Scientists rebut ‘consensus claims’: ‘Only 0.3% of 12,000 papers published in journals claimed recent warming was mostly manmade’
In fact, the extent of our influence on climate is not “settled science.” Only 0.3% of twelve thousand papers published in learned journals claimed that recent warming was mostly manmade. The 375 activists are entitled to their opinion, but the scientific community’s peer-reviewed results overwhelmingly fail to endorse their narrow view that recent warming was predominately manmade.
True, we influence climate, by returning to the air some of the carbon dioxide that was there before. But so do termites, by emitting more methane than all the world’s farm animals combined. So do plants, by taking carbon dioxide; storing the carbon in leaves, stems, and trunks; and returning the oxygen to the air. So does the Sun, by supplying nearly all the Earth’s radiant energy. So do volcanoes, by emitting hot rocks that warm the air and ejecta that shade the Earth from the Sun and cause cooling. So do the oceans, by helping to keep the Earth’s temperature within a few degrees either side of the period mean for more than 800,000 years.
The activists say we are warming the oceans. But in the first 11 full years of the least ill-resolved dataset we have, the 3500+ Argo bathythermograph buoys, the upper mile and a quarter of the world’s oceans warmed at a rate equivalent to just 1 Celsius degree every 430 years, and the warming rate, negligible at the surface, rises faster the deeper the measurements are taken. The oceans are warming not from above, which they would if we were warming the air and the air was warming the oceans, but from below.
The activists say we are warming the lower atmosphere. Yet on all datasets, the atmosphere is warming at less than half the rate originally predicted by their fellow-activists at the error-prone Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — who have a vested interest in overstating the supposed extent of our influence on climate. For, otherwise, the Panel would be – as it should now be – abolished. The Panel
‘Consensus’ activist John Cook’s major falsehood in new paper exposed – Claims 95% + of scientists believe AGW ‘presents a global problem’
Advancing to the introduction of the “Alice In Wonderland” paper of Lewandowsky/Cook/Lloyd and already in the second sentence I bump into this (my emphasis):
… the consensus position that global warming is happening, is human caused, and presents a global problem is shared by more than 95 % of domain experts and more than 95 % of relevant articles in the peer-reviewed literature (Anderegg et al. 2010; Cook et al. 2013, 2016; Doran and Zimmerman 2009; Oreskes 2004; Shwed and Bearman 2010).
… presents a global problem …
… shared by more than 95 % of domain experts and more than 95 % of relevant articles in the peer-reviewed literature …
?!?!?!?
…
The issue that I have with the claim is this: it makes the unsupported claim that it is a problem and that it is global and that it is surveyed and found to be 95+% of the papers/experts standing behind this claim. While in reality none of the referenced papers investigated that aspect and at least one of the authors was an author in two of the referenced papers and should know that this claim was unsupported by the evidence. Yet, the claim is made in the second sentence of the introduction of a scientific paper, determining the playing field for what comes next in the paper.
I am trying to put is as politely as possible here, but I have a hard time imagining that this slipped in inadvertently and that the other authors, as well as the reviewers, just glossed over it.
…
I have read the Anderegg 2010, Cook 2013, Doran & Zimmerman 2009 and Oreskes 2004 papers and at that time I found nothing of that kind. In none of those papers participants were asked whether they considered this warming to be a global problem.
Let’s look at what these papers actually investigated.
Oreskes 2004
(I wrote about this paper earlier).
Short version: Oreskes wanted to know how many papers disagreed with the position of the US National Academy of Science and the IPCC:
Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. … [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations
I have no problem with the first part. Human activities are putting CO2 in …
Climate skeptic basher John Cook (promoter of 97% claim) joins George Mason U. – Morano’s alma mater!
Via GMU press release:
We are delighted to announce that John Cook, PhD will be joining our team as a Research Assistant Professor, beginning January 2017.
Initially trained as a physicist, John recently completed his PhD in psychology at the University of Western Australia. His doctoral research focused on the negative influences of misinformation on climate literacy, and how to neutralize those influences.
Despite his newly minted PhD, John has been a towering figure in the field of climate communication for the past decade. In 2007, he created Skeptical Science – a website/app devoted to explaining climate science and rebutting global warming misinformation. Skeptical Science is widely seen by climate scientists and other climate educators as an invaluable educational resource. For his efforts, John has received numerous prestigious awards including a 2012 Eureka Prize for Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge (Australian Museum), a 2013 Peter Rawlinson Conservation Award (Australian Conservation Foundation) and a 2016 Friend of the Planet Award (National Center for Science Education).
John has also published five books on climate change and/or science misinformation – including The Debunking Handbook (with Stephen Lewandowsky) that has been downloaded over ½ million times from Skeptical Science – and dozens of scientific articles. His research paper titled Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming (Environmental Research Letters, 2013) – that definitively demonstrated that 97% of climate scientists are convinced that human-caused climate is happening – is the most-ever-downloaded paper from that journal, or any journal published by the Institute of Physics. Not bad for a social scientist!…
Analysis: The so-called global warming ‘scientific consensus’ is a complete fabrication and does not exist
http://theclimatescepticsparty.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-so-called-global-warming-scientific.html…
Watch Alex Epstein Debunk 97% Climate Change ‘Consensus’ Claims
…Investigate the authors? Debunked 97‰ climate ‘consensus’ paper garners over 500K downloads
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/27963/
Five hundred thousand. That’s the number of downloads which has graced the University of Queensland’s John Cook’s paper which claims 97% of scientists believe humans are “largely responsible” for global war– er, climate change.
The average number of downloadsfor an academic paper is … 700.
The 97% figure has widely been touted by activists and politicians since the report was published. President Obama had said “Ninety-seven percent of scientists, including, by the way, some who originally disputed the data, have now put that [global warming debate] to rest.” (The president has since has upped the figure to 99.5%.)
The problem with Cook’s work,according to The Daily Caller, is that that 97% has been met with a lotof skepticism and outright denunciation:
Cook and his team got to 97 percent by running a keyword search for “global warming” and “global climate change” between 1991 and 2011, which yielded more than 12,000 papers. They then agreed upon definitions of possible categories the papers could fit into — “explicit or implicit endorsement of human-caused global warming, no position, and implicit or explicit rejection” — and used the paper abstracts and attempted to decipher the position of each paper.
Earth System Dynamics noted in a September, 2013, press release that there were errors in the math used to get the 97 percent number. “Only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate papers Cook examined explicitly stated that Man caused most of the warming since 1950. Cook himself had flagged just 64 papers as explicitly supporting that consensus, but 23 of the 64 had not in fact supported it.”
A paper by five climatologists in 2013 pointed out that Cook’s research “misrepresented the views of most consensus scientists.”
Also in 2013, Dr. Craig Idso, whose work was lumped in with the 97%,said that the Cook paper was “not an accurate representation of [his team’s] paper.”
MORE: GOP AGs will prosecute climate alarmists if probes of skeptics continue
“It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming,” he said.
The University of Sussex’s Richard Tol responded to the Cook team by saying “Consensus has no place in science,” and characterized the (Cook) data as “a load of crap.”
Now, if Cook and company had put out a paper trivializing global war– er, um, climate change, they’d be in the sights of alarmist academics …
‘When 32.6% becomes 97%— the bald-faced (consensus) lie that changed the western world’
What the president was referring to was a 2013 paper by the University of Queensland’s John Cook. In his research, Cook studied 11,994 papers published between 1991 and 2011 that mentioned the search words “global warming” and “global climate change.”
Guess what Cook found? Only 32.6% of the papers endorsed the view of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. But of that group, 97% said that “recent warming is mostly man-made.”
And so, by a nice sleight-of-hand obfuscation, the great “97% consensus” was born.
Don’t believe me? Check out the actual paper, or the abstract, or the original article. In fact, let’s just say thank goodness that the originals are still posted online. Typically, when someone pulls off a con of such massive, world-wide proportions, they subsequently burn the evidence to cover their tracks.
Still don’t believe me? Here’s the actual, posted statement:
We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
Bottom line: In the actual study in question, only one-third of the 11,994 academic papers studied could be construed as arguing for man-made warming. Possibly the other two-thirds were more focused on the unprecedented increase in solar activity seen over the past century.
Regardless, the big lie has taken hold, and is now being used to push for “decarbonization” policies, and to silence critics of “global warming.”
Warmist John Cook wins award as Friend of Planet for feeding fallacies to school children
…Obama’s 97 percent climate change consensus includes ‘deniers’
The 97 percent of scientists frequently cited by President Obama who agree on climate change? Some of them are actually climate “deniers.”
Take David Legates, University of Delaware professor of climatology. He’s known as a leading “denier” for his skeptical take on the catastrophic climate change narrative, but he does agree that the climate is changing — which, by Mr. Obama’s standard, puts him in the 97 percent.
In fact, Mr. Legates says the figure is probably closer to 100 percent, because few reputable scientists would disagree that the climate changes, or even that humans have an impact on climate. Where he and other scientists part company with the “consensus” is on the narrower issues of whether human activity is the primary driver of global warming or whether it signals imminent climate disaster.
“Neither of these arguments have been proven, and they represent the extremes to which the ‘believers’ will go to push their agenda,” said Mr. Legates in an email to The Washington Times. “These questions are seldom addressed by the ‘believers’ when they are trying to manufacture their supposed ‘consensus’ since they will not find widespread agreement.”
Those touting the 97 percent figure “ask simplistic, obvious questions for which nearly 100 percent consensus can be attained and then pretend that saying ‘I believe in climate change’ actually means ‘I believe anthropogenic global warming will be disastrous,’” he said.…
The Cook ‘97% consensus’ paper, exposed by new book for the fraud that it really is
The Cook ‘97% consensus’ paper, exposed by new book for the fraud that it really is
I don’t like to use the word “fraud”, and I can’t recall if I’ve ever used it in a title. In this case it is warranted. Brandon Shollenberger writes of a new book, The Climate Wars: How the Consensus is Enforced, that proves without a doubt that John Cook and his “Skeptical Science” team are […]
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