oreskes
gregladen | August 31, 2017Three statisticians go hunting for rabbit. They see a rabbit. The first statistician fires and misses, her bullet striking the ground below the beast. The second statistician fires and misses, their bullet striking a branch above the lagomorph. The third statistician, a lazy frequentist, says, "We got it!"
OK, that joke was not 1/5th as funny as any of XKCD's excellent jabs at the frequentist-bayesian debate, but hopefully this will warm you up for a somewhat technical discussion on how to decide if observations about the weather are at all explainable with reference to climate change.
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stoat | November 14, 2010 People have been trying to make me read Merchants of Doot for some time, but I still haven't (go on, someone, send me a copy for Christmas, me c/o CSR St Johns House will reach me :-). But TWD (in the midst of "turning serious") has a post on a particular tobacco-industry document apparently inspired by the GCC. Anyway, what *I* wanted to pick out(in some sort of law of conservation of silliness effect) was not the substance (off you go to WTD for that) but the wonderful terminology: see the doc, its page 17 for some wonderful acronyms, like Gongo and Bongo (Business-Orientated NGO, if you…
stoat | August 25, 2010Back in 2008, I examined the Oreskes vs Nierenberg affair and concluded that Nicolas Nierenberg was correct and Oreskes was wrong. And then NN capped that by actually writing stuff up into a paper, published in July of this year: Early Climate Change Consensus at the National Academy: The Origins and Making of Changing Climate.
And (I missed this at the time I think), Nature published a letter from Nierenberg, Tschinkel & Tschinkel, titled "An independent thinker, willing to say what he thought":
We object to the inaccurate and misleading characterization of William Nierenberg by Naomi…
illconsidered | March 25, 2006This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
Objection:
Sure, Oreskes found no one bucking the consensus, but her paper was overturned by Benny Peiser who did the exact same study and found very different results.
Answer:
True, Benny Peiser did attempt a similar study and submitted it as a letter to Science responding to the Oreske study. But for very good reasons, it was not published.
Peiser claimed to find 34 articles that fell into his "reject or doubt the consensus view" category. This is…