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Robin Guenier's avatar

All excellent stuff Ben. I must commend you for having the energy and patience to do this first rate analysis. But, for me, it misses the point. And that’s very simple: even if all the claims of climate emergency, climate catastrophe etc. are true (I doubt if they are, but that’s irrelevant), the solution, according to many climate scientists, is a radical and urgent cut in global greenhouse gas emissions – and the UK’s net zero policy cannot achieve that. It cannot do so because the UK is the source of less than 1% of global GHG emissions whereas major non-Western economies that are the source of over 70% of emissions have no intention of cutting them.

Moreover, net zero is unachievable and potentially socially and economically disastrous. In other words, as well as pointless, the policy is senseless and totally irresponsible. I don’t see how the lobbying of green billionaires can do anything to counter that.

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Barry Woods's avatar

Dig a little deeper, as I have been just recently, I only just got sucked back into all this last month. And you will find the Sceptical Science volunteers "trained" the CARDS AI by 'coding' the 65,000, paragraphs manually, according to Cook's 'Codebook' (not that they disclose their Skeptical Science "allegiance". The conflict of interest here is off the scale - Imagine how they coded @clim8resiatance......... (possibly by Ken Rice himself. Or maybe Barbel Winkler coded it (she is an accredited Al Gore Climate Reality Leader. This non disclosure to Nature, and the obvious ethical conflict, would if science was healthy, get the whole paper retracted -

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01714-4#Ack1

Acknowledgements

Manual coding of 65,000 paragraphs was made possible due to voluntary contributors, including Anne-Marie Blackburn, Ari Jokimäki, Bärbel Winkler, David Kirtley, Heidi A. Roop, Ian Sharp, James Wight, Keah Schuenemann, Ken Rice, Matthew K. Laffin, Peter Jacobs, Peter Miesler, Rob Honeycutt, Robert J M Hudson, Scot C. Parker, Shirley Leung, and Thomas Traill. We also thank Julia Hathaway and Sergey Samoilenko who assisted in conducting the pilot study involving coding and inter-rater reliability, and Wendy Cook for visualizing Fig. 1. TC was supported by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/N012283/1]. CB is grateful for generous support from a Trinity Research in Social Sciences (TRiSS) Research Fellowship [2016/17].

Ken Rice is a SkS board member (lol)

https://skepticalscience.com/about-sks-inc.shtml

https://skepticalscience.com/team.php

Cook does not declare his own Sceptical Science affiliation in this Nature paper either.

He was very proud to do that in Cook (2013) 97% Consensus paper.

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