Inferring and Explaining

100 t 3 . Wealthy voters, as well as better educated and politically concerned voters, favored Landon. InferrIng and exPlaInIng Lest any of you think that all this concern with polling for presidential elections is a thing of the past, you might well refect on the recent elections. Here’swhat professional pollsterswere worried about as the 2008 election approached: “We were all scared to death in 2004, because we had a close race and the cell phone-only problem was already with us then,” says Scott Keeter, the head of surveys at the Pew Research Center . . . “Pollsters have learned quite a bit about the cell phone-only users they do call. Tey are most likely to be under 30, unmarried, renters, making less than $30,000 a year, and are slightlymore likely to be black or Hispanic,” says Keeter. . . . He adds, “It suggests that if there are enough of them, and you are missing them in your landline sur- veys, then your polls will have a bias because of that.” 6 Naomi Oreskes’s Study Tere is an interesting segment in Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth , where he cites a scholarly study of peer-reviewed articles on cli- mate change. A University of California at San Diego scientist, Dr. Naomi Oreskes, published in Science magazine a massive study of every peer-reviewed science journal article on global warming from the previous 10 years. She and her team selected a large random sample of 928 articles representing almost 10% of that total, and carefully analyzed howmany of the articles agreed or disagreed with the prevailing consensus view. About a quarter of the articles in the sample dealt with aspects of global warming that did not involve any discussion of the central elements of the consensus. Of the three- quarters that did address these main points, the per- centage that disagreed with the consensus? Zero. 7 Herewehave, a littlebit secondhand, anincredibly interesting, andpotentiallyquite important, sam- ple.Te argument leaves the conclusion unstated but still quite obvious—almost all natural scien- tists publishing on climate change endorse the consensus view about climate change. e 1 . In a sample of 928 peer-reviewed articles dealing with climate change, 0 percent dis- agreed with the consensus view. t 0 . Virtually all peer-reviewed research on cli- mate change endorses the consensus view. Mr. Gore is quite right that Dr. Oreskes published a short, but very infuential, article, “Beyond the Ivory Tower:Te Scientifc Consen- sus on Climate Change,” in a prestigious jour- nal, Science , inDecember of 2004. 8 She begins by reminding her readers that policy makers and the mass media ofen suggest that great scien- tifc uncertainty about “anthropogenic” climate change but states fatly, “Tis is not the case.” 9 In defense of her thesis, she ofers a fairly elaborate study she has conducted. She ofers a working defnition of what she will call “the consensus view,” from reports by the Intergov- ernmental Panel on Climate Change: Human activities . . . are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents . . . that absorb or scat- ter radiant energy. . . . Most of the observed warming