"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former" - Albert Einstein
If Cities 92.9 practiced truth in advertising, their promos for The Morning Rush with Robert Rees would have to include stupidity and misinformation as two of their primary features, rather than just "news and talk".
Case in point is the consensus view among climate scientists regarding climate change.
Based on extensive reading, I take the position that among climate scientists who are actively engaged in studying the climate and publishing their results in peer reviewed scientific journals, the consensus viewpoint is near unanimous that the earth is warming, and that warming is mostly due to human activities. So about a month ago, I was a bit surprised to hear Robert Rees make the following claim on his morning show:
ROBERT REES: "The left calls Republicans, or basically anybody who believes that global warming - if it exists - is not man-made, then they call them a science denier, even though the science is pretty much split on that issue, and more and more people are coming on the side of, yeah, ok, maybe man isn't creating global warming. Even though more scientists are going that way more and more, and the science is split on it, you're a science denier."
After hearing this comment, I immediately sent the following text message to the show:
The science isn't split. Among published climate scientists, 97% agree that global warming is mostly due to human activities which include the burning of fossil fuels and land-use changes. 97% isn't a split, it's a landslide.
I regularly send text messages to the show, and Robert always reads and responds to them immediately, except in this instance. For this text, the response came about 30 or so minutes later, which was after I had left for work and was no longer listening. I finally caught the response later in the week from the podcast for that particular day:
ROBERT REES: "And you my dear sir are reading very old outdated data. That study came out a long time ago and has been more than once debunked. That study that you're referring to is a study from a University of Illinois professor where he says uh, 97% of climate scientists say that global warming is man-made."
The reason Robert didn't respond immediately was now obvious, he wanted to first look into the matter before responding, which is fine, but his response raises two questions:
1. Does the 97% claim come from a single study, as claimed by Robert?
2. Has this study been thoroughly debunked, as claimed by Robert?
The short answer to both questions is
no.
It turns out that Robert is the one using bad data, and as you'll see later in this essay, the bad information appears to be coming from a well known misinformation outlet known as the Heartland Institute.
To address the first claim - that the 97% number comes from a single study - let's take a look at some of the history of scientific attempts to quantify the scientific consensus on climate change:
Oreskes, 2004
In 2004,
Naomi Oreskes published a paper in the peer reviewed science journal Science which was titled
The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. In the paper, Oreskes explains that a search of the ISI database for scientific papers published between 1993 and 2003 using the keywords "global climate change" returned 928 scientific papers. The paper itself lists only climate and change as the search keywords, but this was an error at the time the paper went to print and has been corrected after the fact. From the paper:
"The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."
So, in 2004, the Oreskes study looked back over a decade of climate science, and did not find any significant disagreement with the consensus view point that humans are significantly affecting climate change.
Doran et al., 2009
In 2009, Peter T. Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman of the University of Illinois at Chicago published a paper called
Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change which describes the results of a survey sent to 10,257 earth scientists asking the following two questions;
1. When compare with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
This is the study that Robert Rees referred to while responding to my text message, and now speaks of regularly on his show. First I'll let the authors describe their study, then I'll present the explanation the Heartland Institute supplied to Robert.
First, regarding the number of responses.
"With 3,146 individuals completing the survey, the participant response rate for the survey was 30.7%. This is a typical response rate for web-based surveys [Cook et al., 2000; Kaplowitz et al., 2004]."
Next, regarding how the respondents were categorized based on areas of research.
"With survey participants asked to select a single category, the most common area of expertise reported were geochemistry (15.5%), geophysics (12%), and oceanography (10.5%). General geology , hydrology/hydrogeology, and paleontology each accounted for 5-7% of the respondents. Approximately 5% of the respondents were climate scientists, and 8.5% of the respondents indicated that more than 50% of their peer-reviewed publications in the last 5 years have been on the subject of climate change. While respondents names are kept private, the authors noted that the survey included participants with well-documented dissenting opinions on global warming theory."
And finally, the study's conclusions.
"Results show that overall 90% of participants answered "risen" to question 1 and 82% answered yes to question 2. In general, as the level of active research and specialization in climate science increases, so does agreement with the two primary questions (figure 1). In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered "risen" to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2."
And now, behold the description of the study that Robert Rees read to his listening audience. This is exactly the type of description one would expect from the weapons grade misinformers at the Heartland Institute. I'll address the spin and the falsehoods as they present themselves.
ROBERT REES: "Here's the thing, and this comes from the Heartland Institute, he says a graduate student asked the following questions to 10,000 earth scientists working for universities and government research agencies. So, ten plus thousand earth scientists were asked these questions: 1) When compared with pre-1800 levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant? Question 2) Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures? They only received responses from 3,000 individuals which is only 5% of self identified climate scientists. So they sent out the question to 10,000. Only got responses from 3,000."
Notice the attempt at downplaying the number of respondents, even though according to the study, it falls within the range of what is expected for these types of surveys.
ROBERT REES: "But, to get to the magic 97% in the affirmation of both questions, you know, saying yes to both questions, the study's authors had to whittle down the survey to 79 climate scientists. Those are individuals who published more than 50% of their recent peer reviewed papers on the subject of climate change. So, [laughing] they took out of 10,000 earth scientists who worked for universities and government research agencies, they whittled down their questionnaire down to 79 individuals. That's how you get 97%."
The survey wasn't whittled down to just 79 scientists, as anyone can plainly see by following the link I provided to the actual paper. All respondents are accounted for in the results, but are categorized by level of climate science expertise. The 79 individuals that reflect the 97% number are those who were categorized as both climatologists, and active publishers of climate science. In other words, those with the highest level of expertise. It wouldn't make sense to include earth scientists who don't study climate along with earth scientists who do when considering the consensus view, as those who don't study climate are not considered climate experts. When I want an opinion on a technical subject, I'll take that of an expert over a non-expert every single time.
ROBERT REES: "In fact, this study that showed the 97%, when you look at the entire study, it shows that out of the people that responded, which was once again only 30% of the individuals who responded, 3,000 out of 10,000 that responded. Out of those 3,000, 66% of those guys who responded, or gals, actually had papers that said man-made global warming was not, or man's involvement was not the cause of global warming. So actually, the science isn't split, you're right, most of them actually say it's not man-made global warming, according to the same study that you're citing."
This is the point where I facepalm so hard that I nearly knock myself from my chair. Nowhere in the study does it say that 66% of the respondents published papers showing that man is not the cause of global warming. I don't know if the Heartland Institute provided Robert with this phony statistic, or if he simply pulled it from his bottom end, but that number makes no sense in light of the fact that 82% of all the respondents agreed that humans are significantly contributing to global warming. With that being the case, how could one explain that 66% also published papers showing that humans are not contributing? It simply defies basic logic. This facepalm is definitely going to leave a mark.
ROBERT REES: "When you whittle it down to 79 particular individuals, yep, 97% of them said it's man-made global warming. I didn't want to talk about that but when I saw the text I was like, oh give me a break. Using way old outdated data, data that was skewed in the first place."
2009 wasn't that long ago, and obviously the only one skewing the numbers is Robert Rees; science denier, and statistics manufacturer extraordinaire.
For more entertainment, and facepalming, here's Robert talking again more recently about this same study:
ROBERT REES: "Oh, the science is settled, really? According to one study the science is settled? 97% of scientists agree? Once again, that study was sent out to thousands and thousands of climate scientists, and they narrowed down the results to like 70. Oh, we don't like all these thousands of people's other answers, we're gonna take these 70 people's answer and finish out the study, and say the science is settled."
This statement completely misrepresents the Doran study. The study was sent out to
earth scientists, of which a small percentage were actual
climate scientists. Overall, 82% of those who responded agreed that humans are significantly contributing to climate change, and of those respondents who are actively publishing climate scientists, 97% agreed that humans are significantly contributing to climate change. Either way you look at it, even if you ignore the 79 climate scientists in the sample, earth scientists as a whole, according to the study, overwhelmingly agree that humans are significantly contributing to climate change.
So once again, in 2009, we have a study that finds a strong consensus view among earth scientists, and like the Oreskes study, an even stronger consensus among actual climate scientists.
Anderegg et al., 2010
In 2010, a study titled
Expert Credibility in Climate Change was published by the National Academy of Sciences, a prestigious organization begun in 1863 by then president Abraham Lincoln. I'll let the abstract speak for itself:
"Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that 97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in their field support the tenets of Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of convinced researchers."
So, despite Robert's claim to the contrary, three studies, and no indication whatsoever of a split in the science. And the Anderegg study actually corroborates the Doran study's 97% number. So much for Robert's claim that the Doran study was debunked.
Cook et al., 2013
Just last year, a consensus study titled
Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature was published in the peer reviewed scientific literature. Like the Oreskes study, it looked at published climate research over a period of time. Whereas the Oreskes study looked at a decade of research, the Cook study looked back over two decades (1991-2011). Cook and his team identified 11,944 papers related to "global climate change" or "global warming" over the 20 year period. They then reviewed those papers and categorized them as to whether they endorsed human caused global warming, were neutral, rejected it, or stated that they were uncertain. They also contacted the authors to allow them to rate their own papers, so as to reduce the possibility of falsely attributing an incorrect viewpoint to a paper. What they found was that of those papers that did in fact take a position on the cause of climate change, 97.2% endorsed the view that humans are significantly contributing to climate change.
So again, contrary to the viewpoint expressed by the Heartland Institute via Robert Rees, here is yet another study that corroborates the results of other studies, thus demonstrating a strong consensus view on the part of publishing climate scientists that humans are a major contributor to climate change.
What should be obvious to anyone reading this far, is that Robert's claim that the 97% consensus number is derived from a single study is false. As I've shown throughout this essay, there are multiple studies that have been undertaken in an attempt to quantify the scientific consensus on climate change.
What should also be obvious is that Robert's claim that the Doran study has been debunked is also false. Independent studies that converge upon very similar results, despite using completely different research methods, provide a compelling reason to accept that those studies - each of them - is an accurate reflection of reality.
As a final thought, take a look at how Cities 92.9 chose to describe the segment in which Robert made his false claims about the scientific consensus:
"
Studies are showing that scientists don't believe climate change is man-made, and yet that's not what is reported."
That's not what gets reported for a very simple reason; it isn't true. But that doesn't stop Cities 92.9 from reporting it.
The misinformation that comes out of this station on any given broadcast day is absolutely staggering.
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