While the Republican Party and their EPA want to pretend that there is still not a consensus in the scientific community surrounding manmade climate change—the rest of the world heats up. The Guardian published an article by one of the authors of a new paper that studied climate “contrarians. In it she explains that while climate deniers enjoy the “integrity” that comes with being an oppressed minority in the scientific community—they are less like Galileo and more like a bunch of guys who are bad at science and full of shit. One of the authors of the paper, Katharine Hayoe, wrote on her Facebook page.
Here’s a highlight from her statement.
So we took those papers and - thanks to the superhuman efforts of my colleague Rasmus Benestad - recalculated all their analyses. From scratch.
And you know what we found?
Every single one of those analyses had an error - in their assumptions, methodology, or analysis - that, when corrected, brought their results into line with the scientific consensus.
The Guardian article was written by Dana Nuccitelli, also an author on the study. She explains a little more about trying to replicate denier science. Guess what they weren’t able to replicate? The results that deniers reported. Why weren’t they able to replicate these results? Because the science was always faulty. The researchers were able to highlight a variety of themes in the “mistakes” made by deniers, for example—predictive models that only work in one direction but somehow don’t work with any known data from the past.
When we tried to reproduce their model of the lunar and solar influence on the climate, we found that the model only simulated their temperature data reasonably accurately for the 4,000-year period they considered. However, for the 6,000 years’ worth of earlier data they threw out, their model couldn’t reproduce the temperature changes. The authors argued that their model could be used to forecast future climate changes, but there’s no reason to trust a model forecast if it can’t accurately reproduce the past.
So, while there is three percent of “scientists” denying conclusions on manmade climate change, those three percent are doing science about as well as flat-earthers.