Originally posted by GK4Herd:
Skeptical Science conducted a survey of over 12,000 peer reviewed abstracts submitted from 1991 to 2011 and discovered that 97% of the abstracts held the view that man had culpability in global warming. If you know anything about the peer review process is that it is exceedingly stringent. To come up with a consensus of 97% is a statistic that is just too overwhelming to be ignored as the natural tendencies for a community to align for ANY reason.
From my vantage point this has to be taken seriously. And from my vantage point, those who don't take it seriously in spite of the overwhelming consensus do so because they are protecting their ideological beliefs. The alignment down the party line makes it hard to believe differently.
GK, you know I respect you and admire you for many things, esp. your love and passion for science but you may want to take a step or two back away from the Skeptical Science survey and what THEY say the survey says. What you have stated above (in bold) is NOT what Skeptical Science really said about its "survey" (and yet have been very slow to correct the misinterpretations of what the survey represents).
In its own abstract, SS says that 97% of the abstracts THAT hold a view of AGW agree on the cause. However, only 32% of the 12,000 "abstracts" surveyed actually HOLD such a view, so 97% of approximately 4000 (abstracts) is the aggregate number (about 3725 abstracts out of 12,000, or 31% of the abstracts reviewed). That is hardly a consensus (not even sure it would qualify as a plurality). In addition, SS (and fellow-thinkers) have let the 97% of 12000 abstracts reviewed number float in the ether without self-correction or quantification. Moreover, as Prof. Tol (at the Guardian editorial link below) makes note, science has been wrong many times when consensus suggested the wrong result. As I have pointed out several times, as but one example, scientist Alfred Wegener proposed the continental drift (pangaea) theory, which was widely ridiculed and dismissed as nonsense because the consensus was the earth was permanently fixed. 20 years after Wegener's death and the "science" finally came around to his theory.
Moreover, there are several professors that had their publications characterized as favorable to AGW that have publicly stated that such categorization was a mischaracterization of their work (whether that was intentional or a manifestation of the word-search/cursory review of the abstract alone is not entirely clear). Although it is notable that innocent errors (or ones inherent in a flawed methodology) should result in errors in both directions (over and under - inclusiveness), yet, the reported errors with Cook et al.'s methodology is one of over-inclusiveness that favors SS's overarching position. One professor that has taken SS to task, Richard Tol of Sussex Univ., published an article in rebuttal (
here) that calls not only the SS's "survey" into question but also the IPCC structural issues. The Guardian editorial is well worth the read.
Finally, also important are the criticisms of the methodology used (which was term-searching of the abstract only followed by a rather cursory review by non-expert searchers). In the legal world, because much of litigation discovery is now electronic (because of e-mail and electronically saved files), the courts are moving away from word/term-searching models because they are highly inefficient and ineffective, usually yielding significant percentages of over-inclusive and repetitive information and omission of critical information, and instead have went toward predicative coding and other similar processes. Insofar as a review of academic articles (and not solely the abstract) has value for such an endeavor, getting out of the word-searching arena and into predicative coding would prove somewhat useful.
