Quote :

"Yes it would have."

lol, sure. everyone overnight would have stopped wanting financial services. what a great thought! I guess when all those DotCom businesses went bust there was no more demand for e-commerce, either, right? That's why there is no e-commerce today, right?

^ does "actively-publishing" mean the people who are actually allowed to publish by Hansen, Mann, Jones, and others? I mean, that'd be a pretty bogus statistic if ever I've heard one. Besides, it's fairly well established that even the NAS has a nasty bias in this argument, given how much AGW funding they get. I mean, what else are they gonna say? "No, we think it's bunk, no need to keep giving us money for it."

BTW, as for your "97%", I give you this:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/consensus_opiate.pdf

Quote :

"The phrase “97 percent of the world's climate scientists” sounds very dramatic and overwhelming, but the truth is somewhat different. According to the figures presented in the paper, 90% of the scientists were from the US, including federal and state bodies, 6% from Canada and 4% from 21 countries around the world. We are also told that only 5% of the original sample responses were climate scientists, so if we pragmatically apply those proportions we end up with just 141 from the US, 9 from Canada and just 6 from 21 countries around the world, hardly a global consensus. ... We find that they originally contacted 10,257 scientists, of whom 3,146 responded, less than a 31% response rate. “Impending Planetary Doom” was obviously not uppermost in the minds of over two thirds of their target population. Of that number, only 5% described themselves as climate scientists, numbering 157. The authors reduce that by half by only counting those who they classed as “specialists”."

OK, now, let's look at a couple of the questions they asked...

Quote :

"When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?"

that's a bit vague, dontcha think?

Quote :

"Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?"

That's a bit of a bad question... It goes ahead and assumes that temperatures are changing and someone or something must be causing it!

Then let's look at the fact that the quoted statistic was based on 77 people. Yes, 77 fucking people. But, the news reported it as being based on over 3100 people. So tell me, again, who is guilty of misinformation?

So, even in THIS instance, it would seem that the original article is "misinformed." Ironic, eh?

12/19/2010 7:46:43 PM