“97% Climate Consensus” Is A Fantasy
I know; it's been 99.9% for a few years. I've been waiting all day to post this.
WUWT shows that 99.9% of recent papers don't dispute mainstream climate science
Sou | 12:52 AM
Scientists will be surprised to find their papers featured on a list that claims they are science deniers. They won't be surprised to find that the list is being circulated by disinformer Anthony Watts and a rabid denier, Pierre Gosselin (archived here and here and here).
Pierre is the same person who, eight years ago in 2008, predicted that by 2020 the surface temperature would have dropped by 2.5 °C. That prediction isn't looking too hot right now. It would have to drop by 2.83 °C from 2015.
Figure 4 | Global mean surface temperature (blue) and Pierre Gosselin's 2008 prediction (red). Data sources: GISS NASA and WUWT
Pierre is as woeful at understanding science papers as he is at predicting global surface temperature.
Anthony Watts is the same. He wouldn't understand a scientific paper if he had a year to digest it. That's not his job. Anthony linked to a list of supposed denier papers on Pierre Gosselin's blog and wrote:
Kenneth Richard has compiled a list of 770 papers published since January 1, 2014 that contradict the IPCC consensus statement, see here.This includes 240 papers published during the first half of 2016, as shown here.The list of papers includes 43 on solar influences, 27 on natural ocean oscillation, 2 on Rossby waves, 3 on ozone, 6 on the small effect of CO2, 11 on natural variability, 11 on clouds and aerosols, 3 on CO2 stratospheric cooling, 15 on past climates, 4 on settled science, 19 on Climate Model Unreliability, 2 on urban warming, 6 on volcanic forcing, 2 on warming oceans, 7 on miscellaneous topics, 2 on forest fires, 2 on cold vs heat deaths, 6 on climate policy, 7 on extreme weather, 20 on polar ice, 9 on sea level rise, 12 on ocean acidification, 2 on hurricanes, 4 on droughts, 3 on natural climate catastrophe, 7 on greening and crop yields and 1 on low climate sensitivity.Notice there are only six papers in the list that supposedly are about "the small effect of CO2" and only one on "low climate sensitivity". Not even the "no effect of CO2". By my generous reckoning, that means that 99.1% of the papers do not support the fake sceptics' position, which is 2.1% higher than 97% :) Note also that he's included three papers on stratospheric cooling, which is an indicator of global warming.
I haven't looked at every one of the papers Pierre has on his blog. Many of the included papers are about solar activity and many others are about paleo-climatology, so don't cover greenhouse warming or the modern period, except in passing.
The first six of the 2016 papers classified as Solar Influence on Climate are about the sun, and do not appear to be based in climate science denial. The next one is in The Cryosphere and the title shows what it's about: The darkening of the Greenland ice sheet: trends, drivers, and projections (1981–2100). On the first page, the authors wrote:
Albedo projections through to the end of the century under different warming scenarios consistently point to continued darkening, with albedo anomalies averaged over the whole ice sheet lower by 0.08 in 2100 than in 2000, driven solely by a warming climate. Future darkening is likely underestimated because of known underestimates in modelled melting (as seen in hindcasts) and because the model albedo scheme does not currently include the effects of LAI [light-absorbing impurities], which have a positive feedback on albedo decline through increased melting, grain growth, and darkening. And toward the end they wrote how melting is going to increase over coming decades:
The drivers we identified to be responsible for the observed darkening are related to endogenous processes rather than exogenous ones and are strongly driven by melting. Because melting is projected to increase over the next decades, it is crucial to assess our capability of studying, quantifying, and projecting these processes as they will inevitably impact, and be impacted by, future scenarios.
The next two seem to have been confined to research on the sun and didn't appear to reject AGW. The one after that was a paper in Climate of the Past. It's also about Greenland and is based on analysis of ice cores. That paper is interesting in that it discusses the likely reasons for the temperature fluctuations in northern Greenland. It has nothing to suggest that the authors dispute mainstream climate science or AGW.
In the first paragraph of the next paper the author, Andrea Jo Miller Hanna, wrote:
The ongoing, rapid environmental changes recently observed in the Arctic highlight the need for high-resolution records of pre-industrial climate change in this climatically sensitive region; such records are fundamental for understanding recent anthropogenic changes in the context of natural variability.
The next one was a denier paper in the style of David "funny sunny" Archibald (and cited his "work"). It was published in one of the many suspect "journals". This one boasts about the fact that it's not a proper journal:
All manuscripts are peer reviewed and reviewing process will be completed within two weeks. The manuscripts will be published online shortly after acceptance.Oh yeah!
I skipped over a lot of papers and took a look at what was classified as "Natural Oceanic/Atmospheric Oscillation Influence on Climate". The first one was a paleo paper by Michael Griffiths and co, in Nature Communications, which I wrote about last month. The authors would be most bemused at being labeled science deniers by WUWT and co.
The next one was also a paleo paper in which the authors, Johan Faust and co. wrote:
Long-term NAO records are crucial to better understand its response to climate forcing factors, and assess predictability and shifts associated with ongoing climate change. This is what WUWT calls deniers? Huh!
The next one was also a paleo paper. The one after that was about the multiscale evolution of temperature variability in the arid region of Northwest China (ARNC) from 1901 to 2013. In that entry the deniers even quote the authors, Chen et al., writing:
Our findings deepen the understanding of the temperature changes all over the ARNC in the context of global warming.
Deniers really are desperate. This is as bad as PopTech's list of so-called denier papers.
In this cursory examination I only found one paper that could properly be called a denier paper and that wasn't published in a proper journal. Even if one allowed nonsense journals, one out of 770 would raise the 97% to 99.87%. If not allowed, the entries on this so-called denier list could well show 100% consensus that humans are causing global warming :D
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