No doubt you’ve heard-and always at ear-splitting decibels-that “97 percent of all climate scientists agree” that climate change is real, will be devastating to life on earth, and is largely or entirely due to human emissions of greenhouse gases. The participants at the COP26, United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, have been screaming pretty much nothing else for days.
Problem is, the “97 percent” is pure fiction.
I should know. In 2013, I and several other researchers wrote in Science & Education that the “97 percent” figure came from John Cook and colleagues at the University of Western Australia-who basically cooked the books.
Cook and his comrades did not in fact poll the world’s climate scientists. Not even close. They simply collected the abstracts of nearly 12,000 journal articles and then subjectively designated whether the abstract of a given paper either endorsed or rejected “the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
Two-thirds of the abstracts, however, expressed no opinion, and of the remaining nearly 4,000 very few explicitly agreed-by the authors’ own assessment-with the stated consensus position. My colleagues and I were forced to conclude that “the 97% consensus claimed by Cook et al. turns out upon inspection to be not 97.1% but 0.3%.”
The “97 percent” consensus is, as we said then, “one of the greatest items of misinformation that has been circulated on either side of the climate debate.”
But the propaganda continued; and continues to this day-and is now more extreme. Just in time for COP26, and published in the same journal in which the first “consensus” was announced, a new group, led by researchers at Cornell University, wrote an article entitled, “Greater than 99% Consensus on Human Caused Climate Change in the Peer-reviewed Scientific Literature.”
Incredibly, the methodology in that article is even more flawed than that employed in the first. This latest clutch of climate alarmists randomly selected a mere 3,000 papers from more than 88,000 climate-related papers published since Cook-and then applied Cook’s subjective assessment to this tiny fraction of the available abstracts. Surprised to learn that only four were determined to be skeptical of human-caused global warming?
And the authors were also biased regarding the rest of the abstracts. For example, they noted that “a majority” did not state a position on whether climate change was human caused. But unlike Cook et al., who discarded such papers, this new group of researchers simply asserted that the act of publishing on climate change- in fact, just the authors’ mentioning of the term-was enough to have those articles logged as favoring the consensus. One would be hard pressed to come up with a more perfect example of circular reasoning.
The situation would be laughable but for the draconian measures the climate alarmists, citing this “99 percent” so-called consensus, have been calling for in Glasgow-which, mercifully, ended. If these persons get their way, the needless human suffering will be no joke; and, as always, it will be the poor in all countries-who can stay alive only when affordable energy is plentiful-who will be harmed the most. And, unless the thinking part of US electorate starts a sustained revolt at the polls, you, thanks to your tax dollars, will be helping to finance that misery.
David R. Legates is a research fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., co-author with Fred Singer and Anthony Lupo of “Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate” (revised and expanded third edition), and a professor of geography and spatial sciences at the University of Delaware.
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Well, if that’s their finding then the answer is easy, eliminate the humans!
Problem is, the “97 percent” is pure fiction.
“the 97% consensus claimed by Cook et al. turns out upon inspection to be
not 97.1% but 0.3%.”
This is just another Lie, Con and deception by the demonic Democrats of the world, where control is their only goal.
The dishonorable socialist Democrat Party and its servants revolves around and its philosophy is based on Total Control, Hate, Lies, Cons, Deceptions, Immorality and the lack of Integrity, Ethics or Honor.
WHY Do you think, SO MANY of those nations involved, are working hard, to mandate everyone get the vaccume shot..
THEY WANT to reduce the population.
They’re working on that, too.
More Liberal insanity where mediocre men of blinded vision are unable to even properly gather statistics to measure the width of their waists, to keep their own pants from falling down. O them it is always better to endure the embarrassments of failure or getting found out in a lie, than lose opportunities to control the lives of WE THE PEOPLE. Joe’s 97% of all climate scientists agreeing is about as accurate as his claims that 100% of the money in his infrastructure bill will got to building infrastructures with nobody skimming any of it off the top. A greater con has not been pulled off since George C. Parker, known as the greatest con-man in American history, managed to sell landmark items like Madison Square Gardens, the Statue of Liberty and, you guessed it, the Brooklyn Bridge. Similar proposed Biden infrastructures are now on the way.
Leave it up to the “HIGHLY” intelligent to believe they are in charge of the weather. I guess the ice age would have never occurred had democrats been around during that time.
They’d have called it racist/sexist/bigoted, and hoped that worked.
Dire predictions come and go and the percentage of scientists who support these predictions turns out to be as inaccurate as the predictions themselves. But it gives the idiots who buy into this garbage a chance to feel useful and important. If you were able to assign any value to it all—that’s probably is as close as you can get.
Our Government will only give grant money to the Scientists that back Global Warming and Climate Change. It’s all about the Money . If you are against Climate Change NO grant money for you .
I can’t remember a SINGLE ONE of their predictions, that have ever came true.