Another climate scientist has told the truth about the nonsensical claim of a 97% consensus of scientists believing in the man-made climate change hypothesis:
“It was the narrative from the beginning,” [Dr. Richard ]Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told RealClear Radio Hour host Bill Frezza Friday. “In 1998, [NASA’s James] Hansen made some vague remarks. Newsweek ran a cover that says all scientists agree. Now they never really tell you what they agree on.”
“It is propaganda,” Lindzen said. “So all scientists agree it’s probably warmer now than it was at the end of the Little Ice Age. Almost all Scientists agree that if you add CO2, you will have some warming. Maybe very little warming.”
“But it is propaganda to translate that into it is dangerous and we must reduce CO2,” he added.
The study that announced the 97% consensus, “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature,” by John Cook and friends, is simply bogus.
The study was created under the halo of the University of Queensland was published in 2013 and, according to Watts Up With That, when the source data for the study was published online, the University of Queensland got so worried they threatened a lawsuit over use of Cook’s “97% consensus” data for a scientific rebuttal.That threat is antithetical to the scientific method, which says that, for a study to be valid, it must be possible to repeat it and achieve the same results as the initial study. But, the University of Queensland is hiding the fact that Cook’s study was a qualitative study which relied on opinion and produced biased results.
It is also hiding the fact that you can’t get 97% of scientists who are standing outside in the middle of a blizzard agree that it’s snowing.
The way the 97% study was conducted was Cook and his buddies looked at peer-reviewed studies and classified them as either agreeing or disagreeing with the climate change hypothesis. Cook doesn’t mention that the 97% figure was really 97% of the hand-picked studies they reviewed. Even worse, investigative journalists at Popular Technology reported that the 97% Study falsely classifies scientists’ papers as supporting the global warming hypothesis – according to the scientists who published the papers.
Popular Technology looked into precisely which papers were classified as believing in the man-made climate change hypothesis. The investigative journalists found that Cook and his colleagues identified papers by such prominent, aggressive climate change skeptics as Willie Soon, Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir Shaviv, Nils-Axel Morner and Alan Carlin as believing the hypothesis.
Cook and his colleagues, for example, classified a peer-reviewed paper by scientist Craig Idso as explicitly supporting the “consensus” position on global warming “without minimizing” the asserted severity of global warming. When Popular Technology asked Idso whether this was an accurate characterization of his paper, Idso responded:
“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.”
A more extensive examination of the Cook study by the New American reported that, out of the nearly 12,000 scientific papers Cook’s team evaluated, only 65 endorsed Cook’s alarmist position. That is less than 0.97%.
The crucial point here is the qualifying clause, “of those who have an opinion.” In other words, even the highly questionable Cook study doesn’t actually claim, as President Obama does, that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree.” In fact, when examined closely, one finds that the study says only one-third of the authors of the published research papers they examined expressed an opinion that the Cook team interpreted as either an implicit or explicit endorsement of AGW. So now its 97 percent of one-third of selected scientists in a sampling of research papers [some of which have been mis-identified]. That’s a far cry from the 97 percent of all scientists claimed by President Obama and many of the media stories.
Another criticism of Cook’s paper is it didn’t define the “consensus” they were looking for. Is the 97% for people who believe the global warming is real, or people who believe it’s real and caused by mankind?
There are scientists, for example, who believe the Earth just went through a warming period caused by high sunspot activity. Many of those scientists blaming sunspots either work or consult for the U.S. or British Governments. Those scientists believe that we have entered a period of low sunspot activity and that might cause a mini-ice age.
Any objective examination of the data and methodology Cook and the University of Queensland have allowed the public to see, will conclude that the 97% consensus figure has no basis in fact.
By the way, recently President Obama scrapped the “97% consensus of scientists believe in climate change” claim – and raised it 99.5%:
While the president noted that “99.5 percent of scientists and experts [and] 99 percent of world leaders” agree human-caused climate change needs to be reckoned with.
But then again, this is not the first lie Obama has told during his presidency.
