A Heated Debate: Are Climate Scientists Being Forced to Toe the Line?

a reply to: the2ofusr1

That's quite a gem, nice find.

Will be watching it this evening and seeing how it stands up to today's mental model.

Thanks!

~Namaste

a reply to: SonOfTheLawOfOne

But by mc_squared's accord, they should be "dismissed" because they are "irrelevant".

^I love this. You say it as if I wrote the paper or something.

It’s not “by mc_squared’s accord” - it’s by the principles of the scientific method. How exactly is anyone supposed to use these papers to tabulate an opinion on the causes of climate change, when they say absolutely nothing about those causes? ESP? Maybe crush the papers up and read them like tea leaves?

Nobody is suggesting they are not valid pieces of work in their own right – just that they are useless for the purposes of quantifying this discussion. How hard is that to understand, seriously?

Meanwhile if there was anywhere near the supposed dissent you keep trying to project there is – the fact is it would show up in far more than a piddly 1.9% of the papers that do take up an actual position.

And before you come telling me "oooh it’s all a big conspiracy and everyone who says it’s not happening can’t get published": what’s more telling than anything is the fact that the uncertains make up an even smaller percentage than the not happenings. There is less uncertainty even than there is deniers!

...
Last but not least though there actually is a way to remove the ambiguity from the no positions – you can simply contact the authors and ask them directly. Maybe you missed it, but that was phase 2 of the Cook study. In that section the overall consensus was virtually unchanged at 97.2%, even though a far larger proportion of the papers (64.5%) took up an explicit position this time. The authors were under no peer review, no pressure or politics to cave to – they just had to answer a simple questions and if they were feeling stifled this was their chance to speak up and be heard. Yet all they did was reinforce the 97% consensus.

So once again your arguments are completely invalid. You’re just making up wildly hypothetical (i.e. entirely unscientific) scenarios to make yourself feel better because this paper doesn't say what you want it to say.

a reply to: SonOfTheLawOfOne

It explains why you both post the same garbage to support your arguments and use the same exact tactics to try and demean and belittle people who poke holes in your ideology.

So what holes have you poked in our “ideology” here exactly?

In this thread you have very clearly demonstrated you don’t understand the papers or the basis for that 97% consensus you’ve been trying so hard (and failing) to tear down. The OP has demonstrated he doesn’t understand his own links that he naively used to show the exact opposite of what he’s trying to say. And in doing so all you guys have done in general is continue to reinforce the narrative people like me have been pushing since day 1, that being:

1. The science on climate change is actually quite solid and robust.

2. Virtually all “skepticism” on this subject is in fact manufactured by corrupt special interest groups and their government sympathizers, who twist facts and use seedy PR strategies to manipulate naïve people like yourself into believing it’s the science that’s corrupt.

3. These shills get away with it because ignorant masses provide endless fuel for their propaganda fire - neglecting to research any of this material critically or objectively, and opting instead to just swallow all the lies whole, because you just love bitching about Al Gore, or fantasizing that you're so much smarter than the average bear (not to mention the entire scientific establishment).

...
So here’s the deal – I have much better things to do than “belittle and demean people”. But ever since I made the rookie mistake of once trying to engage in a reasonable debate on this, I’ve encountered pretty much nothing but militant ignorance and abuse from phony skeptics everywhere - usually followed by unapologetic denial, deflection, and most of all endless whining about being victimized for having a “different opinion” once you start to lose the argument very badly.

Your attitude has been absolutely no exception: YOU started this little exchange with your condescending remarks about people like me, who apparently can’t read or understand things like Cook’s paper. Then, when all I did was point out what a completely oblivious hypocrite you were being – you start flying off the handle.

Now you’re just backpedaling and playing the victim because you’ve stuck your own foot in your mouth and embarrassed yourself. So personally I could care less if you’re all butthurt about it, considering how eager you were to dish out the invective beforehand.


What I do care about however is all the other people getting sucked in by the mindless cheerleading of ignorance that posts like yours and the OPs are spreading and smearing. ATS deserves better. It deserves members who actually think before they write, who at least take enough care to make sure they know what they’re talking about before pointing fingers and lambasting others. As far as I’m concerned it is posts like yours - malicious AND ignorant - that create such a negative atmosphere in here. So please cry me a river now that you’ve sunk yourself in your own bleeding hypocrisy.

Two things I want to add that some will try and understand and others will dismiss because of their emotional attachment to what they have been told to believe . James Corbett on YT shows the psychology we are a part of and the second is about Real Science Debate which is well worth reading to understand how Science does and does not work . www.youtube.com... wattsupwiththat.com...

Here’s the logic:

a) We know that human caused climate change is a fact. (We heard this repeatedly asserted in the “debate” above, did we not? It is a fact that CO2 is a radiatively coupled gas, completely ignoring the actual logarithmic curve Goreham presented, it is a fact that our models show that that more CO2 must lead to more warming, it is a fact that all sorts of climate changes are soundly observed, occurred when CO2 was rising so it is a fact that CO2 is the cause, count the logical and scientific fallacies at your leisure).

b) This paper that I’m reviewing asserts that human caused climate change is not a fact. It therefore contradicts “known science”, because human caused climate change is a fact. Indeed, I can cite hundreds of peer reviewed publications that conclude that it is a fact, so it must be so.

c) Therefore, I recommend rejecting this paper.

It is a good thing that Einstein’s results didn’t occur in Climate Science. He had a hard enough time getting published in physics journals, but physicists more often than not follow the rules and accept a properly written paper without judging whether or not its conclusions are true, with the clear understanding that debate in the literature is precisely where and how this sort of thing should be cleared up, and that if that debate is stifled by gatekeeping, one more or less guarantees that no great scientific revolutions can occur because radical new ideas even when correct are, well, radical. In one stroke they can render the conclusions of entire decades of learned publications by the world’s savants pointless and wrong. This means that physics is just a little bit tolerant of the (possible) crackpot. All too often the crackpot has proven not only to be right, but so right that their names are learned by each succeeding generation of physicist with great reverence.

Maybe that is what is missing in climate science — the lack of any sort of tradition of the maverick being righter than the entire body of established work, a tradition of big mistakes that work amazingly well — until they don’t and demand explanations that prove revolutionary. Once upon a time we celebrated this sort of thing throughout science, but now science itself is one vast bureaucracy, one that actively repels the very mavericks that we rely on to set things right when we go badly astray.

originally posted by: mc_squared
a reply to: SonOfTheLawOfOne

But by mc_squared's accord, they should be "dismissed" because they are "irrelevant".

^I love this. You say it as if I wrote the paper or something.

You act like you did.

It’s not “by mc_squared’s accord” - it’s by the principles of the scientific method. How exactly is anyone supposed to use these papers to tabulate an opinion on the causes of climate change, when they say absolutely nothing about those causes? ESP? Maybe crush the papers up and read them like tea leaves?

That's the point... they are still climate scientists and don't have an opinion, but were excluded from the count. Therefore, it's not possible to say that "97% of climate scientists agree". What is so difficult for you to understand?

We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.

Meaning that of 11,944 papers, only 32.6% endorsed global warming. If 11,944 papers makes up 100% of the papers that were deemed "climate change" and "global warming", 32.6% endorsing global warming is absolutely not in any way 97% of climate scientists agreeing.

You are trying to prop this paper up. It took 5 tries before they could get someone to publish it. It's been torn apart by Tol and others, and even in another published paper which were already listed prior, but in the highly unlikely event that you want to read it, here is the link:

Agnotology

Nobody is suggesting they are not valid pieces of work in their own right – just that they are useless for the purposes of quantifying this discussion.

They are not useless for quantifying the discussion, as I've just pointed out. They are papers that qualified as climate change subject material in their search and specifically mentioned it in the abstract, they just didn't say in the abstract whether it was man made, or natural. You keep using "uncertain", but that is uncertain of man's influence, not uncertain of anything else, such as natural variability or natural phenomenon that are not yet understood or explained.

Meanwhile if there was anywhere near the supposed dissent you keep trying to project there is – the fact is it would show up in far more than a piddly 1.9% of the papers that do take up an actual position.

Duh. If they take a position, they obviously have an opinion on man's influence on climate change. Of the 33% that took a position, 97% of them believe the same thing. 1.9% explicitly reject, outright, AGW, which again, is not the group that doesn't express an opinion either way. There are several scientists that have come out after their papers were included by Cook et al, and flat out said that their position was misrepresented.

And before you come telling me "oooh it’s all a big conspiracy and everyone who says it’s not happening can’t get published": what’s more telling than anything is the fact that the uncertains make up an even smaller percentage than the not happenings. There is less uncertainty even than there is deniers!

(sigh)

You don't read prior posts. There are plenty of examples of this behavior, but you'll flat out ignore it to support your argument.

...
In that section the overall consensus was virtually unchanged at 97.2%, even though a far larger proportion of the papers (64.5%) took up an explicit position this time. The authors were under no peer review, no pressure or politics to cave to – they just had to answer a simple questions and if they were feeling stifled this was their chance to speak up and be heard. Yet all they did was reinforce the 97% consensus.

The same 33% of pro-AGW papers written by the surveyed scientists were the same ones that rated their papers and took the same position as they did in the papers. So I write a paper, clearly stating I think man causes climate change, then you ask me in a survey, and you are surprised that my position didn't change? LOL Wow...

Of course, Cook did everything by the book, and the scientific method, with no bias at all...

In his "Introduction to TCP," Cook acknowledges that probably only half of the 12,000 papers they’ve selected will either explicitly or implicitly endorse AGW alarmism. But over time, he expects online volunteers to “process” many of the 6,000 non-endorsement papers, “converting” them into endorsements! Here’s Cook:

I anticipate there will be around 6000 "neutral" papers. So what I was thinking of doing next was a public crowd sourcing project where the public are given the list of neutral papers and links to the full paper — if they find evidence of an endorsement, they submit it to SkS (Skeptical Science)…. Thus over time, we would gradually process the 6000 neutral papers, converting many of them to endorsement papers — and make regular announcements like "hey the consensus just went from 99.75% to 99.8%, here are the latest papers with quotes."

Cook went on to sketch out an entire promotional campaign utilizing press releases, major media programs, booklets, Kindle/iBooks, blogs, etc. “We beat the consensus drum often and regularly and make SkS the home of the perceived strengthening consensus,” Cook advised.

At least one of the members of his team seems to have recognized that Cook had the emphasis all backwards. Ari Jokimäki responded:

I have to say that I find this planning of huge marketing strategies somewhat strange when we don't even have our results in and the research subject is not that revolutionary either (just summarizing existing research).

Source

There's plenty more where that came from...

So once again your arguments are completely invalid. You’re just making up wildly hypothetical (i.e. entirely unscientific) scenarios to make yourself feel better because this paper doesn't say what you want it to say.

Right. I cited a paper written specifically about the flaws in the Cook paper, but I'm just making things up. I give links with scientists and their own words, explicitly showing papers that were improperly categorized. I've clearly shown you, in the abstracts own words, one more time:

We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.

I don't have to argue with you, and everyone else can read themselves and come to their own conclusions. The paper is deeply flawed, as are many others on BOTH SIDES of the argument.

Rather than admit that, you can keep spitting your venom around at people, and their "militant ignorance".

~Namaste

originally posted by: mc_squared
a reply to: SonOfTheLawOfOne

It explains why you both post the same garbage to support your arguments and use the same exact tactics to try and demean and belittle people who poke holes in your ideology.

So what holes have you poked in our “ideology” here exactly?

In this thread you have very clearly demonstrated you don’t understand the papers or the basis for that 97% consensus you’ve been trying so hard (and failing) to tear down. The OP has demonstrated he doesn’t understand his own links that he naively used to show the exact opposite of what he’s trying to say. And in doing so all you guys have done in general is continue to reinforce the narrative people like me have been pushing since day 1, that being:

1. The science on climate change is actually quite solid and robust.

2. Virtually all “skepticism” on this subject is in fact manufactured by corrupt special interest groups and their government sympathizers, who twist facts and use seedy PR strategies to manipulate naïve people like yourself into believing it’s the science that’s corrupt.

3. These shills get away with it because ignorant masses provide endless fuel for their propaganda fire - neglecting to research any of this material critically or objectively, and opting instead to just swallow all the lies whole, because you just love bitching about Al Gore, or fantasizing that you're so much smarter than the average bear (not to mention the entire scientific establishment).

...
So here’s the deal – I have much better things to do than “belittle and demean people”. But ever since I made the rookie mistake of once trying to engage in a reasonable debate on this, I’ve encountered pretty much nothing but militant ignorance and abuse from phony skeptics everywhere - usually followed by unapologetic denial, deflection, and most of all endless whining about being victimized for having a “different opinion” once you start to lose the argument very badly.

All of the above is off-topic dribble, decorated with some passive aggressive ad-hominem attacks on the OP and myself.

For all 3 points, I can say the exact same thing (without your added hyperbole):

1. - The science is not robust, it's based on models.
2. - Skepticism is manufactured by both sides.
3. - The "shills" get away with it because of how much tax money there is to be made.

Clearly, you are the one whining and feeling victimized because others have a different opinion than yours.

Oh, and I thought there wasn't an argument anymore... so I guess I can't be on either the winning or losing end, right? Because there is no debate...

Moving on....

Your attitude has been absolutely no exception: YOU started this little exchange with your condescending remarks about people like me, who apparently can’t read or understand things like Cook’s paper. Then, when all I did was point out what a completely oblivious hypocrite you were being – you start flying off the handle.

Ok genius... show me where I started this exchange? Because I never made a comment about you or to you directly on this thread. I didn't begin any exchange with you, I said something to another poster who used your post, and I discussed the sources and not a damn thing about your post specifically, or you directly. Show otherwise, or eat crow. Talk about foot in mouth...

I never once flew off the handle, I calmly defended myself and presented sound arguments with cited papers and external sources. (See previous statement)

EDIT: If I flew off the handle in ANY of my posts, they would be banned and that's how you'd know I flew off the handle.

Now you’re just backpedaling and playing the victim because you’ve stuck your own foot in your mouth and embarrassed yourself. So personally I could care less if you’re all butthurt about it, considering how eager you were to dish out the invective beforehand.

I dished out nothing to you, and you took comments that I posted and inferred them to mean that they included you, then decided to attack and derail the topic.

Foot in mouth? Butthurt? Embarrassed? You should be looking in the mirror right about now...

ATS deserves better.

Amen.

It deserves members who actually think before they write, who at least take enough care to make sure they know what they’re talking about before pointing fingers and lambasting others.

It does. You just accused me of doing something I never did, and saying something to you that I never did. Then started pointing fingers and lambasting me and the OP.

As far as I’m concerned it is posts like yours - malicious AND ignorant - that create such a negative atmosphere in here. So please cry me a river now that you’ve sunk yourself in your own bleeding hypocrisy.

I don't think you'll find a post of mine on this thread that was malicious in any kind of way. Maybe a little sarcastic at times, and toward you, probably condescending here and there.

Malicious and ignorant? I think everyone can see for themselves who is wearing that hat today.



~Namaste

a reply to: mc_squared

1. The science on climate change is actually quite solid and robust.

This one thing, I just couldn't let go that easily, because this is part of the main OP and the heated debate.

Since the science is so robust... you might be able to answer a few things that were previously posted....

Since almost all climate science and forecasting (and hindcasting) is done with models, where is the science robust?

Maybe you can account for why the models don't include these extremely important aspects of climate to support your vehement advocation for why they are right, when the IPCC says things like:

"Surface temperature reconstructions show multi-decadal intervals during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950-1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th Century."

The pro-AGW camp has made claims that we're hotter now, and in some cases, that the MWP didn't even happen and was a completely localized event, but records are surfacing that show otherwise. Still no admissions of being wrong from that side even though it's shifted from outright denial to "some regions".

"Models do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10 – 15 years."

That's a nice way of saying that the models don't match observations - ie - they are wrong.

As a previous paper I cited shows, 111 of 114 of the models were incorrect, which is a 97% inaccuracy of the models, but let's keep basing world-changing decisions on that rock-solid science you so vigilantly hold up, and act like you're Atlas carrying the world's stupidity and ignorance on your shoulders.

Or how about this gem:

"There is medium confidence that this difference between models and observations is to a substantial degree caused by unpredictable climate variability, with possible contributions from inadequacies in the solar, volcanic, and aerosol forcings used by the models and, in some models, from too strong a response to increasing greenhouse-gas forcing."

Just what I, and the OP, have been saying, as well as many skeptics. The models got it wrong and have been getting it wrong.

The IPCC admits that the reason is because of unpredictable climate variability, meaning changes that can't be predicted.

They go on to say that identified and contributed forcings in the models are inadequate when measuring solar, volcanic and aerosol It continues to go on and express that it could ALSO be from too strong a response to increasing greenhouse-gas forcing - meaning that too much weight was giving to CO2 in the models.

What about clouds?

"Climate models now include more cloud and aerosol processes, but there remains low confidence in the representation and quantification of these processes in models."

You can debate me, but I'm getting my information from the IPCC's own admissions. I've always argued the models and the validity of the data used in them because I've worked with both.

So maybe you can enlighten everyone as to where the IPCC is wrong, and how the following is true instead:

1.) Why don't climate models properly include water vapor?

2.) Why can't climate models properly include clouds and cloud formation?

3.) Why don't climate models include the sun's variability?

4.) Why were 111 of 114 climate models wrong on predicting the current observed temperatures?

5.) Where and how do we measure the amount of convection, which is what carries heat from the surface to the upper atmosphere?

6.) Why don't the models include said convection if we are able to measure it accurately?

7.) Why don't models include hurricanes, which move the heat equivalent of several nuclear bombs, out of the oceans and into the atmosphere?

Everything I just listed, impacts climate or climate models that are used to forecast our future climate, and there is no doubt about it.

If all of us "skeptics" are so wrong, then please explain the above, which will reduce the amount of skepticism we all have.

I look forward to hearing yet again, how little we understand and how wrong we are... while absent any answers to the questions and statements mentioned above, and calling me malicious and ignorant for asking questions that you, nor anyone else, seems to be able to answer in this debate.

~Namaste

It's not like conservatives are very pro business.

It's not like elites and industrialists who produce fossil fuels love money.

Nor is it likely that negative implications of pollution could impact the profit levels of these elites and industrialists.

It's not like the elites and industrialists HIRE scientists to refute evidence that could impact their profits.

Sure as hell couldn't be that conservatives aren't enlisted by these industrialists due to their love of all things business, or the fear of more government involvement...

I guess this entire contention is a mystery. lol

a reply to: SonOfTheLawOfOne

You act like you did.

No I merely act like someone who actually read the paper, instead of having it dictated to me via blog-translator.

So the more you continue to butcher it with this hatchet job of misinformed posts, the harder I find it to believe you did anything other than have someone spoonfeed everything to you. I actually hope for your sake this *is* the case, because then there might still be some hope left – as in you realizing the benefit of using your own brain, and putting the wattsupwiththat down long enough to see how much these idiots are lying to you.

If this really is all on your own accord however, then it looks like I’m just talking to another champion mental gymnast, and completely wasting my time. But I’ll give it one last heave-ho for the sake of denying ignorance:

That's the point... they are still climate scientists and don't have an opinion, but were excluded from the count. Therefore, it's not possible to say that "97% of climate scientists agree". What is so difficult for you to understand?

Because first of all it’s not scientists, it’s papers. What’s written in the literature is considered as a representative sample of the consensus opinion. Maybe take notes or something and write that term down - “representative sample”, because it’s going to become very important in a minute.

Second of all - it’s not some fixed headcount. It never was, and never will be. To have this expectation is completely impractical and illogical. There are thousands more papers out there that were never included (this is discussed in the conclusion). It doesn’t matter though, because it’s all relative - but you keep trying to make it absolute, as in “only 3,896 out of XXXXX papers said man made climate change was real, so there can’t be any quantifiable consensus”.

Third - you are comparing apples to oranges by trying to count every derivative ever written about climate change when it has nothing to do with attribution. It’s like, if there was a raging debate about whether lemmings really do commit mass suicide by jumping off cliffs: 97 papers said yes, it’s deliberate - and 3 percent said no, it’s an accident - but 600 papers were about the mating habits of lemmings, or heck let’s even say they were about the effects of tragic (but ambiguous) cliff deaths on lemming populations. Would you say then that mass lemming suicide is a myth, because only 97 out of 700 papers said it was real?

Do you think Trident went and asked every dentist in the world if they would recommend their gum before boasting about the 4 out of 5 consensus?

So if you honestly can’t see how YOU’RE the one who’s being biased and unfair with your flawed methodology here, then I simply can’t help you. This is all about relatives, not absolutes, and it’s perfectly standard acceptable practice.

Representative sampling is done all the time in the real world – in science, in engineering, in political polling, in all sorts of interesting applications, because it works. You are just telling yourself it doesn’t work here because you don’t like the result.


And the thing is I could forgive the fact that maybe you just don't get it, even if it's obvious you just don't want to get it - but then there’s stuff like this:

The same 33% of pro-AGW papers written by the surveyed scientists were the same ones that rated their papers and took the same position as they did in the papers. So I write a paper, clearly stating I think man causes climate change, you ask me in a survey, and you are surprised that my position didn't change? LOL Wow...

LOL Wow indeed…could it be any more clear that you never read this paper? Because that statement is entirely made up.

Page 4:

Among self-rated papers that stated a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. Among self-rated papers not expressing a position on AGW in the abstract, 53.8% were self-rated as endorsing the consensus.

Page 5:

A direct comparison of abstract rating versus self-rating endorsement levels for the 2142 papers that received a self-rating is shown in table 5. More than half of the abstracts that we rated as ‘No Position’ or ‘Undecided’ were rated ‘Endorse AGW’ by the paper’s authors.

Table 4 goes on to show that 761 (35.5%) of the self-rated papers remained as “no position” – so how the heck do those get there when according to you Cook et al only cherry-picked the authors who had already taken up a position on AGW?

They didn’t. They openly explored the no position part, and although they did find a lot less ambiguity (not surprising since the authors were obviously very familiar with the whole paper and not just the abstract), it changed nothing, it only reinforced the original assessment and made it that much stronger.

So I’m going to stop there.

I’d be happy to discuss all your other little links or the nuances of climate modelling - but I’m not wasting any more of my time until I can see I’m talking to a real human being who can put together some modicum of critical thinking, instead of another climate denial robot regurgitating piles and piles of intellectually dishonest blog science.

So please go ahead and comment on the above and convince me. If you can show some ability to reason rationally (which by the way, sometimes means just having the guts to stand up and say “I misunderstood this and I was wrong”), I’ll gladly put the knives away and we can have an adult conversation.

But let me just remind you of the things you said that triggered this whole backlash:

It's like NOBODY CAN READ A PAPER THESE DAYS!

They didn't say that "of 32% of climate based papers that support AGW, 97% of them agree", which would have been the FACTS and not a bunch of spoon-fed gargage.

(again, they made their methodologies PERFECTLY CLEAR in the paper and the abstract - they didn’t hide anything - so I don’t know how you come to this ridiculous assertion that people who read it are just swallowing “spoon-fed garbage”)

And folks should read the papers they pretend to understand or have read before they go around parroting numbers that they've seen in blogs and heard on TV.

You may have not been directing those at me in particular, but there were plenty of open-air insults available for anyone happening to walk by, and the fact is I just can’t stand unbelievable hypocrisy, so congrats Green Lantern – you’ve discovered my secret weakness!! Sucked me right in with it, and thus the claws came out.

Now go ahead and fix it if you like – prove to me you’re just a misunderstood good guy with noble intentions who gets a little too excited at times. Do that and you’ll see I can be a bigger person and we can maybe even have a reasonable conversation.

But if you want to keep doing mental backflips and spinning this yarn to save face and keep believing that everybody’s got the wool pulled over their eyes except you and your blog science buddies, please don’t waste any more of my time – and welcome to the world of full blown climate denial dementia.

originally posted by: haviahabia
It's not like conservatives are very pro business.

It's not like elites and industrialists who produce fossil fuels love money.

Nor is it likely that negative implications of pollution could impact the profit levels of these elites and industrialists.

It's not like the elites and industrialists HIRE scientists to refute evidence that could impact their profits.

Sure as hell couldn't be that conservatives aren't enlisted by these industrialists due to their love of all things business, or the fear of more government involvement...

I guess this entire contention is a mystery. lol

Lol (to paraphrase someone else from earlier in this thread):

When you put it that way it almost sounds like a conspiracy!

Too bad it's completely lost on people who read wattsupwiththat.com every day.

originally posted by: mc_squared
....


Because first of all it’s not scientists, it’s papers. What’s written in the literature is considered as a representative sample of the consensus opinion. Maybe take notes or something and write that term down - “representative sample”, because it’s going to become very important in a minute.

...

Riiight, right, only on mc_squared's world is 97% of 36% of the research papers that were biased and included in the study = a majority of scientists must agree with AGW...