Via UpWorthy: ORIGINAL: By Dr. James Lawrence Powell, author of The Inquisition of Climate Science.
I can’t make that URL in the chart work — the original article at DeSmogBlog is here.
Climate change denial or global warming denial is much like creationism — it lacks a scientific basis. Dr. Powell wrote:
Global warming deniers often claim that bias prevents them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. But 24 articles in 18 different journals, collectively making several different arguments against global warming, expose that claim as false. Articles rejecting global warming can be published, but those that have been have earned little support or notice, even from other deniers.
A few deniers have become well known from newspaper interviews, Congressional hearings, conferences of climate change critics, books, lectures, websites and the like. Their names are conspicuously rare among the authors of the rejecting articles. Like those authors, the prominent deniers must have no evidence that falsifies global warming.
Anyone can repeat this search and post their findings. Another reviewer would likely have slightly different standards than mine and get a different number of rejecting articles. But no one will be able to reach a different conclusion, for only one conclusion is possible: Within science, global warming denial has virtually no influence. Its influence is instead on a misguided media, politicians all-too-willing to deny science for their own gain, and a gullible public.
Scientists do not disagree about human-caused global warming. It is the ruling paradigm of climate science, in the same way that plate tectonics is the ruling paradigm of geology. We know that continents move. We know that the earth is warming and that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause. These are known facts about which virtually all publishing scientists agree.
DesmogblogRelated articles
- Flatly wrong global warming denial | Bad Astronomy (blogs.discovermagazine.com)
- Global Warming To Cause A New Ice Age (stevengoddard.wordpress.com) (This is a mostly parody site; satires are poorly labeled, however, as are solid reports.)
- The overlap of creationism and global-warming denialism (pekintimes.com)
- Surprise, Climate Change Denier Appointed To Head House Science Committee (wonkette.com)
- Jim Powell – Why Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility – In One Pie Chart (prn.fm)
- Koch Brothers Produce Counterfeit Climate Report to Deceive Congress (desmogblog.com)
- New Report: ‘Extreme Weather Report 2012’: ‘Latest peer-reviewed studies, data & analyses undermine claims that current weather is ‘unprecedented’ or a ‘new normal’ (climatedepot.com)
- Bill O’Reilly watching climate change denier moved to tears by polar melting documentary (boingboing.net)
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
I’m sure the climate change denialists are correct. After all, it’s not like there’s a profit-motive of extravagant proportions on their end.
The real cash cow is on the left of this issue. University professors, non-profits and independent scientists not on the corporate dole are living like kings and queens while the impoverished CEOs, staff “scientists” and major stakeholders in Exxon-Mobil, BP and Massey Energy are barely scraping by.
I’m quite worried about them. It might be time for a telethon.
Jim
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Completely and totally. To the claim that politics prevents contrary views from getting into print, we show that the contrary views are in print.
This is very straightforward, Morgan. Denialists can’t claim something doesn’t happen, when it does.
No. The fact that there are ONLY 24 such studies, and the fact that these 24 are refuted by dozens of others. Science, not majority rule.
It’s the 13,950 other studies, which measure warming, explain and analyze warming’s effects and future effects and human causation, that provide the rebuttal and refutation, not just the number.
It’s the old Einstein observation. The Nazis published a collection of essays, “100 scientists against Einstein.” Einstein said, “Why a hundred? If I were wrong, it would take only one.”
And so it is with warming and all climate change. One good study could refute the hypothesis.
There is no such study.
Some of the 24 reports may indeed be quality research, but so limited in scope that it doesn’t matter. A study that argues 2000 was cooler than 1998, for example, may be correct. It doesn’t refute warming, though. A study that says warming causes more evaporation from the oceans, which causes more clouds, could be solid, too. But it doesn’t refute warming. (The clouds are too short-lived, generally; in any case, the more resulting clouds have not slowed the warming as indicated by a million measurements.)
Here’s where the number of studies is important: It shows the trends of findings. The trends are against denialists.
Real science doesn’t argue bias. That’s bogus science. You remember Robert Park’s “7 Warning Signs of Bogus Science,” right? [Whole essay at the second link.] Park wrote:
That there is such a paltry percentage of published reports contrary to warming is a clear indicator in science that the science going that way is bad. Contrast it with the number of papers on Steady State prior to Wilson and Penzias’s confirmation of Big Bang. Until that proof of Big Bang, and refutation of Steady State, scientists didn’t know which one was more accurate — both accounted for the observations made, and both had some success predicting future observations. But only Big Bang and Ralph Alpher and George Gamow predicted the echo, and when it was discovered, exactly where Alpher and Gamow said it would be, and at exactly the frequency they predicted, even Fred Hoyle conceded pretty much.
Hoyle didn’t ask Congress to cut funding to Big Bang research. Hoyle didn’t ask any corporation to fund a propaganda campaign against Big Bang. Hoyle didn’t claim that politics got Wilson’s and Penzias’s papers published, and got them the Nobel Prize in Physics. Hoyle didn’t claim pro-Bangers were cutting his funding. Hoyle moved on to other areas of research.
Contrast that to the warming denialists:
1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media: Marshall Foundation, Anthony Watts, Heartland Institute and others have massive public relations budgets, do little or no research, publish no research articles as a consequence of doing the research, but send Mad Man Monckton on tours of Australia to wow the little old ladies with blue hair and to make entertaining insults.
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work: Hello? Morgan? This is you, now.
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection: We’re supposed to be seeing cooling for every year after 1998, according to denialists — instead we got the hottest decade in history, no cooling at all.
4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal: Every time it snows, warming denialists claim the snow refutes warming.
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries: “The Earth has warmed since the dinosaurs . . .”
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation: And in this case, in organized fashion the denialists not only work in semi-isolation, they mount massive, expensive public relations campaigns against real scientists collaborating through the IPCC.
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation: “All the planets are warming.” CO2 may have been a greenhouse gas in the past, but no longer.” “CO2 isn’t a pollutant now — it’s a fertilizer!” Et cetera.
Denialism rests on bogus science, no real science.
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So, the fact that these 24 reports were published, puts the kibosh on the claim that research from the skeptic cannot be published. And the fact that these 24 reports are so badly outnumbered, “proves” that those 24 must be wrong.
Do you have a single good reason to offer why it cannot be turned around? In other words, the fact that the 24 reports were published, proves either that there is some quality research out there putting legitimate doubt on the climate change dogma, or that publication is not a meaningful litmus test for us to be applying. Perhaps both are true. But it definitely has to be one or the other, it seems that’s been proven 24 times here.
And, conversely, the fact that the 24 are so badly outnumbered, soundly supports what the skeptics have been saying all along, that the institutions hiding behind this glittery “peer review” cliche are strongly motivated toward a certain pre-established “scientific” outcome, and therefore biased.
James, what is this “hissy fit” of which you speak? Projection much?
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Before Morgan has a hissy fit, Kirien is me. I had posted something on another blog that uses the same blogging system as this one and I used the name “Kirien” to have a bit more
anonymity there then here.
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So tell me, Morgan.
If 99 doctors said you had cancer and 1 doctor said you didn’t.
You’d believe the 1 that said you didn’t have cancer?
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The report is that the science is overwhelming all rational skepticism, and that global warming occurs.
Morgan concludes instead, “Peer review doesn’t work.” Nothing like getting a wrong question that was not asked from a study.
That’s a key problem with all warming skeptics.
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Read what is written: Denialists claim they can’t get published, but if we look, we find denialist papers ARE published (as with creationism — sometimes every scholarly paper produced in a certain period gets published). So there is no bias that can be found.
You know that, Morgan. You can’t find papers from scientists, which deny global warming based on solid research, which are not published, at least not more than a tiny handful (more than the 24 published papers noted here?). There are not enough rejection slips to back any claim of bias, and enough published papers to totally refute it.
So, what the journals say is scientifically accurate and fair.
On the other side, despite those denial papers, the vast, vast, almost complete body of papers on the subject, point out that climate change occurs.
But there are lot of loudmouths, like Watts and Monckton, the pseudonymous JoAnn Nova, and James Inhofe, who are dead wrong in their loud denials of warming. Most of those do no research at all (e.g., Monckton). Those who do even a modicum of research and bother to write it up are a tiny number (there is almost nothing done that has offered any toehold for a critique of warming). Watts suffered the embarrassment of collaborating on a paper this year that concluded Watts’s position was wrong, that warming is occurring.
From that you conclude peer review research is worthless? Okay, then take the consensus of scientists: 14,000 specialists say warming occurs, 24 think there is doubt. Majority rule?
It doesn’t matter how reasonable people slice it: Global warming occurs, humans cause a lot of it, humans could slow or stop it, the fix is politically difficult because of denialist roadblocks, but eminently doable.
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Global warming deniers often claim that bias prevents them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. But 24 articles in 18 different journals, collectively making several different arguments against global warming, expose that claim as false. Articles rejecting global warming can be published, but those that have been have earned little support or notice, even from other deniers.
A few deniers have become well known from newspaper interviews, Congressional hearings, conferences of climate change critics, books, lectures, websites and the like. Their names are conspicuously rare among the authors of the rejecting articles. Like those authors, the prominent deniers must have no evidence that falsifies global warming.
Oh…so…when something is published in a peer-reviewed journal, it doesn’t mean that much after all? Huh. Okay then if that’s the case, why is there any meaning at all affixed to peer review?
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