National Review recently published an article by Oren Cass that misrepresents a 2016 paper on the scientific consensus on climate change, written by coauthors of 7 leading consensus studies and members of the Skeptical Science team (coauthors include Naomi Oreskes, Peter Doran, William Anderegg, Bart Verheggen & Stuart Carlton). I asked National Review for a right-of-reply and to their credit, they agreed. Here is my reply to Oren Cass: How to Recognize ‘Science Denial’.
National Review also published a reply-to-my-reply from Oren Cass: John Cook’s Leap of Faith. Unfortunately, Cass justifies his use of the fake expert strategy because, well, Bernie Sanders. He also misrepresents Gavin Schmidt and the IPCC, attempting to argue that I am an outlier compared to them
Interestingly, this is the same strategy that Richard Tol once tried in arguing our 97% was an outlier compared to other consensus studies, which led to my co-authoring the 2016 consensus-on-consensus study with other consensus researchers (which was the paper that Cass misrepresents, everything is coming full circle). The position of the IPCC, Gavin Schmidt and myself are in perfect agreement: our best estimate of human contribution to global warming is 100% with the lowest bound being around 50%.
Anyway, I also recorded an Evidence Squared podcast with Peter Jacobs, where we critique the original National Review article. We discuss the techniques of climate science denial, focusing on the technique of fake experts that Cass uses to cast doubt on expert agreement.
Follow Evidence Squared on Facebook, Twitter and Soundcloud.
Posted by John Cook on Monday, 15 May, 2017
 |
The Skeptical Science website by Skeptical Science is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. |