Hi Blacknad,
This is a general forum. Scientific credentials is not a pre-requisite for joining in. To make such comments is patently offensive since very few of those on this forum disclose their qualifications. Oh, and the very best professor I ever had never attended university as a student. He was a noted author in his field and his knowledge in that field was astonishing. When he was quite elderly they gave him an honory degree. Big deal! Einstein was a patent clerk when he came up with the theory of relativity and was a hopeless student. I really would like to see you saying his views were somehow of lesser value because he had no scientific credentials at the time.
Please take great care in making such statements. Should dehammer be a professor in some field or other that he has chosen not to disclose, he could rightly consider your statement a publicly published defamatory statement. That cost both a website and the author of a similar off the cuff remark a great deal of money only last year in another science based forum.
I really would have liked to have found different results. It really is depressing by the way. But I cannot change the results because they are what you have called an "x-file" moment. I have already been asked to do so and I really did find that request very offensive.
Oh, and I was offered funding by someone that is in turn funded by oil companies. I declined.
By the way your quote is of Ms Oreskes' study. Have you read it? This is what was done. She and her colleagues did a search of a major database for the term "climate change". You get very different results by simply changing the words to "global warming" or "global climate change" or to any number of other similar searches.
Actually read the study and you will find the facts do not match the conclusion. Firstly, Ms Oreskes, University of San Diego, read extracts only. Imho in climate change studies these are opinion parts of studies or conclusions. They may or may not be based on fact or on the data reported in the study.
I wanted to provide a link to the study itself but couldn't find a site that provided it without payment.
The paper is by a person expert in the history of science. What I found most interesting in the study was the very precises use of words. "Not a single one challenged the scientific consensus" does not mean "they all agreed that man is causing global warming of which there is no doubt". It actually means only that in the reading of the extracts she found no comments that directly challenged the view that the earth's temperature was rising due to global warming. If the studies said nothing at all about this issue because they just did not address the point at all, that still fitted in with the conclusion because the absence of the specific comment challenging the view was all that was being recorded.
The study does not state that 928 peer-reviewed papers accepted global warming was a fact and man made. That is quite a different thing.
Unfortunately, a great many people would have trouble with the symantics used and would simply interpret the conclusion as 928 studies agreed with the "consensus" when nothing could be further from the truth.
Looking at all papers between 1993 and 2003 in the same database that are related to climate change in one form or other, there are about 1.500 papers. About 50 specifically challenge the proposition of global warming. About 40 challenge the proposition of man made effects. How they managed to be published is beyond me but they snuck through somehow. A significant minority do not address the issues, either of the reality of global warming or that it is man made, one way or the other.
It is certainly clear that the majority of papers do support the view that global warming is a fact. It is also clear that a smaller number but still very large sub-set agree with the view that global warming is man made.
I paraphrase one paper. "We found evidence that the sea level is rising. This is due to man's activities causing global warming." The study had no nexus at all between what was being studied and any proof of global warming or whether any such warming was man made. This was a personal view of the author, having no basis in fact in the study itself which simply analysed various data about sea levels for a certain very small location.
And in extracts this is what you tend to get, opinion. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated example. It happens a lot. "We found evidence of population flux in such and such a thing. It is clear from this that global warming is a fact and is man made" How absurd! It is not hard to find study after study that says very similar things by the way.
So what does Ms Oreske's study prove? That Ms Oreskes is good at symantics and getting considerable publicity for what should have been a very dry report.
I do hope Blacknad that you read more than extracts. If you do you will most likely confirm my comment about how extracts very often have opinion not supported by the study itself, when in the field of climate change. If you did this in most other science, the peer review would reject the paper or ask for the unsupported opinion to be removed before publication. How come climate science enjoys this special position?
Sorry there are no links. I cannot link to any study I have reviewed unfortunately and links to other studies would take time I currently do not have.
Going into hospital in a few hours. With a bit of luck to those that resent my views here, the nasty little infection I have will finish me off and you will win your arguments by default. Actually that was probably not really warranted but, boy, it is hard to discover real problems in studies being reviewed when such a position is the most unpopular of any that exist for the endevour. You then have to choose whether you will defend your findings despite the fact that you probably have no chance of convincing anyone, or change your view because you become sick of being the odd man out. It becomes tiring after a while.
Regards
Richard
