 to 2007, public opinion polls have indicated around 60% of the US public believes there is significant disagreement among scientists about whether GW was happening (Nisbet and Myers 2007). Similarly, 57% of the US public either disagreed or were unaware that scientists agree that the earth is very likely warming due to human activity (Pew 2012).”

Polling data for the UK show a similar level of public misperceptions on climate change.  For example, a 2012 Guardian/ICM poll found that only 57% of British voters accept that human-caused climate change is happening.  In an April 2013 YouGov poll, 39% of the UK population agreed that “the planet is becoming warmer as a result of human activity,” and 53% agreed “the world’s climate is changing as a result of human activity.”  This public misperception on human-caused climate change and the associated scientific consensus was the reason we embarked on our study.  For this reason I would also respectfully disagree with Professor Hulme’s description of our paper as “irrelevant,”

    “The irrelevance is because none of the most contentious policy responses to climate change are resolved *even if* we accept that 97.1% of climate scientists believe that ‘human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW’…”

Again quoting from our paper,

    “An accurate perception of the degree of scientific consensus is an essential element to public support for climate policy (Ding et al 2011). Communicating the scientific consensus also increases people’s acceptance that climate change (CC) is happening (Lewandowsky et al 2012).”

Our co-author John Cook’s PhD research has similarly shown a strong correlation between public awareness of the scientific consensus and support for government climate policy across nearly the entire political spectrum.  Our paper is well suited for correcting the public’s misperception that humans are not causing global warming or that there is no scientific consensus on the subject, and hence it is a relevant and useful contribution.