Global Warming/Climate Change/Global Weirding?

[Red Arrow]

People who Fox News won't change the minds of people who science.
People who science won't change the minds of people who FOX news until it's too late.
We can all move on from here.

You people who think you know everything really irritate those of us who do (know everything).

[TheArtist]

 Interesting thing is, that if we were to adopt better lifestyle and economic choices, this "problem" real or not, would go away.  If we were to change some habits to do some things that would better our health and help our pocketbooks at the same time,,, who wouldn't want to do that regardless.

Here is some take away from a recent study for example...

"We showed that the same dietary changes that can add about a decade to our lives, reduce incidence of type II diabetes by about 25 percent, cancer by about 10 percent and death from heart disease by about 20 percent" said Tilman, a professor in the University's College of Biological Sciences and resident fellow at the Institute on the Environment. "In particular, if the world were to adopt variations on three common diets (mediterranean diet as an example), health would be greatly increased at the same time global greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by an amount equal to the current greenhouse gas emissions of ALL cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships. In addition, this dietary shift would prevent the destruction of an area of tropical forests and savannas as large as half of the United States."

Then think about doing things like being more energy efficient.  Looking at changing regular bulbs to LED ones.  They are expensive, though less so all the time, but doing the math I have begun replacing all of the old bulbs in my shop and home because over time it will save me money.  Again who wouldn't want to do that, regardless of any reduced energy use/greenhouse emissions talk.  

I would love for electric cars to become more common.  I live near a highway and keep reading more studies of how that can negatively impact your health, take years off your life, etc.  (wish I could move but can't right now and almost feel guilty about the next people that would live there) Plus just being in traffic sucking in those fumes is not good for you (apparently billowing black smoke out your tailpipe is perfectly fine in Oklahoma, meanwhile our politicians sit in Washington breathing cleaner air than we are, how nice for them). But I digress, more energy efficient/cleaner cars, appliances, businesses, electric cars, more transit, more pedestrian friendly areas, etc. etc. will not "destroy the economy", but can just be part of a new, better, healthier for human beings, economy.

Again, there are so many changes that we could make that would be good for us health wise and economically, such that who cares if it also get's rid of any "global warming or not" climate change controversies?

[dbacksfan 2.0]

Science is nowhere close to an absolute truth.  Claims of science are continually proven wrong and they evolve.

Has it ever occurred to anyone that we have better data collection methods for global temperatures today than 20 or 30 years ago?  That alone could account for anomalies in data, if there were parts of the globe we were not getting accurate data from before.

This is similar to my thinking. Back in 1974 just before the June 8th tornados that hit Tulsa, you had to send ANG jets to see what the cloud formations were, and what the weather patterns were. We have only been mapping the earth by satellite for the last 40 years or so, and every few years the technology improves to get a better idea about what's going on. Yes there has been improvements in the area of actually measuring what's going on with regards to surface measurements, but there are still large areas that have yet to truly be studied. The disappearance of MH370 comes to mind, because they talk about the fact that this portion of the Indian Ocean is largely unexplored.

The earth has climatological cycles of warming and cooling, as well as changes in ocean currents, the jet stream, and this effect on the weather as a result I don't dispute. But saying that all of this is man made, I just think there is not enough real data. Who is to say that the written data collected before the technology we had in the 60's is accurate?

Just my opinion, people are trying to extrapolate data from hand written events, as well as evidence that has been found and theorized as to what happened on a global scale, and trying to develop a model of what could happen.

It's not a pure science or pure truth, it's a forecast based on partial data, and partial historical, and sometimes they get it right. It's easier to put a probe on a comet, then to predict what the earth is going to do.

[heironymouspasparagus]

Science is nowhere close to an absolute truth.  Claims of science are continually proven wrong and they evolve.

Has it ever occurred to anyone that we have better data collection methods for global temperatures today than 20 or 30 years ago?  That alone could account for anomalies in data, if there were parts of the globe we were not getting accurate data from before.

Collection anomalies are not the same as accurate data....temperature measurement - accurate to well within 1 deg F has been proven for a very long time.  We are NO better today at that type of measurement than we were 200 years ago.  In fact, a mercury thermometer of 1800's is better than a digital thermometer in your house or car or wherever - within a couple of tenth's  (0.1 or 0.2 deg) while all the digital thermometers you may around you are at best within about 1 degree.  (I guarantee they are using thermistors or semiconductors - diodes - and NOT RTD's!)

Data collection methods have changed too, but the accuracy is no better.  What really has changed is that we get data from many more places.  More data can help, but does NOT automatically mean better data.

[Conan71]

You can tell yourself whatever it takes to make you feel better over ignoring science for "what ifs?"

99% of the real experts are sure of man made climate change and you are choosing to disagree with no facts and no supporting arguments. It's ok, that's your choice. Just be aware you are now hanging out with the truthers, the birthers, the anti-vaccers, the evolution deniers and all the conspiracy nuts that tell themselves whatever it is that makes them ignore science and facts for the bullsh!t stories they read on the internets.

Careful Swake, you are starting to sound like one of the mouth-breathing Rachael Madcow followers.  Do you know where the "consensus" claim comes from?

So where did that famous "consensus" claim that "98% of all scientists believe in global warming" come from? It originated from an endlessly reported 2009 American Geophysical Union (AGU) survey consisting of an intentionally brief two-minute, two question online survey sent to 10,257 earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Of the about 3.000 who responded, 82% answered "yes" to the second question, which like the first, most people I know would also have agreed with.

Then of those, only a small subset, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals, were considered in their survey statistic. That "98% all scientists" referred to a laughably puny number of 75 of those 77 who answered "yes".

That anything-but-scientific survey asked two questions. The first: "When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?"  Few would be expected to dispute this...the planet began thawing out of the "Little Ice Age" in the middle 19th century, predating the Industrial Revolution. (That was the coldest period since the last real Ice Age ended roughly 10,000 years ago.)

The second question asked: "Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?" So what constitutes "significant"? Does "changing" include both cooling and warming... and for both "better" and "worse"? And which contributions...does this include land use changes, such as agriculture and deforestation?

A more recent 2012 survey published by the AMS found that only one in four respondents agreed with UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims that humans are primarily responsible for recent warming. And while 89% believe that global warming is occurring, only 30% said they were very worried.

A March 2008 canvas of 51,000 Canadian scientists with the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysics of Alberta (APEGGA) found that although 99% of 1,077 replies believe climate is changing, 68% disagreed with the statement that "...the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled." Only 26% of them attributed global warming to "human activity like burning fossil fuels." Regarding these results, APEGGA's executive director, Neil Windsor, commented, "We're not surprised at all. There is no clear consensus of scientists that we know of."

A 2009 report issued by the Polish Academy of Sciences PAN Committee of Geological Sciences, a major scientific institution in the European Union, agrees that the purported climate consensus argument is becoming increasingly untenable. It says, in part, that: "Over the past 400 thousand years – even without human intervention – the level of CO2 in the air, based on the Antarctic ice cores, has already been similar four times, and even higher than the current value. At the end of the last ice age, within a time [interval] of a few hundred years, the average annual temperature changed over the globe several times. In total, it has gone up by almost 10 °C in the northern hemisphere, [and] therefore the changes mentioned above were incomparably more dramatic than the changes reported today."

The report concludes: "The PAN Committee of Geological Sciences believes it necessary to start an interdisciplinary research based on comprehensive monitoring and modeling of the impact of other factors – not just the level of CO2 – on the climate. Only this kind of approach will bring us closer to identifying the causes of climate change."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/17/that-scientific-global-warming-consensus-not/

Sure it's op-ed, sure Larry Bell has his detractors.  He cites studies in his commentary.  Studies which clearly debunk the myth that 99% of "real experts" are in agreement about human-caused global warming.  Just because you have the cute "peer reviewed" meme saved to your computer doesn't make it so.

There simply is NOT 99% agreement in the scientific community on AGW.

[TeeDub]

Again, there are so many changes that we could make that would be good for us health wise and economically, such that who cares if it also get's rid of any "global warming or not" climate change controversies?

Doesn't social security have enough trouble without unproductive old people living longer?   It's not like they are even enjoying themselves once they get to the adult diaper phase.

[Conan71]

John Cook, who came up with the survey meme of "peer reviewed" papers on global warming, has very questionable methodology.  In fact, authors of papers which supposedly supported AGW were randomly sampled, and they were miffed at the conclusions reached by Cook's panel.  There's also overwhelming evidence that Cook's team simply cherry picked key statements from papers, not even considering the context of how it was used in the paper.  This literally was not much more than a keyword search.

The paper, Cook et al. (2013) 'Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature' searched the Web of Science for the phrases "global warming" and "global climate change" then categorizing these results to their alleged level of endorsement of AGW. These results were then used to allege a 97% consensus on human-caused global warming.

To get to the truth, I emailed a sample of scientists whose papers were used in the study and asked them if the categorization by Cook et al. (2013) is an accurate representation of their paper. Their responses are eye opening and evidence that the Cook et al. (2013) team falsely classified scientists' papers as "endorsing AGW", apparently believing to know more about the papers than their authors.

Dr. Idso, your paper 'Ultra-enhanced spring branch growth in CO2-enriched trees: can it alter the phase of the atmosphere's seasonal CO2 cycle?' is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; "Implicitly endorsing AGW without minimizing it".

Is this an accurate representation of your paper?

Idso: "That is not an accurate representation of my paper. The papers examined how the rise in atmospheric CO2 could be inducing a phase advance in the spring portion of the atmosphere's seasonal CO2 cycle. Other literature had previously claimed a measured advance was due to rising temperatures, but we showed that it was quite likely the rise in atmospheric CO2 itself was responsible for the lion's share of the change. It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming."

Dr. Scafetta, your paper 'Phenomenological solar contribution to the 1900–2000 global surface warming' is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; "Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%"

Is this an accurate representation of your paper?

Scafetta: "Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission.

What my papers say is that the IPCC view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun. This implies that the true climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling is likely around 1.5 C or less, and that the 21st century projections must be reduced by at least a factor of 2 or more. Of that the sun contributed (more or less) as much as the anthropogenic forcings.

The "less" claim is based on alternative solar models (e.g. ACRIM instead of PMOD) and also on the observation that part of the observed global warming might be due to urban heat island effect, and not to CO2.

By using the 50% borderline a lot of so-called "skeptical works" including some of mine are included in their 97%."

Any further comment on the Cook et al. (2013) paper?

Scafetta: "Please note that it is very important to clarify that the AGW advocated by the IPCC has always claimed that 90-100% of the warming observed since 1900 is due to anthropogenic emissions. While critics like me have always claimed that the data would approximately indicate a 50-50 natural-anthropogenic contribution at most.

What it is observed right now is utter dishonesty by the IPCC advocates. Instead of apologizing and honestly acknowledging that the AGW theory as advocated by the IPCC is wrong because based on climate models that poorly reconstruct the solar signature and do not reproduce the natural oscillations of the climate (AMO, PDO, NAO etc.) and honestly acknowledging that the truth, as it is emerging, is closer to what claimed by IPCC critics like me since 2005, these people are trying to get the credit.

They are gradually engaging into a metamorphosis process to save face.

Now they are misleadingly claiming that what they have always claimed was that AGW is quantified as 50+% of the total warming, so that once it will be clearer that AGW can only at most be quantified as 50% (without the "+") of the total warming, they will still claim that they were sufficiently correct.

And in this way they will get the credit that they do not merit, and continue in defaming critics like me that actually demonstrated such a fact since 2005/2006."

Dr. Shaviv, your paper 'On climate response to changes in the cosmic ray flux and radiative budget' is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; "Explicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimise"

Is this an accurate representation of your paper?

Shaviv: "Nope... it is not an accurate representation. The paper shows that if cosmic rays are included in empirical climate sensitivity analyses, then one finds that different time scales consistently give a low climate sensitiviity. i.e., it supports the idea that cosmic rays affect the climate and that climate sensitivity is low. This means that part of the 20th century should be attributed to the increased solar activity and that 21st century warming under a business as usual scenario should be low (about 1°C).

I couldn't write these things more explicitly in the paper because of the refereeing, however, you don't have to be a genius to reach these conclusions from the paper."

Any further comment on the Cook et al. (2013) paper?

Shaviv: "Science is not a democracy, even if the majority of scientists think one thing (and it translates to more papers saying so), they aren't necessarily correct. Moreover, as you can see from the above example, the analysis itself is faulty, namely, it doesn't even quantify correctly the number of scientists or the number of papers which endorse or diminish the importance of AGW."

Dr. Carlin, your paper 'A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change' is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; "Explicitly endorses AGW but does not quantify or minimize".

Is this an accurate representation of your paper?
Carlin: "No, if Cook et al's paper classifies my paper, 'A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change' as "explicitly endorses AGW but does not quantify or minimize," nothing could be further from either my intent or the contents of my paper. I did not explicitly or even implicitly endorse AGW and did quantify my skepticism concerning AGW. Both the paper and the abstract make this clear.

http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/06/cooks-97-consensus-study-game-plan.html

I doubt you will take time to read it, but TCP (The Consensus Project) was clearly a contrived marketing campaign with a pre-determined outcome to match the message Cook and others wanted to convey:

http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/06/cooks-97-consensus-study-game-plan.html

[Conan71]

Absolutely there is agreement in the scientific community about AGW, however, there's nowhere close to 97% or even the 99% Swake claims. At least now you know the methodology of how the 97% meme was achieved in the first place.

The claim of a 97% consensus on global warming does not stand up

Dana Nuccitelli writes that I "accidentally confirm the results of last year's 97% global warming consensus study". Nothing could be further from the truth.

I show that the 97% consensus claim does not stand up.

At best, Nuccitelli, John Cook and colleagues may have accidentally stumbled on the right number.

Cook and co selected some 12,000 papers from the scientific literature to test whether these papers support the hypothesis that humans played a substantial role in the observed warming of the Earth. 12,000 is a strange number. The climate literature is much larger. The number of papers on the detection and attribution of climate change is much, much smaller.

Cook's sample is not representative. Any conclusion they draw is not about "the literature" but rather about the papers they happened to find.

Most of the papers they studied are not about climate change and its causes, but many were taken as evidence nonetheless. Papers on carbon taxes naturally assume that carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming – but assumptions are not conclusions. Cook's claim of an increasing consensus over time is entirely due to an increase of the number of irrelevant papers that Cook and co mistook for evidence.

The abstracts of the 12,000 papers were rated, twice, by 24 volunteers. Twelve rapidly dropped out, leaving an enormous task for the rest. This shows. There are patterns in the data that suggest that raters may have fallen asleep with their nose on the keyboard. In July 2013, Mr Cook claimed to have data that showed this is not the case. In May 2014, he claimed that data never existed.

The data is also ridden with error. By Cook's own calculations, 7% of the ratings are wrong. Spot checks suggest a much larger number of errors, up to one-third.

Cook tried to validate the results by having authors rate their own papers. In almost two out of three cases, the author disagreed with Cook's team about the message of the paper in question.

Attempts to obtain Cook's data for independent verification have been in vain. Cook sometimes claims that the raters are interviewees who are entitled to privacy – but the raters were never asked any personal detail. At other times, Cook claims that the raters are not interviewees but interviewers.

The 97% consensus paper rests on yet another claim: the raters are incidental, it is the rated papers that matter. If you measure temperature, you make sure that your thermometers are all properly and consistently calibrated. Unfortunately, although he does have the data, Cook does not test whether the raters judge the same paper in the same way.

Consensus is irrelevant in science. There are plenty of examples in history where everyone agreed and everyone was wrong. Cook's consensus is also irrelevant in policy. They try to show that climate change is real and human-made. It is does not follow whether and by how much greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced.

The debate on climate policy is polarised, often using discussions about climate science as a proxy. People who want to argue that climate researchers are secretive and incompetent only have to point to the 97% consensus paper.

On 29 May, the Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the US House of Representatives examined the procedures of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Having been active in the IPCC since 1994, serving in various roles in all its three working groups, most recently as a convening lead author for the fifth assessment report of working group II, my testimony to the committee briefly reiterated some of the mistakes made in the fifth assessment report but focused on the structural faults in the IPCC, notably the selection of authors and staff, the weaknesses in the review process, and the competition for attention between chapters. I highlighted that the IPCC is a natural monopoly that is largely unregulated. I recommended that its assessment reports be replaced by an assessment journal.

In an article on 2 June, Nuccitelli ignores the subject matter of the hearing, focusing instead on a brief interaction about the 97% consensus paper co-authored by... Nuccitelli. He unfortunately missed the gist of my criticism of his work.

Successive literature reviews, including the ones by the IPCC, have time and again established that there has been substantial climate change over the last one and a half centuries and that humans caused a large share of that climate change.

There is disagreement, of course, particularly on the extent to which humans contributed to the observed warming. This is part and parcel of a healthy scientific debate. There is widespread agreement, though, that climate change is real and human-made.

I believe Nuccitelli and colleagues are wrong about a number of issues. Mistakenly thinking that agreement on the basic facts of climate change would induce agreement on climate policy, Nuccitelli and colleagues tried to quantify the consensus, and failed.

In his defence, Nuccitelli argues that I do not dispute their main result. Nuccitelli fundamentally misunderstands research. Science is not a set of results. Science is a method. If the method is wrong, the results are worthless.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2014/jun/06/97-consensus-global-warming/print

[heironymouspasparagus]

Careful Swake, you are starting to sound like one of the mouth-breathing Rachael Madcow followers.  Do you know where the "consensus" claim comes from?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/17/that-scientific-global-warming-consensus-not/

Sure it's op-ed, sure Larry Bell has his detractors.  He cites studies in his commentary.  Studies which clearly debunk the myth that 99% of "real experts" are in agreement about human-caused global warming.  Just because you have the cute "peer reviewed" meme saved to your computer doesn't make it so.

There simply is NOT 99% agreement in the scientific community on AGW.

Really??  You are hanging your hat on Larry Bell and the Sasakawa Foundation...??


WOW!!   I mean... just wow!!


Yep,... no training, knowledge, or expertise will trump actual science backgrounds every time... in America!!


Wanna quick taste of reality..??  I know it can sometimes be slightly bitter - after all, it IS an acquired taste for most - but you certainly are mature enough (old?) to partake and develop the more sophisticated palate required!!     And this link by REAL scientists....

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/01/forbes-rich-list-of-nonsense/

[heironymouspasparagus]

Absolutely there is agreement in the scientific community about AGW, however, there's nowhere close to 97% or even the 99% Swake claims. At least now you know the methodology of how the 97% meme was achieved in the first place.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2014/jun/06/97-consensus-global-warming/print

Ahhhh.....  "Master of the Gish Gallop"


Bell uses the key technique that denialists use in debates, dubbed by Eugenie Scott the "Gish gallop", named after a master of the style, anti-evolutionist Duane Gish. The Gish gallop raises a barrage of obscure and marginal facts and fabrications that appear at first glance to cast doubt on the entire edifice under attack, but which on closer examination do no such thing. In real-time debates the number of particularities raised is sure to catch the opponent off guard; this is why challenges to such debates are often raised by enemies of science. Little or no knowledge of a holistic view of any given science is needed to construct such scattershot attacks.



Bet you didn't know they had a name for the "Faux News" methodology, did ya...??



http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tobias

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Mandia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane_Gish

http://www.nationalmemo.com/how-joe-biden-broke-the-gish-gallop/    (This one is particularly ironic...A truthful Gish Gallop....)

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/04/27/plimer-does-the-gish-gallop/



See what I did there?  And didn't even inflict 50 lines of copy/paste text on the board to do it...just linked the references!  Oh, yeah....didn't have to lie about it or "spread" a flood of BS, either!  Bonus!  (Hint on the quotes - University of Houston.)

[Conan71]

You obviously didn't bother to read a sentence of what was posted.  Real scientists, who had their work misinterpreted to support the Cook meme.

You also did not bother to read any of the sources cited by Bell.  As expected, you went to his character and posted a link to a partisan hack pro-AGW web site.

That's fine, you've made up your mind on this pop culture notion of global warming catastrophe based on flawed data.  You react just like those leading the movement do: any attempt to show the flaws in the data and the message are squelched, called kooks and "deniers".

Wikipedia? Really?

[Red Arrow]

You obviously didn't bother to read a sentence of what was posted.  Real scientists, who had their work misinterpreted to support the Cook meme.

They can't be real scientists if they don't support AGW.

[heironymouspasparagus]

Wikipedia? Really?

Just showing the ridiculousness - and I guessed it was missed - of referencing a guy like Bell. 

And Bell?  Really??


Couple of key points - Scott Mandia...actual professor with real background, credentials, and a degree related to the topic of climate.  Unlike Bell.

And Michael Tobias - PhD in the History of Consciousness - vastly more qualified than Bell on the topic of climate!!  And as a mountaineer, he has climbed the Himalayas, for crying out loud - looking at the climate directly!  Seeing it all first hand and in person!!


But feel free to Gish away....

[heironymouspasparagus]

Oh...I forgot... reading the post - yeah, I read it.  Richard Tol.  Professor of Economics.  The ultimate authority on climate, I am sure - just like Larry Bell.

Got a real scientist reference?  Then we can get away from the spin zone...




Gish, Gish, Gish, Gish....



Would like to have a real discussion sometime on this board related to the CO2 levels in the atmosphere...THAT is the point that is being danced around - pretty much by both sides - and what the effects of that will be (probably bad ones) and how soon (hard to say).  This whole cycle is dramatically/drastically different from the previous 400,000 years and it probably ain't gonna be pretty.  EVERY other cycle, we have seen temperature change way before CO2.  This time, they are moving together - plus all the other possible adverse events happening now.  Like equatorial rainforest - we don't know if losing that is a good thing or a bad thing.  (My bet is on 'bad thing').

Higher CO2 could literally mean more plant life, which would bring about more oxygen, which would lead to more animal life.  This could be good....??  Or not.  Need less partisan BS and way more research - not more big oil obstructionism!

Anyone who dismisses out of hand the doubling of average CO2 in just the last couple hundred years, though, is a Luddite 1D-10-T  (Army nomenclature).

[Conan71]

Just showing the ridiculousness - and I guessed it was missed - of referencing a guy like Bell.  

And Bell?  Really??


Couple of key points - Scott Mandia...actual professor with real background, credentials, and a degree related to the topic of climate.  Unlike Bell.

And Michael Tobias - PhD in the History of Consciousness - vastly more qualified than Bell on the topic of climate!!  And as a mountaineer, he has climbed the Himalayas, for crying out loud - looking at the climate directly!  Seeing it all first hand and in person!!


But feel free to Gish away....

I'm sorry, how many of these people in the media and professional politicians who keep parroting "the script" on AGW have advanced degrees in climatology?  Pay attention to the message not the messenger.  Wait, that's right, you aren't capable of paying attention!  

Read the sources these guys cite, they are solid.  Read what CLIMATOLOGISTS say were intentional misinterpretations/misrepresentation of their works used to come up with the 97% AGW LIE.

I must have hit a soft spot otherwise you wouldn't have started up with this gishing crap.

As an aside, an economist would have a pretty good grasp on statistics, accepted methods of sampling, and using a variety of sources to draw conclusions.  Yes?