While scientists seem to be well-settled on the anthropogenic (human caused) certainties of climate change, wide-spread skepticism still exists among the public regarding the issue. John Cook, most-known for his study that argues 97.1% of published research reports support the belief in human-caused climate change, recently made himself available to Reddit’s scientific community for an Ask Me Anything session.
In the discussion, he answered questions regarding climate change, its deniers, and addressed some accusations regarding his initial study’s methodologies.
Political ideology is, of course, a major factor in the deniers’ bias, and he believes the main way to combat this is “to inoculate the public against… misinformation.” Perhaps this recent This American Life could help. (Episode: The Incredible Rarity of Changing your Mind.) In the reddit discussion, Cook often refers readers and question-askers to YouTube videos: mini-lectures (5-7 minutes) that cover issues such as “[what’s] driving the denial of climate change?”, “the 5 characteristics of science denial”, and others, that he also uses in his recently-begun MOOC, presumably.
In response to allegations that his data had been manipulated to match his conclusion, Cook invites anyone and everyone to visit an interactive webpage so people can replicate the study. In the study he and his worker-scientists analyzed the abstracts of some 12,000 scientific papers addressing climate change, and garnered some sort of consensus on each trial’s stance on the issue.
In response, professor Richard SJ Tol (blog) set out to analyze Cook’s research and found faults with its methods. One problem, Tol noted, was that Cook including too small of a sample size. While a search for “global climate change” landed some 10,000 responses, when Tol amended the search to “climate change”, the potential sample size was increased to over 50,000 papers. Some of the main contributors to the climate change discussion were also left out of the study. Another problem Tol noted was that the reviewers did not seem to have enough time to amply assess that many abstracts. While half of the twenty-four participants in the study analyzed some fifty abstracts each, the remaining twelve reviewed 1922 each (which sounds like an impossible feat.)
All of this is not to say that Tol disagrees with the overall scope of the paper, but that he finds faults with its methods. Tol concludes his paper as follows:
The conclusions of Cook et al. are thus unfounded. There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct. Cook et al., however, failed to demonstrate this. Instead, they gave further cause to those who believe that climate researchers are secretive (as data were held back) and incompetent (as the analysis is flawed). It will take decades or longer to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero—the only way to stabilize its atmospheric concentration. During that time, electoral fortunes will turn. Climate policy will not succeed unless it has broad societal support, at levels comparable to other public policies such as universal education or old-age support. Well-publicized but faulty analyses like the one by Cook et al. only help to further polarize the climate debate.
Cook’s team responded to Tol’s study, in the same issue of Energy Policy and concluded that “Running the same tests using appropriate consensus statistics shows no evidence of inconsistency. We confirm that the consensus is robust at 97±1%.” So while some minor inconsistencies in data may be possible, they do not damage the report’s initial findings.
Cook is aware of how difficult it is to change someone’s mind about climate change, and explains in his reddit discussion that the opposition need only drum up “an incoherent soup of noise that nevertheless is effective in confusing the public and delaying support for action…” It seems, then, that any attack on Cook’s methods, could potentially backfire from the overall goal of gaining support for an issue which seems to only be receding from public discussion.
I’m curious, in the coming presidential election (2016 isn’t that far away…), if climate change will be an issue as it was during Obama’s first presidential campaign, and if it is, I’m curious if it will as soon afterwards slip away from public consciousness.
The Burgeoning Scientist 