RUTHFULLY YOURS

That is, one-third of the respondents, who include many hundreds of academically credentialed TV weathercasters and other weather communicators, don’t buy the party line on global warming. Twenty-seven percent don’t believe humans are mostly responsible and 6% are don’t-knows.

The scientific community, we’ve been told, is virtually unanimous about CO2-caused warming. That alleged consensus justifies the trillion-dollar spending on windmills and solar farms, as opposed to, say, Third World electrification, clean water, the eradication of malaria and other health scourges now damning billions to poverty and despair.

The reality is that the CO2 emissions dogma is now so shaky – especially given the 21^st century’s pause or halt to warming –  that peer-reviewed papers sceptical of the orthodoxy are  flooding into scientific journals. Kenneth Richard has been tabulating these papers and lists more than 660 published in just the past  27 months – including 133 since the start of 2016 and 282 last year. The mainstream media ignores them,  ditto the IPCC whose remit is  to look exclusively for evidence of human-induced, rather than natural, climate change.[1]

Returning to the AMS survey,  its members are well qualified in science generally and weather in particular. Most respondents had a Bachelor (32%) or Masters (30%) science degree, or PhD in meteorology or atmospheric science (33%). More than a third rated themselves ‘expert’ in climate science, whatever either term may mean. The discovery of one-third sceptics in AMS ranks undoubtedly understates the real level of scepticism in the organisation. The key issue concerns the 3592 non-respondents.  In fact 3,364 of them didn’t even open the emails, despite being reminded up to five times.

A plausible reason for a sceptic not to respond was that the survey was run by Dr Ed Maibach, of George Mason University, a communications specialist. Maibach is has been bluntly described in the sceptic blogosphere as a ‘slimebag’ because he was second signatory on the “RICO20” petition to President Obama last September, calling for sceptics to be prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organisations Act. Thus any sceptic AMS member getting an email from Maibach asking, among other things, whether they are sceptics, could suspect that Maibach might misuse such information to threaten, sue and blacklist them.[2]  As Anthony Watts put it,  “The man asking the questions might flag you for criminal prosecution for having an opinion he doesn’t like.”

That RICO petition backfired spectacularly on its authors. The lead signatory was Professor Jagadish Shukla, who was quickly exposed for creaming nearly $US6 million  since 2001 for himself, wife and daughter in salaries from his own purported non-profit climate-research foundation.[3] The foundation, in turn, was bankrolled with more than $US75m in US government research grants. In 2014 alone, the Shukla family’s double-dip generated more than $US1m. Shukla is now under intensive audit and faces possible discipline/prosecution over alleged violations of university salary guidelines.

Among other millions falling from the (taxpayer) skies into the laps of the RICO20 witch-hunters is $US3m for Shukla’s pal, Maibach, a three-year research grant to enhance TV weathercasters education, the thrust being to convert them into climate-change warriors.[4]   The AMS survey is part of this exercise, another reason why sceptic members may well have given it a wide berth.

The survey is full of daft questions, the kind contemplated only by unthinking alarmists. Question 1, for example, is,  “Regardless of the cause, do you think climate change is happening?”

Well duh! Climate change is as old as the planet. Fancy asking whether in 2016 climate change has ceased. So 96% replied “Yes”, and only a rogue 1% said “No” (3% were don’t-knows). Author Maibach was actually engaging in spin: the vacuous term “climate change” is used throughout the survey and the more meaningful, and emotionally loaded, term “global warming” is never used at all.[5]

Another dopey question: “To the best of your knowledge, has the climate in your area changed over the past 50 years?” It so happens that 89% of the respondents were unborn or juveniles 50 years ago. On what basis could they   profess knowledge about their local climate in 1966? Nonetheless, 74% claimed their local climate had indeed changed, and more than 40% claimed they had become more convinced about global warming as a result of witnessing local climate change (what exactly would they “witness” to be relevant to global warming?)

It gets worse. AMS weathercasters were also asked if the local climate changes have been beneficial or harmful, whether the local climate will change in the next 50 years, and whether these hypothesized changes to 2066 will be beneficial or harmful? Answering another question, 60% of respondents thought anti-global warming measures, especially global emissions reductions, would work during the next 50 years. They were further asked, in a ridiculous way, if the anti-warming measures would assist the 50-year future of health, farming, transport, homes and fresh water in the US per se. These answers tended towards yes (65%) and no (25%), proportional to the alarmist/sceptics ratio overall.

An extraordinary 29% of respondents thought that climate change (about half a degree of warming in the past half-century) was 81%-to-100% human-caused, as if there were negligible natural climate-change forces before the human fossil-fuel era.

Maibach became a warming warrior a decade ago, after an education at the hands of the Potsdam Climate Institute people. He parlayed that into a career of grant-getting in the cause of climate propaganda.

For example, he won a $US1.06m grant a few years ago to get TV meteorologists to inject more climate-change information into their broadcasts, and another $US1.25m grant to help weather broadcasters convert “unusual weather events as climate change educational opportunities”. This included fingering “weathercasters still undecided about the reality of anthropogenic climate change, the nature of their indecisions, and opportunities to help them reach a conclusion consistent with scientific consensus”. Moreover, Maibech was funded to “develop a prototype conflict analysis and resolution process between weathercasters who reject the scientific consensus and those who accept it.” He was also funded to pump climate orthodoxy into schools and university courses, and to persuade Hollywood gurus to make their films more climate oriented.

A classic piece of Maibach “research” grew out of having been funded to help health professionals better spruik the alleged health hazards of global warming. He claimed that, from a survey he conducted, 60% of 2296 US public health directors were  convinced that they had seen local harmful effects of warming.[6] The reality was that out of his initial sample of 2296, he received responses from only  217, of whom 133 were concerned about warming. This was 3.5% of the initial sample, not the 60% he claimed. So much for Maibach and his surveys.

The original “97% consensus” about human-caused global warming dates to a 2004 study by science historian Naomi Oreskes, who has been babbling for the past quarter-century that warming sceptics are the same as tobacco lobbyists. She  surveyed the literature from 1993-2003 and found three-quarters of 928 papers agreed with the consensus, and a quarter made no comment on it. (The fallacy is that in the highly-competitive scramble by academics for government research funding, any request suggesting the author is not on board with the ‘consensus’ was certain to be refused funding; thus their output never saw the light of day. This censorship-by-shunning is now crumbling).

Then there was  the Doran/Zimmerman study in 2008. This study was supposed to represent  3146 earth-scientist respondents. In fact, laughably, they culled their list down to a mere 79  suitable respondents, of whom 76 (or 97%) backed the consensus.

In 2013,  University of Queensland Ph.D. student John Cook published yet another 97% study, supposedly involving the rating of 12,464 abstracts. The Cook exercise passed peer review and was accepted by Environmental Research Letters, run by the  UK Institute of Physics (I hadn’t known that physics involved measurements of ‘consensus’).[7] It became the most-cited bit of research that year, with 161,000 downloads (currently 470,000). Sadly, the peer reviewers failed to check the study’s own data. This data showed that the number of studies actually backing the orthodox climate view – that most of the past 50 years’ warming is human-caused – was not 97% but 0.3%.

The 97% claim involved nothing more than agreement that there is some global warming and humans play some part in it. Given that the overwhelming majority of sceptics also believe this, the only surprise is that the figure isn’t  99.9%.

The study’s methodology attained a new low for science, even for climate science. According to time stamps on the work of Cook’s team which rated rating the studies, one rater managed to review 675 abstracts within 72 hours — a superhuman effort, as Richard Tol remarked.

The time stamps also reveal something far more serious. After collecting data for eight weeks, there were four weeks of data analysis, followed by three more weeks of data collection. The same people collected and analysed the data. After more analysis, the paper classification scheme was changed and yet more data ­collected.

Cook thus broke a key rule of scientific data collection: observations should never follow from the conclusions. Medical tests are double-blind for good reason.

You cannot change how to ­collect data, and how much, after having seen the results. If you want to believe climate researchers are incompetent, biased and secretive, Cook’s paper is an excellent case in point.

The study also claimed the raters were independent and had not colluded. In fact the raters were Cook’s intimates on his  Skeptical Science team. In what they supposed were private webchats, they freely admitted colluding on ratings and looking at material they were not supposed to under the study’s guidelines.[8]  For a simple check on Cook’s honesty, go to his own website, where he claims his study was “tweeted by President Obama”, viz. – “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: ‪#climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” Not only did Obama make no such tweet (Barack Obama@BarackObama is a third-party tweet shop) but it is also untrue that Cook’s alleged 97% consensus endorsed that warming was “dangerous”.

Sceptic Brandon Shollenberger discovered that the team had left open cyber doors to the private section of the website, and when he got inside, he found an image of  Cook elaborately Photoshopped by his followers in the Nazi drag of an SS Reichsfuehrer (left), the title held by Heinrich Himmler from 1929-45.[9] Another image showed “Herr John Cook”, in lieu of Hitler, addressing a Nuremburg rally, with the massed ranks of troops hand-labelled “SkS” (i.e. Skeptical Science).[10] For SS logos and swastikas, Cook’s helpers had laboriously substituted Skeptical Science logos.

What this was all about, no-one but Cook and his team knows. (Shollenberger’s e-book on Cook’s oddities, The Climate Wars, can be downloaded for $A1.39.)

Cook was mightily embarrassed that Shollenberger had walked, through open links, into Cook’s inner web sanctum. Next thing, Shollenberger got a ferocious letter from the University of Queensland’s legal team not only threatening to sue but asserting that the ‘We’ll sue!’ letter itself was confidential and copyright and Shollenberger would be doubly sued for disclosing its contents, even, presumably, to his own solicitor.[11] This deserved, and quickly got, a Hitler Downfall parody.

It seems a characteristic of “climate science” that its most vocal practitioners leave an odiferous trail. In the case of the American Meteorological Society survey, the trail includes McCarthyist attacks on “deniers”, a gravy train of funding that branches into multi-million mismanagement, and survey questions of laughable inanity. Earlier attempts to demonstrate a (meaningless) “consensus” about global warming made a mockery of scientific methods and inquiry, and traipsed into a morass involving Nazi portraiture and farcical lawsuit threats by university lawyers.

The only “consensus” demonstrated to date is that the global-warming community is a weird mob.

Tony Thomas blogs at No B-S Here, I Hope