> In light of the above we can now return to our main questions: is there clear and reliable evidence that climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory factor in the onset of the country's civil war?; and, if and where yes, was it as significant a contributory factor as is claimed in the existing academic and expert literature? On each step of the claimed causal chain, our answers are no. We find that there is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor in northeast Syria's 2006/07–2008/09 drought; we find that, while the 2006/07–2008/09 drought in northeast Syria will have contributed to migration, this migration was not on the scale claimed in the existing literature, and was, in all probability, more caused by economic liberalisation than drought; and we find that there is no clear and reliable evidence that drought-related migration was a contributory factor in civil war onset. In our assessment, there is thus no good evidence to conclude that global climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory causal factor in the country's civil war.

>>consider how it applies to all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.

Maybe this is in conflict with what science should be. But it's also definitely what science is now.

We don’t vote on scientific proof. Yes evidence leads us to believe climate change is happening, but why and predicting it’s trajectory and effect should be met with scientific standards not scaremongering and “CLIMATE DENIER” hyperbole.

If the pursuit of scientific rigour and fact has taught us anything over our history it’s that skepticism and challenging the status quo is necessary and should be welcomed. In today’s climate debate it it’s nothing but derided.

Further, people are wise to be skeptical or even dismissive of climate denialist claims because there is a long history of politically motivated people making deliberately but subtly specious arguments for it. Given both the overwhelming consensus and the glut of misinformation, it makes sense to filter it with a very high bar.

The benefit of science (reproducibility, falsifiability) has been hacked by commercial interests. This isn't even in dispute (Heartland, IER, many others). Groups that dispute climate change are all funded by CO2 emitters and the results are coordinated by enormous lobbying and donation campaigns.

Flat earth proponents are not operating within a scientific framework of doubt and proof, and neither are climate change deniers.

First there’s the “almost 100%” of scientists agree argument again. Sorry, that’s not a valid argument for saying something is true!

Second. Models aren’t proof. They’re models. Yes we can measure gas quantities and determine correlations. But we haven’t scientifically proven it. We’re dealing with chaotic systems. Until we can, we need to remain skeptical and open to other ideas. That’s my point. Not that it isn’t happening.

Third. Then you bring politics into it. Oh the 1% are funded by Big Oil. Oh and the 99% aren’t funded by politically motivated players either? See point (1), scientific fact isn’t determined by who agrees with it or not. Until it’s proven, it may be unproven.

And fourth. Flat earth, again, the relationship to climate deniers...you don’t need scientists to agree the world isn’t flat. It’s proven. Scientifically. See the difference?

Thanks for eloquently providing examples to exactly what I was saying

Yes, and those measurements tell us that without a large amount of positive feedback, the effect of greenhouse gases alone is too small to worry about.

> and then correlated it to measured climate change that normalized for various known climate cycles

Nope, this has not been done. The climate models cannot reproduce the data at all with just the measured greenhouse effect of the various greenhouse gases. They have to dial in a large amount of positive feedback, and even then the only period of time for which they reproduce the data tolerably well is the latter half of the 20th century. The model outputs don't match the early 20th century warming, they don't match the mid 20th century cooling, and they don't match the early 21st century pause.

The correct, honest scientific conclusion from all of this is that the models are simply not good enough at this point, i.e., we don't understand how the climate works well enough at this point, to support multi-trillion dollar policy decisions.

The main reason global warming isn't taken more seriously is because of the way it is discussed.

I stopped reading there.

The argument relates not to climate science itself, but to the methodology on study measuring the consensus of climate scientists. It's pretty easy to follow.

The fact that he's smart doesn't change the conflict of outlooks.

What mattered was the original description of him as "an economist at ..." which effectively neuters his very public positions on things like coordinated action w.r.t. climate change. He's absolutely entitled to his beliefs, but shouldn't be cited as if "oh wow, an ECONOMIST at SANTA CLARA says this, so ..."

But of course, this has nothing to do with the subject of the blog post, which is whether Cook paper asserting that "97% agree that humans are the primary cause of global warming" is at best a misleading application of statistics.

There is no need to have a particular background in climatology to understand whether the Cook paper was methodological sound, just a background in statistics. The argument Friedman advances is quite straight-forward, and you are welcome address the argument rather than try to disqualify him as a source.

I want him acknowledged as a source with a pre-determined axe to grind. He's smart, he's clever, he's sometimes right. But he's not J. Random "Economist from Somewhere University".

My point is stating that he was an economist at a respectable university was not to disguise his bias, but to emphasize that he wasn't just some random blogger, which was apparently a barrier for some people when it came to assessing his argument.

[0]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9

edit: added missing word.

From publication and citation data, Anderegg et al. (2010) selected 908 of 1,372 climate researchers, defined as scientists who had published at least twenty climate papers and had either signed petitions opposing or supporting the IPCC’s positions or had co-authored IPCC reports. Of these, 97–98 % endorsed the standard definition that ‘‘anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for ‘most’ of the ‘unequivocal’ warming of the Earth’s average global temperature over the second half of the twentieth century’’(p. 12107). The standard definition of the consensus in Anderegg et al. (2010) is less imprecise than that of Cook et al. (2013). Yet, like Cook et al. (2013), Anderegg et al.(2010) did not seek to determine how many researchers considered this global warming to be actually or potentially damaging enough to require a climate policy.

Such surveys are often cited as demonstrating a near-unanimous scientific consensus infavor of a climate policy, when they never ask any question about whether and to what extent the anthropogenic component in recent warming might be dangerous or about whether a ‘‘climate policy’’ should be adopted in attempted mitigation of future warming. Nevertheless, Cook et al. (2013), after a subjective review of only the abstracts of 11,944 papers on climate change which ‘‘matched the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’’’ (p. 1), conclude that 97.1 % of those that expressed an opinion endorsed the hypothesis as defined in their introduction (i.e.,the standard definition). However, 66.4 % percent of the abstracts had expressed no position. Thus, 32.6 % of the entire sample, or 97.1 % of the 33.6 % who had expressed an opinion, were said to be in agreement with the standard definition. However, inspection of the authors’ own data file showed that they had themselves categorized only 64 abstracts, just 0.5 % of the sample, as endorsing the standard definition. Inspection shows only 41 of the 64 papers, or 0.3 % of the sample of 11,944 papers, actually endorsed that definition.

I had a little bit of trouble parsing that text alone, but the underlying data was easier to digest - here's the breakdown of analyzed papers by "level of endorsement of the climate consensus", from Table 1 of that same paper:

    Endorsement level                                                   Abstracts % of All Abstracts
    ------------------------------------------------------------------- --------- ------------------
    Explicit, quantified endorsement (standard definition of consensus)        64              0.54%
        Actually endorsing the standard definition upon inspection             41              0.34%
    Explicit, unquantified endorsement                                        922              7.72%
    Implicit endorsement                                                     2910             24.36%
    No Position                                                              7930             66.39%
    Expression of uncertainty                                                  40              0.33%
    Implicit rejection                                                         54              0.45%
    Explicit, unquantified rejection                                           15              0.13%
    Explicit, quantified rejection                                              9              0.08%
    Total                                                                   11944            100.00%

This doesn't strike me as a particularly strong refutation to throwaway5752's claim.

I think the implication in your reply is that it's more of the latter, but if it turns out to be more of the former, I think there needs to be a huge asterisk attached to the 97% number.

To quote Friedman in a follow-up post:

> My objection was that the 97% figure lumped together categories 1-3, when only category 1 fitted Cook's "main cause." Categories 2 and 3 were papers saying or implying that human action was a cause—"contributed to" in the language of the example. Category 1 contained 64 papers, or 1.6%, not 97%.[0]

Which does not mean that there isn't a large consensus that humans are the primary cause of global warming. What we can infer is:

1. The Cook paper is not evidence of that consensus

2. That Cook himself is perhaps not a reliable source.

[0]https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/john-cooks-respo...

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/myownPapers-d/LegatesSoon...

Which points to a 2016 study [0] refuting Tol's claim that the majority of climate scientists have not reached a consensus.

[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/04...

None of these "experts" have a track record of correct predictions that justifies taking their current predictions seriously. Remember we are not talking about the fact that the climate changes: yes, it does, it always has, and it always will (unless at some point in the distant future we learn how to control it accurately). We are talking about the dire predictions of catastrophe that have been made to try to justify spending many trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation. Those predictions have never come true.

> Epidemiologists told everyone for a decade and a half this would happen, but here we are.

To know whether these were useful predictions, we would need to know more details. Did they predict when it would happen? Did they predict how it would spread? A prediction that "this will happen, some time in the future" is not very useful. AFAIK no epidemiologists were making predictions much more precise than that.

Looking at the actual frequency of epidemics of various sizes in the past, we might very roughly estimate that we will have one serious enough to involve a significant portion of health care resources once every decade or so. But you don't have to be an epidemiologist to do that; you just have to do the simplest possible extrapolation of the data. We had H1N1 about 10 years ago, and SARS about 18 years ago. That's still not a very strong prediction, but it would seem to be as good a basis for public policy discussion (which is to say, a fairly weak one but not negligible) as anything more complicated that has come from epidemiologists.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_First_Assessment_Report

There have certainly been very dramatic (all overly well reported) warnings representing a minority of researchers which have not been accurate. These should not invalidate the whole lot of predictions.

Those minimal predictions don't justify spending trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation. They basically say "the climate is going to change, so be ready to deal with it".

Switching to low- and zero-carbon fuels, achieving greater efficiencies and so on, is expensive, but still a lot cheaper than e.g. moving coastal cities or engineering mega-projects to combat flooding, dealing with huge numbers of migrants, dealing with massive changes in agriculture, worse natural disasters, and so on.

Plus even if you deal with the effects for decades, your problem has not gone away. The situation is worse, and the planet is still heating.

Studies based on climate models that are overpredicting warming, plus economic and sociological models that have even less predictive power.

> moving coastal cities or engineering mega-projects to combat flooding

If your coastal city has a problem with sea level rising a couple of feet, your coastal city has already had a problem for a century or more, and you ignored it. How is that all of a sudden a climate emergency?

> your problem has not gone away

I've already said climate change is something we're always going to have to deal with, just as humans have had to deal with it during all of human history. The idea that we can magically stop the climate from changing ever again is ridiculous.

Models in general haven't overpredicted warming, as several people in this discussion have tried to educate you.

> If your coastal city has a problem with sea level rising a couple of feet, your coastal city has already had a problem for a century or more, and you ignored it.

I'm not at all clear what your point is here. It looks like you're arguing that because something is changing over the course of several decades it's not as much as a problem. Surely that can't be it though, because that makes no logical sense. From an economic sense it's just as expensive.

> The idea that we can magically stop the climate from changing ever again is ridiculous.

A strawman argument. That is not what I wrote.

The climate is changing faster by far than it has in all human history, and probably in the history of our planet.

Dealing with the effects is also much more difficult now compared to most of human history. When you have 7 or 8 billion people living on the planet, largely in huge cities, it's far more challenging.

It's just a lot easier and cheaper to avoid breaking something in the first place than it is to try to fix it afterwards.

Yes, they have. We're obviously not going to agree on this point.

> It looks like you're arguing that because something is changing over the course of several decades it's not as much as a problem.

No, I'm arguing that the problem is not new, and it's not a climate problem. It's a problem of misgovernment and has been around for quite a while. But that doesn't stop cities and countries to try to get the rest of us to pay for fixing it by trying to claim that it's a cimate problem.

> The climate is changing faster by far than it has in all human history, and probably in the history of our planet.

This is ludicrous. Nobody has the data to back this up, and there is plenty of data contradicting it.

> When you have 7 or 8 billion people living on the planet, largely in huge cities, it's far more challenging.

When the "problem" you're talking about is a degree of so of temperature rise and a foot or two of sea level rise over the course of a century, to call dealing with it "challenging" is an egregious misuse of language. This is simply not that big a deal compared to all the other things we humans have to deal with. And the things we will need to do anyway to deal with those far more challenging problems--like how to bring billions of people out of poverty and how to make our infrastructure more robust--will end up adapting us to the change anyway. If we're going to spend trillions of dollars on something, let's at least spend it on something that benefits everybody regardless of what happens with the climate, instead of on a huge CO2 mitigation boondoggle that will transfer a lot of money from your and my pockets to the pockets of politicians and "green" business executives, but won't actually help much of anything.

The data on this are so clear I don't really know where to start if you don't believe it. I feel your opposition on this issue is ideological, and there's no data that will change your mind.

> If we're going to spend trillions of dollars on something, let's at least spend it on something that benefits everybody

Given I think there's no arguing data with you, I'll try some arguments that might be more in line with what I guess your beliefs are.

Switching from fossil fuels brings huge benefits. Solar, wind, hydro, small nuclear plants etc. are much better for society.

Energy security increases if energy is produced locally. Democracies have less pressure to prop up dictatorships. Smaller countries are less at risk of getting bullied by larger countries.

Decentralisation of energy production makes the world more stable, less fragile. Energy policy can be set locally rather than centrally. Regions, communities, even individuals, can decide for themselves how to source their power. You can do that with e.g. solar power, but you can't do that with huge gas- or oil-powered plants.

Renewables are actually getting more cost-effective to use than fossil fuels. Government subsidies, direct and indirect, are distorting the market. End government support for fossil fuels and let the market free. There are huge opportunities for private enterprise in switching society to use the better technologies.

Air pollution is a huge killer. A study I saw yesterday showed dramatic increases in death from COVID-19 where air pollution was worse. Even in normal times, life expectancy and health quality is adversely affected by air pollution.

A switch to electric transport improves air pollution massively. There are also technical advantages to electric vehicles, such as improved reliability.

No, they're not. The data are a mess. Temperature records have been "adjusted" and the original raw data thrown away all over the place. I understand you don't believe this; I'm simply stating what I believe for the record. As I said, we're clearly not going to agree.

> I feel your opposition on this issue is ideological, and there's no data that will change your mind.

I have spent two decades now closely following the global warming/climate change alarmism issue. What I'm basing my statements on here is not ideological opposition to anything: it's the result of two decades of watching a long con in operation. And note carefully that this does not mean that I don't think the climate is changing or that I don't think we will need to do things to deal with climate change. It simply means that I do not trust the people or the institutions that are clamoring about catastrophe if we don't spend trillions of dollars to stop CO2 emissions now. Those people and institutions have no credibility with me after what I've seen them do for the past two decades, and what I've gone back and found out about what they did further back than that.

> Switching from fossil fuels brings huge benefits.

Agreed. But we don't have to spend trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation to do that. We just have to, you know, switch. Spending money on CO2 mitigation (unless by "CO2 mitigation" you just mean "build more non-CO2 emitting power plants") hinders that, it doesn't help it.

I mostly agree with your points on energy security, decentralization, removing government distortions of the market (I think this is a good idea in every sphere, not just energy), and air pollution. Kudos to you for including small nuclear plants, btw; most people don't. The only caveats I would make are:

Decentralized power from solar or wind won't provide reliable base load power in many places, at least not without a solution to the energy storage problem that currently doesn't exist except for very small loads. You need small nuclear plants. Hydro by itself can't really be decentralized, since there are only a limited number of good locations for it and basically all of them are already developed. (Hydro in the form of pumped storage powered by solar or wind is a different matter; for many small scale needs that might be a viable solution to the energy storage problem.)

Electric transport is great, except for one mode: airplanes. I just don't see a viable alternative to liquid chemical fuels for airplanes any time soon. But that can be dealt with by using other energy sources to make liquid fuels, either by directly powering chemical reactions or by using living organisms like algae.

Which overpredicted the warming that has occurred from 1990 to now (though its predictions overall were certainly much milder than the catastrophic ones that are being trumpeted as reasons to spend trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation).

Not to mention that there have been four more assessment reports since then (and the sixth is in the works now), and the more alarmist ones (in particular the third and fourth) are the ones that climate change alarmists are basing their predictions of catastrophe on. (Even though the fifth report actually backed off in some respects, particularly in admitting--though as obliquely as possible--that the climate model predictions were not matching the data.)

No, they're lower than the low end of the predicted range. Plus, the low end of the predicted range was based on assumed CO2 emissions that were significantly lower than what has actually occurred since then. So we have more CO2 than predicted and less warming than predicted even from the lower than actual CO2.

> even the low estimates still predict a 3C temperature rise by the end of the century

That's not 3C rise from where we are now. It's not even 3C rise from where we were in 1990. It's 3C rise from the "pre-industrial" temperature, i.e., the mid to late 1700s, i.e., in the middle of the Little Ice Age. Temperatures have already risen (largely due simply to coming out of the Little Ice Age) by about 1.6C since then, so that low estimate is about 1.4C rise from now to 2100. And, as noted, actual temperature rise is running below the low end estimate. We're looking at roughly a degree C rise in a century. The idea that humans cannot adapt to that so we have to spend trillions of dollars to stop emitting CO2 right now is laughable.

> Just because some of the 6 or 7C predictions (high end of range) don't appear to be coming true we should just ignore the rest of the models?

We should not be using the models to drive public policy decisions with multi-trillion dollar costs. They're simply not good enough for that.

Yes it is, if taken seriously.

If the prediction is "we can expect a serious epidemic once every 10 years", then we have something definite that we can plan for, or at least discuss the costs of planning for. There's no way to discuss the costs of planning for "this will happen, some time in the future" without more detail.

Which has largely happened in a lot of areas...

except for the people who think the correct response is to ignore any prediction that isn't perfectly specific?

That would be nice, yes.

> except for the people who think the correct response is to ignore any prediction that isn't perfectly specific?

If a prediction isn't giving you any useful, actionable information, you can't act on it.

That doesn't necessarily mean you do nothing. If our public policy decision is "well, we don't really know how often epidemics like this will occur, but just to ballpark, let's plan on one every 10 years and see what we would need to do to prepare", that's fine. Just don't say we need to do that because the experts made a prediction. It's just a best judgment call based on very incomplete information.