"A final question, one asked on Judith Curry's blog a year ago by a real scientist, Willis Eschenbach..."Willis Eschenbach has been a guest poster at Watts Up With That since June of 2009 and has had 20 pages of his writings indexed since tagging his posts began in December of 2009. Unlike apparently most of his regular readers, I took the time early on to check the credentials of Mr. Eschenbach;
But just when you think it can't get any better, along comes this cracker of an expose at Watts Up With That, courtesy of scientist Willis Eschenbach.Without the qualifier "amateur", this egregiously misrepresents his educational and professional experience and elevates an amateur's opinion to a level he has not earned.
"I'll let you in on a very dark, ugly secret — I don’t want trust in climate science to be restored," Willis Eschenbach, an engineer and climate contrarianYet, he failed to correct this misinformation when given the chance,
Willis Eschenbach says:He finally owns up to this misrepresentation in 2013,
March 3, 2010 at 12:06 pm
My comment to the piece in the NYT (number 197 in the stack) was this:
"Willis Eschenbach
Occidental, CA
March 3rd, 2010
12:08 pm
As one of the people quoted in the article, I’d like to commend the New York Times for several things.
1. The article is generally well balanced.
2. I am quoted directly, rather than paraphrased, and my original article is cited. This minimizes misunderstanding. I encourage people to read my article. [...]
My best to everyone, and my congratulations to John Broder and the New York Times."
Willis Eschenbach says:So why did he not correct the New York Times in 2010?
October 11, 2013 at 9:22 pm
"...you are correct that I’m not an engineer,"
"The study, based entirely on computer models, focused on the exceptional flooding that took place in England and Wales in the autumn of 2000. [...]Again, he failed to correct this misrepresentation when he had the chance.
Why had this strangely opaque study been based solely on the results of a series of computer models – mainly provided by the Hadley Centre and RMS – and not on any historical data about rainfall and river flows? [...]
In the real world, the data show no evidence of an increase in UK rainfall at all. Any idea that there is one seemed to be entirely an artefact of the computer models.
On Friday came the fullest and most expert dissection of the Nature paper so far, published on the Watts Up With That website by Willis Eschenbach, a very experienced computer modeller.
It’s Not About MeWhen challenged on this in 2013, Mr. Eschenbach decided to double down on the misrepresentation of his credentials,
Posted on February 28, 2011 by Willis Eschenbach
"One response to Christopher Booker graciously mentioning my work in the Telegraph..."
Willis Eschenbach says:Mr. Eschenbach has no relevant computer programming experience. He was never trained or employed as a computer programmer, let alone a "computer modeler". He fails to list a single name of a program he actually wrote on his CV (unheard of for a real programmer) that can be verified for their quality and as confirmation of the programming languages he claims to be proficient in.
October 11, 2013 at 9:22 pm
"So while you are correct that I’m not an engineer, nor have I claimed to be, I am indeed a computer modeler of some small ability"
Willis Eschenbach Posted May 15, 2011 at 8:54 PMHardly the credentials of a "computer modeler".
"I program in Excel because I’m an order of magnitude faster in Excel. I have a host of specialized functions and macros that let me do the various functions and actions quickly."
"[A] Tetra Tech Company, is leading the design and construction of the [ExxonMobil] campus"
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| ExxonMobil's new 386-acre campus |
"Hydrogeologist Bill Craig of Tetra Tech spent the morning on the stand as a defense witness called by MDT and Imperial Oil/ExxonMobil. Tetra Tech was hired by the oil company to draft the environmental assessment MDT required for the Kearl module project"Hypocritically, Nuccitelli railed against the development of Alberta's oil sands, while simultaneously cashing his paycheck ExxonMobil helped pay for.
"[H]e was a particularly destructive individual, almost entirely without morals. He was an "ends justifies the means" type and his sole purpose was to try to destroy everything liberal regardless of what he had to do to achieve this. He was the one who made the cavallier comment that "We have all the guns and we outnumber liberals." He's the kind of guy that would laugh if someone acted upon such a suggestion." - Rob Honeycutt [Skeptical Science Forums], March 2, 2012
"Ding dong, the witch is dead..." - John Hartz [Skeptical Science Forums], March 2, 2012This type of behavior apparently earns you an acknowledgement in the scientific literature and a tweet from the President.
Introduction
It's essential that the public understands that there's a scientific consensus on AGW. So Jim Powell, Dana and I have been working on something over the last few months that we hope will have a game changing impact on the public perception of consensus. Basically, we hope to establish that not only is there a consensus, there is a strengthening consensus. Deniers like to portray the myth that the consensus is crumbling, that the tide is turning. However, our survey of the peer-reviewed literature shows that the opposite is true - the consensus is getting stronger and the gap between those that accept and reject the consensus is increasing. What we have in mind is an extended campaign over 2012 (and beyond).
Phase 1: Publishing a paper on the negligible impact of climate denial in the peer-reviewed literature
TCP is basically an update and expansion of Naomi Oreskes' survey of the peer-reviewed literature with deeper analysis. In 2004, Naomi surveyed 928 articles in the Web of Science matching the search "global climate change" from 1993 to 2003. We've expanded the time period (1991 to 2011) and added papers matching the search "global warming". We ended up with 12,272 papers. I imported the details of each paper (including abstracts) into the SkS database and set up a simple crowd sourcing system allowing us to rate the category of each paper using Naomi's initial categories (impacts, mitigation, paleoclimate, methods, rejection, opinion). We did find some rejection papers in the larger sample but the amount was negligible. The amount of citations the rejection papers received were even smaller proportionally, indicating the negligible impact of AGW denial in the peer-reviewed literature. Jim and I wrote these initial results up into a short Brevia article that we just submitted to Science (so please don't mention these results outside of this forum yet, lest it spook Science who freak out if there's any mention of a submitted paper before publication). Of course, Science have a 92% rejection rate so the chances are very slim - we'll try other journals if rejected there.
When the paper is published, we would announce it on SkS as the beginning of the public launch of TCP. It will also be promoted through the communications dept at the Global Change Institute although their press releases only go to Australian media so will have to explore other promotion ideas.
Phase 2: SkS team rates endorsements
For Phase 1, we didn't rate the actual # of endorsements of AGW - the focus was on the proportion and impact of rejection articles. So Phase 2 will be about tallying the # of endorsements and comparing it to the # of rejections in a variety of ways. This is where it gets exciting. A simple comparison of the # of endorsement papers vs rejection papers tells a vivid story of a strengthening consensus. Even more so, the # of citations of endorsement papers vs rejection citations. And this is something I haven't crunched any data for yet but just adding up the # of authors who have written endorsement papers vs rejection authors will, I imagine, tell another interesting tale.
What I'm thinking of doing is crowd sourcing among the SkS team the role of rating the 12,000 papers. By rating, we are actually going beyond what Naomi did. Her rating was one dimensional - just the 6 categories. We decided we wanted to collect more information about each paper and have defined two dimensions or two aspects of each paper that we want to capture - the category (impacts, mitigation, paleoclimate, methods, opinion) and the endorsement level (from explicit endorsement down to explicit rejection). So I'll program up a crowd sourcing system allowing SkSers to rate papers - the goal being every paper gets at least 2 ratings from different people for consistency.
The end goal of Phase 2 is publishing the results in a peer-reviewed paper. As far as co-authorship of the paper goes, I was thinking perhaps a practical approach would be that to be a co-author on the paper, you rate at least 2000 papers - seems a fair requirement to get your name on a peer-reviewed paper. And of course input into the writing of the paper - we'll need to anticipate all the various attacks our results will get as this result will be highly threatening to the denialosphere.
The result is we'll have 12,000 papers with category ratings and endorsement level. We can analyse this data in a variety of ways to tell many interesting stories - but what I'm guessing from what I've rated so far is we'll find is around 50% of the papers are explicit or implicit endorsements and the rest are neutral (with the tiniest fraction being rejection). Note and this is an important note - this result is based just on the abstract text, not the full paper, and hence is an underestimate of the actual number of endorsements.
Phase 3: Publicly crowd source the categorisation of neutral papers
When we publish the Phase 2 paper, it will strongly emphasise that the endorsement percentage is based just on the abstract text and hence an underestimate of the true number of papers endorsing the consensus. 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 (I'll have an easy-to-use online form) with the excerpted text. The SkS team would check incoming submissions, and if they check out, make the endorsement official. 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". The final result will be a definitive, comprehensive survey of the number of endorsements of AGW in the literature over the last 21 years.
Phase 4: Repeat each year
Fingers crossed, Phase 3 will be complete by the end of 2012. Then in early 2013, we can repeat the process for all papers published in 2012 to show that the consensus is still strengthening. We beat the consensus drum often and regularly and make SkS the home of the perceived strengthening consensus.
This thread is for general discussions of how to market TCP (began in this earlier thread) and make as great an impact as possible. Various surveys find that a disturbing proportion of the public don't think scientists agree about global warming so I suggest our goal be to establish "strengthening consensus" as a term in the general public consciousness (that goal can be a topic for discussion if required).Ari Jokimaki responded to Cook,
To achieve this goal, we mustn't fall into the trap of spending too much time on analysis and too little time on promotion. As we do the analysis, would be good to have the marketing plan percolating along as well. So a few ideas floating around:
Press releases: Talked to Ove about this yesterday, the Global Change Institute have a communications dept (well, two people) and will issue press releases to Australian media when this comes out. No plan yet for US media.
Mainstream Media: This is the key if we want to achieve public consciousness. MSM is an opaque wall to me so ideas welcome. I suspect this will involve developing time lines, building momentum for the idea and consulting with PR professionals like Jim Hoggan.
Climate Communicators: There needs to be a concerted effort (spearheaded by me) to get climate communicators using these results in their messaging. I've been hooking up with a lot of climate communicators over the last month and will be hooking up with more over the next few months so will be discussing these results with every climate communicator I can get hold of, including heavyweights like Susan Hassol and Richard Somerville, to discuss ways of amplifying this message.
Also Ed Maibach is doing research on the most effective way to debunk the "no consensus" myth so I hope to contact him and hopefully include our results in his research. The more we can get climate communicators incorporating our results into their messages, the better.
Blogosphere: The usual blogosphere networking. Note - Tim Lambert tried to do a similar crowd sourcing effort a few years ago but didn't succeed in generating enough support for the crowd sourcing - I'm confident we can get it done.
Climate Orgs: Also have been making connections with various climate organisations and occasionally talked about the possibility of collaboration so will use this project as a focal point as ways to work together. Have to think about this some more
Google: Coincidentally, started talking to someone who works at Google, specifically the data visualisation department. So I've been working with them on visualising the consensus data in sexy, interactive ways. This will be one of the X-factor elements of TCP - maybe they can even provide an embeddable version of the visualisation which blogs and websites can use.
Video: Peter Sinclair is keen to produce a YouTube video about the TCP results to publish on the Yale Forum on Climate Change.
Booklet: similar to Guide and Debunking Handbook, explaining the results of the peer-reviewed paper in plain English with big shiny graphics (with translations, I suppose - they're a pain for me to convert but worthwhile doing).
Kindle/iBook version of Booklet (can you publish free books on Amazon?).
Embeddable widget: graphic showing the graph of strengthening consensus, updated each year, easily copy and pasteable into other blogs. I like this idea, can make TCP go viral and become ubiquitious on the climate blogosphere!
Other ideas very welcome.
Update - will continue to add to this list as more ideas come along.
"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)." - Ari Jokimäki
"In his defense, [Dana] has had limited exposure to stats at uni" - Richard Tol
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| Including "global" before "climate change", Cook et al. dropped 75% of papers and changed disciplinary distribution. |
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| Including "global" before "climate change", Cook et al. dropped many papers by eminent climate researchers. |
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| Including "global" before "climate change", Cook et al. dropped 33 of the 50 most cited papers. |
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| Choosing exclusive WoS over inclusive Scopus, Cook et al. dropped 35% of papers and changed disciplinary distribution. |
"[Dana] I think your sampling strategy is a load of nonsense." - Richard Tol
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| Craig D. Idso Ph.D. Geography Chairman, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change |
Idso: "That is not an accurate representation of my paper. The papers examined how the rise in atmospheric CO2 could be inducing a phase advance in the spring portion of the atmosphere's seasonal CO2 cycle. Other literature had previously claimed a measured advance was due to rising temperatures, but we showed that it was quite likely the rise in atmospheric CO2 itself was responsible for the lion's share of the change. It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming."
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| Nicola Scafetta Ph.D. Physics Research Scientist, ACRIM Science Team |
Scafetta: "Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission.
What my papers say is that the IPCC view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun. This implies that the true climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling is likely around 1.5 C or less, and that the 21st century projections must be reduced by at least a factor of 2 or more. Of that the sun contributed (more or less) as much as the anthropogenic forcings.
The "less" claim is based on alternative solar models (e.g. ACRIM instead of PMOD) and also on the observation that part of the observed global warming might be due to urban heat island effect, and not to CO2.
By using the 50% borderline a lot of so-called "skeptical works" including some of mine are included in their 97%."
Scafetta: "Please note that it is very important to clarify that the AGW advocated by the IPCC has always claimed that 90-100% of the warming observed since 1900 is due to anthropogenic emissions. While critics like me have always claimed that the data would approximately indicate a 50-50 natural-anthropogenic contribution at most.
What it is observed right now is utter dishonesty by the IPCC advocates. Instead of apologizing and honestly acknowledging that the AGW theory as advocated by the IPCC is wrong because based on climate models that poorly reconstruct the solar signature and do not reproduce the natural oscillations of the climate (AMO, PDO, NAO etc.) and honestly acknowledging that the truth, as it is emerging, is closer to what claimed by IPCC critics like me since 2005, these people are trying to get the credit.
They are gradually engaging into a metamorphosis process to save face.
Now they are misleadingly claiming that what they have always claimed was that AGW is quantified as 50+% of the total warming, so that once it will be clearer that AGW can only at most be quantified as 50% (without the "+") of the total warming, they will still claim that they were sufficiently correct.
And in this way they will get the credit that they do not merit, and continue in defaming critics like me that actually demonstrated such a fact since 2005/2006."
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| Nir J. Shaviv Ph.D. Astrophysics Associate Professor, Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
Shaviv: "Nope... it is not an accurate representation. The paper shows that if cosmic rays are included in empirical climate sensitivity analyses, then one finds that different time scales consistently give a low climate sensitiviity. i.e., it supports the idea that cosmic rays affect the climate and that climate sensitivity is low. This means that part of the 20th century should be attributed to the increased solar activity and that 21st century warming under a business as usual scenario should be low (about 1°C).
I couldn't write these things more explicitly in the paper because of the refereeing, however, you don't have to be a genius to reach these conclusions from the paper."
Shaviv: "Science is not a democracy, even if the majority of scientists think one thing (and it translates to more papers saying so), they aren't necessarily correct. Moreover, as you can see from the above example, the analysis itself is faulty, namely, it doesn't even quantify correctly the number of scientists or the number of papers which endorse or diminish the importance of AGW."
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| Richard S.J. Tol Ph.D. Economics Professor of the Economics of Climate Change, Vrije Universiteit |
Tol: "WoS lists 122 articles on climate change by me in that period. Only 10 made it into the survey.
I would rate 7 of those as neutral, and 3 as strong endorsement with quantification. Of the 3, one was rated as a weak endorsement (even though it argues that the solar hypothesis is a load of bull). Of the 7, 3 were listed as an implicit endorsement and 1 as a weak endorsement.
...from 112 omitted papers, one strongly endorses AGW and 111 are neutral"
Tol: "@dana1981 I think your data are a load of crap. Why is that a lie? I really think so."
Tol: "@dana1981 I think your sampling strategy is a load of nonsense. How is that a misrepresentation? Did I falsely describe your sample?"
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| Nils-Axel Morner Ph.D. Quaternary Geology Professor Emeritus of Palegeophysics and Geodynamics, Stockholm University |
Morner: "Certainly not correct and certainly misleading. The paper is strongly against AGW, and documents its absence in the sea level observational facts. Also, it invalidates the mode of sea level handling by the IPCC."
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| Willie Soon Ph.D. Rocket Science Astrophysicist and Geoscientist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics |
Soon: "I am sure that this rating of no position on AGW by CO2 is nowhere accurate nor correct. Rating our serious auditing paper from just a reading of the abstract or words contained in the title of the paper is surely a bad mistake. Specifically, anyone can easily read the statements in our paper as quoted below:
"For example, Soon et al. (2001) found that the current generation of GCMs is unable to meaningfully calculate the effects that additional atmospheric carbon dioxide has on the climate. This is because of the uncertainty about the past and present climate and ignorance about relevant weather and climate processes."
Here is at least one of our positions on AGW by CO2: the main tool climate scientists used to confirm or reject their CO2-AGW hypothesis is largely not validated and hence has a very limited role for any diagnosis or even predicting real-world regional impacts for any changes in atmospheric CO2.
I hope my scientific views and conclusions are clear to anyone that will spend time reading our papers. Cook et al. (2013) is not the study to read if you want to find out about what we say and conclude in our own scientific works."
Soon: "No extra comment on Cook et al. (2013) is necessary as it is not a paper aiming to help anyone understand the science."
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| Alan Carlin Ph.D. Economics, MIT Senior Operations Research Analyst, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Retired) |
Carlin: "No, if Cook et al's paper classifies my paper, 'A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change' as "explicitly endorses AGW but does not quantify or minimize," nothing could be further from either my intent or the contents of my paper. I did not explicitly or even implicitly endorse AGW and did quantify my skepticism concerning AGW. Both the paper and the abstract make this clear. The abstract includes the following statement:
"The economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions may be about two orders of magnitude less than those estimated by most economists because the climate sensitivity factor (CSF) is much lower than assumed by the United Nations because feedback is negative rather than positive and the effects of CO2 emissions reductions on atmospheric CO2 appear to be short rather than long lasting."
In brief, I argue that human activity may increase temperatures over what they would otherwise have been without human activity, but the effect is so minor that it is not worth serious consideration.
I would classify my paper in Cook et al's category (7): Explicit rejection with quantification. My paper shows that two critical components of the AGW hypothesis are not supported by the available observational evidence and that a related hypothesis is highly doubtful. I hence conclude that the AGW hypothesis as a whole is not supported and state that hypotheses not supported by evidence should be rejected.
With regard to quantification, I state that the economic benefits of reducing CO2 are about two orders of magnitude less than assumed by pro-AGW economists using the IPCC AR4 report because of problems with the IPCC science. Surely 1/100th of the IPCC AGW estimate is less than half of the very minor global warming that has occurred since humans became a significant source of CO2."
Carlin: "If Cook et al's paper is so far off in its classification of my paper, the next question is whether their treatment of my paper is an outlier in the quality of their analysis or is representative. Since I understand that five other skeptic paper authors whose papers were classified by Cook et al. (Idso, Morner, Scaffeta, Soon, and Shaviv) have similar concerns to date, the classification problems in Cook's paper may be more general. Further, in all six cases the effect of the misclassifications is to exaggerate Cook et al's conclusions rather than being apparently random errors due to sloppy analysis. Since their conclusions are at best no better than their data, it appears likely that Cook et al's conclusions are exaggerated as well as being unsupported by the evidence that they offer. I have not done an analysis of each of the papers Cook et al. classified, but I believe that there is sufficient evidence concerning misclassification that Cook et al's paper should be withdrawn by the authors and the data reanalyzed, preferably by less-biased reviewers.
One possible explanation for this apparent pattern of misclassification into "more favorable" classifications in terms of supporting the AGW hypothesis is that Cook et al. may have reverse engineered their paper. That is, perhaps the authors started by deciding the "answer" they wanted (97 percent) based on previous alarmist studies on the subject. They certainly had strong motivation to come up with this "answer" given the huge propaganda investment by alarmists in this particular number. So in the end they may have concluded that they needed to reclassify enough skeptic papers into "more favorable" classifications in order to reach this possibly predetermined "answer" and hoped that these misclassifications would go unnoticed by the world's press and governmental officials trumpeting their scientifically irrelevant conclusions. Obviously, whether this was actually done is known only to the authors, but I offer it as a hypothesis that might explain the apparently widespread and one-directional misclassifications of skeptic papers. Mere sloppy analysis should have resulted in a random pattern of misclassifications."
"...three categories of articles have been published: review articles up to 10 000 words, original articles of 2500–5000 words and brief communications of 1000–2000 words. Only the first two categories were subject to peer review and brief communications were being published without this quality check." - Health Information and Libraries Journal
"Because of trends in submissions, Nature's Brief Communications will bow out at the end of the year. [...] False rumours that the section was not peer reviewed have occasionally circulated." - Nature
"Analyses like these by people who don't know the field are useless. A good example is Naomi Oreskes work." - Tom Wigley, Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)He then attempts to smear skeptics as "global warming deniers". This is a dishonest ad hominem as skeptics believe there has been a global temperature increase of a fraction of a degree since the end of the little ice age.
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| The Argus-Press, January 26, 1970 |