Global Warming: I doubt it, so should you

The following is all a quotation from: "The Myth of the 98% By Joseph L. Bast Last updated: May 1, 2012" ...... "Why Alarmists Publish More Anderegg et al.’s assertion that “he who publishes the most must be the most credible” is implausible. There are at least four reasons why skeptics appear in print less frequently than do alarmists, and none of them has to do with credibility or expertise. They are: Publication bias. Articles that “find something” – such as a statistically significant correlation that might imply causation – are much more likely to get published than those that do not. Such “findings” are newsworthy and important to other researchers, while experiments that do not “find something” are less so. Even though falsifying hypotheses with experimental data is the essence of true science, it is the experiment that seems to generate or support a hypothesis that gets all the attention and is most likely to be published, even if that experiment had a small sample size, limited duration, or other defects that increased the odds of a false positive finding. Publication bias is also caused by heavy government funding of the search for one result, but little or no funding for other results. In the case of climate change, hundreds of millions of dollars in government grants have gone to scholars who say they are trying to find a discernible human impact on climate, or of climate change on plants, animals, fish, human health, or a litany of other things. Much less funding is available to scholars who say they are seeking to find natural causes for climate change, or explanations of natural phenomena that don’t involve climate change. Publication bias helps explain why most published research findings are false, not only in climate science but in all disciplines. Thousands of researchers are being paid to “find something,” and they publish whenever they think they might have found something, no matter how slim the evidence. We seldom read that other scholars have tried and failed to replicate their findings, but it happens all the time. Resumé padding. Climate scientist Phil Jones, before the Climategate scandal revealed that he was hiding data and illegally blocking FOIA requests, was identified as a coauthor on articles appearing in science journals an average of once a week, an astounding pace if the findings he was reporting were being carefully vetted. (As reported by Fred Pearce in The Climate Files). His data are still being cited in footnotes for scores of other published articles every week or month. This extraordinary productivity is a function of several things, but one is the practice of having large numbers of coauthors on scientific papers, so that a dozen or even two dozen writers get to list the paper in their resumé. This makes objective peer review difficult or impossible, helping to ensure publication. This practice became pervasive in climate research only in the past decade, and it is entirely a phenomenon of alarmist scientists. Most skeptics continue to publish alone or with only a few coauthors. Age and academic status. Climate scientists who are skeptics tend to be older, and more are emeritus, than scientists in the alarmist camp. This could be the result of two things: Either they are willing to speak out because they either have tenure or are retired and do not fear retaliation for taking an unpopular stance, or they are less impressed by the current fixation on computer models. These “old school” scientists recognize that computer models’ outputs are not data but hypotheses that must be tested by data (empirical observation) – a relationship that many younger scientists, accustomed to working constantly with computers and far less with observations of the natural world, tend to get exactly backward. These older scientists also were considered respected and successful if they published once or twice a year and devoted time to classroom teaching, if they are not fully retired. Climate alarmists tend to be younger, trying to get tenure by appearing in academic journals, and more likely to team up with other scientists to appear more frequently in those journals. Alarmists also are more likely to be environmental activists, drawn to the field by their interest in environmental issues rather than by pure interest in science itself. This again makes them more likely to write and publish articles specifically on the hot topic of climate change. Editorial bias. We know from the leaked Climategate emails that a small clique of influential government scientists worked behind the scenes to get academic journal editors to reject papers that would otherwise have qualified for publication. These scientists even arranged for editors who dared to publish such papers to be fired or pressured into resigning. This is gross editorial bias and likely contributed to some of the disparity in publishing numbers between skeptics and alarmists. More subtle bias, which might not be apparent even to the editors who exercise it, probably accounts for still more of the disparity. ....... For more research and commentary on the dubious claim of a “scientific consensus” on the causes and consequences of climate change, Google “You Call This Consensus?” by this author." Environmentalism (in its current form) is the greatest threat to prosperity and liberty.