Chris, I have read Peiser's email to Media Watch, and I have analysed it above. Nowhere does it say that he withdraws his total criticism of Oreskes. It only refers to a part of his original analysis based on the expanded number of articles in the database. Media Watch makes the claims you refer to on the basis of discussions that they had with Peiser after receiving that email, but they don't provide any documentary evidence, which is why I wrote to Peiser.

Tim Lambert, you just make it up. Peiser's email does not support what Media Watch says - you won't find words in there that say anything like "there is only one abstract that supports my conclusion".

I did not say that I would have rejected your piece for "stating something true". I said it wasn't up to standard, and that's been pretty comprehensively demonstrated over the course of this thread. You get some things right, but not enough to rescue the piece.

I never said that "most scientists dispute the consensus". I said that there was a "substantial body of opinion that disputes major parts of the AGW thesis". I've never "admitted [that I] only published one previous piece supporting the climate science consensus". In fact we've published numerous articles that do. Opposition to AGW is not a Liberal Party position, and I don't oppose it, so why am I "a Liberal Party hack".

I've also checked out your claim against Marohasy. She quotes the document you cite, but not on the issue of coral bleaching, but to support a claim that "Australian reefs are among the best protected in the world". So she has not misrepresented her source and you should retract that claim, unless you've got some other evidence.

Which all brings us back to the issue you keep avoiding - what's your motivation? It's obviously not finding the truth. If I were you I'd probably fess up to it being politics - better that than being an intellectual "troll"!

Response to GrahamY:

Scientific abstracts are not written for the classroom. Teachers don't explain theory in the same way scientists communicate between themselves. School and undergraduate courses usually deal with well-tested theories, and global warming is such a theory.

You've raised E=MC2 without considering that Einstein was a theoretical physicist. It was mathematical in origin, not experimental. Referring to the Maxwell-Hertz equations and his own theory of special relativity, Einstein wrote, "With these principles as my basis I deduced the following result." The concluding words were, "If the theory corresponds to the facts, radiation conveys inertia between the emitting and absorbing bodies". (http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/E_mc2/e_mc2.pdf, translated from German).

It's disappointing you chose to do a word count. Instead of exploiting scientific method, you've exploited the diversity of the English language. Did you consider that characterised can be spelt with a 'z'? If you insist on being mechanical in English comprehension, you should have checked for synonymous expressions like "indicates", "potential(ly)", "suggest(s)", "X% confidence level", "estimates" and "reflect". There will be others and it is not practicable to list all of them, as you well know. Secondly, how did you count abstracts primarily about model building, those saying more research is required and those absent of a specific conclusion? You treated those abstracts as against the concept of all theory being subject to falsification.

My critique of Pieser has already mentioned that a word count for "anthropogenic global warming" and "anthropogenic climate change" over abstracts for all years, gives the result 13, which is quite a coincidence. You’re word count approach is equally dubious.

I’ve already discussed abstract 45 in a previous post. The conclusions are a “Correlation of sunspot activity with global warming may be spurious but additional analyses are required to test this hypothesis”. I think they have used the word spurious with justifiable reason, given how you describe it.

I look forward to the next instalment. I feel good about it, because I get to learn both about the marvellous work of science and the tricks used by those trying to discredit or misappropriate scientific endeavour. Thanks!

"Nowhere does it say that he withdraws his total criticism of Oreskes. "

You are not getting the point here. Peiser states that he has withdrawn his criticism of Oreskes' 928 article main claim. Thus Gore's restatement of Oreskes' 928 article main claim is correct. Thus Bolt's criticism of Oreskes' 928 article main claim is wrong.

Bolt said absolutely nothing about Peiser's 1247 article survey which by the way is absolutely worthless because it gives articles with no scientific standing.

Response to Michael K:
The word trickery is available in English because it has many shades of certainty and vagary, compared to most other languages.

Response to Chris:
Thanks Chris for connecting us to the original claims.

This is the political mindset at work. The objective is to win the argument, not to get to the truth or prepare for the future. And science is at a disadvantage because it never attempts to "prove" something absolutely and no scientific theory is treated as beyond challenge.

Nevertheless, the whole set of above posts has been extremely informative, especially for those who went to the trouble to read at the actual abstracts http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Oreskes-abstracts.htm.GrahamY is content to just word count them and Peiser has appeared to do the same.

The headline today is 'Climate Scientists: More than 90 percent certain humans are to blame.' This does not mean 10% of scientists are disputing the consensus. It was not a vote in which the result was 90 to 10. It means that ALL attending scientists, including the representatives of 113 governments, are at prepared to give at least a 90% confidence value.

Allow me to put this in some context. Imagine you had a car and invited fifty mechanics to check the brakes. Some said they were 99% sure that the brakes were about to fail. Some said 95% and some said they were 90% sure of failure.

Would you say to yourself, these mechanics are all in dispute! Using these 5% and 10% differences, it should be OK to drive. Well, only if you are very foolish.

This is the crux of what Andrew Bolt and Benny Peiser are telling us to be. They exploit the science, in particular the methodology and language, to extract discord and dispute where, in fact, a scientific consensus does exist and is evident.

Tim Lambert says he is not defending his post because it is unnecessary to do so: “BBGun, I don't respond to your nonsense because the others deal with you more than adequately and don't need my help. But you knew that.”

Huh? As far as I know, all of my comments are essentially correct and I certainly haven’t tried to mislead, so I have no idea what Lambert’s talking about. Perhaps he will enlighten us.

Employing a frequent Tim Lambert tactic, he has attempted to draw the discussion off topic by focusing on GrahamY’s politics. Other than that he hasn’t said much. There are several reasons for his reluctance to comment. At his blog he and like-minded commenters mercilessly ridicule anyone not toeing the ideological line – calling dissenters “troll” is a favoured tactic but that would only look silly to On Line Opinion’s more diverse and sophisticated readership, although frequent Deltoid commenter Chris O’Neill did call me an idiot early on in this thread – maybe he thought he was commenting at Deltoid.

Another reason Lambert’s reluctant to comment in this thread is because he can’t control comments. He is known to moderate difficult Deltoid commenters, attempting to drive them away by holding dissenting comments for extended periods, posting them only when the conversation has moved on, or not at all. He frequently ignores especially difficult comments hoping his readers will take up the challenge on his behalf (as happens in this thread). It is not unknown for benign but dissenting comments to be surreptitiously removed. He’s obviously not very good at give and take discussion and does everything he can to avoid it.

Lambert also refuses to admit when he gets it wrong (or when he misleads). If he did, he’d spend so much time issuing corrections he wouldn’t have time to blog.

Response to David Latimer:

Yeah, “trickery” is a “trickery”, but democracy itself supposes separatong mere personal benefits from a national interest.

If Dark Ages traditions still substantiate nowadays “scientific approaches”, would for instance deliberating on this topic have been of any reasonable outcome