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...