Coronavirus and Credibility

Here's the passage from that paper that explains the 0.3% figure from the abstract:

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%

The 0.3% from the abstract refers to the 0.34% of papers that provide "explicit, quantified" endorsement of the consensus 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". But the majority of abstracts neither endorsed nor rejected that consensus, while the vast majority (97.1%) of those expressing an opinion either explicitly or implicitly endorsed the consensus view.

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

> Lockdowns are still justified under those numbers.

And what if the effects of an extended lockdown is a tanked ecomony with a 3x increase in suicides for the next decade? Is it still justified? Lockdowns are only justified if the only variable you are optimizing for is "number of covid-19 deaths". Yet there are hundreds of other variables that we are ignoring in our quest to minimize that one variable. Impossible to tell now, but tanking the economy to flatten the curve may end up indirectly killing even more people in the long run.

I'm sorry, its not even in hindsight. All you needed to do is look at what China was doing. It became very apparent that there was a major viral outbreak on-going in china around Luna New Year

I had this same thought. Here's Pelosi encouraging people to come to Chinatown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFCzoXhNM6c

Also, we should be careful about how much we eviscerate people on both sides politically during this time. If our leaders are too afraid of repercussions to make difficult decisions, they may make bad decisions instead.

I'm calling for moratorium on partisan finger-pointing. I think we're all in this together, and that's the only way we're getting out of it.

I like how all our problems get tied to global warming these days. Certainly boosts the theory's credibility.