This is very, very interesting;
In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the “consensus view,” defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes’ work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.
Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.
Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers “implicit” endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no “consensus.”In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the “consensus view,” defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes’ work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.
I have to say that I would like to read more researches like this (it is a bit premature to draw conclusions on just one research), but if this confirmed by other scientists / researchers, we should stop talking about the global warming consensus immediately, or we should at least nuance that statement a bit. It seems to me that certain factions have hijacked the global warming debate, and have run away with it and have used it for their own political benefit. The result is that the entire debate has become increasingly polarized and that those who advocate change are considered some kinds of prophets or even Messiahs, and that those who say that perhaps it is not all so clear are treated as and considered to be devils, outcasts and greedy businessmen (which is sometimes most certainly true, but often than not, regular people have read a lot on this subject and doubt Gore’s conclusions with a sincere heart).
Personally, I do believe that human activity increases global warming (quite significantly), and I also believe that we can do something about it. But lets not pretend that the world is about to come to and end because some people prefer to drive SUV’s. Lets keep it in perspective.
If the study is accurate, it helps restore my faith that the scientists themselves haven’t become as politically motivated as they seem to have been. Hopefully the majority of them do see that science and consensus aren’t compatible; that the job of a scientist is to constantly pick at the consensus and find its weak points, and do the research needed to either reinforce those weaknesses or formulate a whole new theory if the consensus one doesn’t hold water.
Politicians have every right to take the prevailing theory and make their case for action based on it, but the scientists had better refrain from trying to prove a theory rather than trying to constantly test it. Unfortunately since funding is tied to politics, I fear that this hasn’t generally been the case.
Even those that simply encourage an open evaluation of the data without making any claims one way or another are treated like pariahs, and denounced as “deniers.” Anthropogenic Global Warning theory has become a religion in itself, greatly obscuring the actual science.
To repeat something I’ve said for years, “consensus” is a political term, not one of science. Science is by definition self-demonstrable and requires no consensus. AGW isn’t there yet, and may never be.
Not exactly sure that’s true; scientists depend heavily upon the work of other scientists, and start their own research using assumptions based on said previous work.
Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Nature of Scientific Revolutions, points out how science goes through phases; a “revolution” when a problem is explained via a new paradigm, and a mopping-up stage where the details are worked out after the paradigm has become accepted.
I suspect we are already past the “revolution” with anthropogenic global warming, and now heading into that second stage….
OK first of all, this study doesn’t really show anything because that’s not how science works. Tom is right. When a theory is proposed, there is massive back and forth about whether it can possibly be true and lots of heated arguments.
After it’s mostly accepted, then people don’t even really mention it, and the papers tend to focus on very specific questions. I would be surprised if the “neutral” ones were written by scientists that didn’t endorse the overall theory, because if they were then the papers would be trying to show how their specific work refuted it. The very fact that they are neutral means that at most they will argue over a detail (although most papers aren’t arguments at all, but explaining new things).
What sort of medical researcher is this guy to not know this?
CS I think the funding argument is a strawman. First of all, climate is one of the most important things to our life, so it’s not like people would stop funding it if we found out there was no GW. Also, in science you can get some money — and it’s easier to — if you go with the consensus and your work is about filling in details. However, you can get a lot more money (and more importantly a lot more fame) if you go against the consensus and propose an alternative theory that is well formed.
Heck, it doesn’t even have to be right. As long as it points out major flaws in the existing one you’ll be well known. The biggest downside to this is that when you go to conferences you should make sure to have lots of water when you show your work because you’ll have people asking you things constantly and I almost lost my voice.
Not exactly sure that’s true; scientists depend heavily upon the work of other scientists, and start their own research using assumptions based on said previous work.
And their own work will be flawed if the assumptions they work from are flawed. Indeed, it will be more flawed than those adopted assumptions from previous work, as it will incorporate new errors extrapolated from older errors. Science based on consensus assumptions rather than empirical replicability is notorious for building elaborate volumes of “knowledge” that are dead wrong. See the history of Ptolemaic astronomy. Epicycles, anyone?
Modern AGW theory is based mostly on modelling and meta-modelling extrapolations, and little on replicable empiricism. The basic science involved is often quite good, the scientists doing the work quite honest and aboveboard, the conclusions not in the least overstated but replete with the bounded qualifications of doubt that mark real inquiry. It’s the process of throwing that research together and then building assumptive models from it that gets tricky. The tentative results are taken as givens, and assigned a much higher level of precision and certainty than is warranted. The more that occurs, the less and less reliable and realistic the model derived will be. And thta’s all before you reach the ever-present problem of omitted and unknown variable(s).
Combine that with the explicitly political process of generating the IPCC reports, and you have a recipe for Really Bad Science that ignores fundamental problems in data, research, and theory.
Science thrives on the exploration of doubt, not the premature trumpeting of certainty where uncertainty is rampant. The latter is the mark of religious or pseudo-religious fundamentalism, not science.
I disagree. When a cause becomes a cause celebre in the political arena, it’s much more likely that you can get funding for siding with the consensus than against it (unless of course you go to sources that have a vested financial interest in disproving the consensus, as in the case of anti-AGW and the energy companies).
Tully–
You’re right about bad assumptions resulting in further bad science. But the scientific community knows this can happen, and insists that other scientists be able to replicate the results before they become accepted.
Modern AGW theory is based mostly on modelling and meta-modelling extrapolations, and little on replicable empiricism Kind of reminds me of my thesis advisor, who would tease the ecology students, saying that since their findings couldn’t be reproduced in a lab what they were doing wasn’t science.
He was wrong. Just because something isn’t done in a lab (be it studies of wetlands or global warming) doesn’t mean it doesn’t conform to scientific methodology. Defining science narrowly as “what can only be done in a lab under controlled circumstances” would cripple many scientific projects, and not just the ecological ones.
CS I said it’s a lot easier to get funding when you’re with the consensus.
It is very hard to get it when you’re not, but if you do it will be for a lot more money. That’s just how the grants are set up.
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Hi there,
This is Peter Teiman writing from Norway. I must say that with the enormous swings in opinion re global warming, is it any wonder that the sentence that “there are lies, damn lies and statistics” is a reality. Hopefully, this will not be to our detriment!
Peter Teiman
People who drive SUVs increase the probability that people in Bangladesh will die. Cause - effect.
This is not about the world ending. This is about people being ignorant and being excessive in their behaviour despite the suffering of others and some bloggers mewling about “dogmatism” and “no consensus!”.
Hold on a minute. What does this study actually say?
6% of recent papers include an explicit statement rejecting the consensus.
48% make no statement whatsoever about the general consensus.
38% imply an acceptance of the consensus.
7% explicitly support the consensus.
And what does that add up to?
Scientific papers routinely report the results of a highly specific research question. One wouldn’t expect there to necessarily be any statement included that addresses high-level general issues. And, half of the papers include no such statement.
How on earth can that be seen as a rejection, or even a questioning of the general consensus?
The conclusion here is that 6% of the papers (not 6% of the scientists) are from a rejectionist perspective. Thats the only conclusion. I dont see any undermining of the notion that there is a broad consensus.
And of course, there is the minor detail that the results of this study are ENTIRELY dependent on the subjective judgement of the researcher - as he categorizes whether a paper is “neutral” or “implicitly supportive”.
I wonder what the results would have been if the researcher had called up the authors of all those “neutral” papers and asked them what their veiws were on the larger consensus.
Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Nature of Scientific Revolutions, points out how science goes through phases; a “revolution” when a problem is explained via a new paradigm, and a mopping-up stage where the details are worked out after the paradigm has become accepted.
I don’t know. I’ve always read Kuhn as saying “normal science” (i.e. the science of “consensus”) is really “ossified science”. For Kuhn every scientific “consensus” is something that will be swept away.
I also suspect that Kuhn is fundamentally wrong… not that there isn’t a sociological aspect to scientific inquiry, but in the idea that scientific method qua method is merely a sociological construct.
NO ‘Consensus’ on “Man-Made” Global Warming
“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus…” - Michael Crichton, A.B. Anthropology, M.D. Harvard
RE: “The scientific consensus on climate change”
“Oreskes claims to have analysed 928 abstracts she found listed on the ISI database using the keywords “climate change”. However, a search on the ISI database using the keywords “climate change” for the years 1993 - 2003 reveals that almost 12,000 papers were published during the decade in question. [...] …she admitted that there was indeed a serious mistake in her Science essay. According to Oreskes, her study was not based on the keywords “climate change,” but on “global climate change” [yet her paper is clearly titled: The scientific consensus on "climate change" not "global climate change"] Her use of three keywords instead of two reduced the list of peer reviewed publications by one order of magnitude (on the UK’s ISI databank the keyword search “global climate change” comes up with 1247 documents) [...] The results of my analysis contradict Oreskes’ findings and essentially falsify her study: Of all 1117 abstracts, only 13 (1%) explicitly endorse the ‘consensus view’. [...] 34 abstracts reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the “the observed warming over the last 50 years”. 44 abstracts focus on natural factors of global climate change.”