The study which concluded there’s 97% consensus of climate scientists believing the man-made global warming hypothesis is simply bogus. It’s laden with faulty research.Thankfully the American Public isn’t buying the 97% nonsense, according to a Pew study released earlier this week .
Any objective examination of the methodology of the study will conclude that the 97% consensus figure has no basis in fact. But sadly the present federal government, as well as liberals all across this nation believe the study and do not allow any discussion despite the fact that global temperatures have been virtually flat for about 18 years, according to satellite data, and peer-reviewed literature is now scaling back predictions of future warming.
Just 27% of Americans say that almost all climate scientists agree human behavior is mostly responsible for climate change. This perception is at odds with a 2013 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which accessed more than 9,000 scientific publications and concluded: ‘The science now shows with 95% certainty that human activity is the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century.
Apparently Americans aren’t as stupid as climate scare-mongers, progressives, and Democratic Party politicians think we are.
The study reporting the 97% consensus, “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature,” by John Cook and friends, published in 2013 by the University of Queensland was .
According to Watts Up With That, when the source data for the study was published online, the University of Queensland got so worried the study would be exposed they threatened a lawsuit over any 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 was hiding that Cook’s study was a qualitative study which relied on opinion and produced biased results.
Cook and his buddies looked at peer-reviewed studies and subjectively classified them as either agreeing or disagreeing with the climate change hypothesis. Based on the methodology the 97% figure was really 97% of the hand-picked studies they reviewed and they decided supported the hypothesis.
When investigative journalists at Popular Technology looked into the 97% study, they found it falsely classified some of the scientists’ papers as supporting the global warming hypothesis. Instead of arriving at their own opinions the Popular Technology report relied on the opinions of scientists conducted the research and wrote the papers.
Popular Technology looked into precisely which papers were classified within Cook’s asserted 97 percent. The investigative journalists found Cook and his colleagues strikingly classified papers by such prominent, aggressive climate change skeptics as Willie Soon, Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir Shaviv, Nils-Axel Morner and Alan Carlin as supporting the 97 percent consensus.
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 not only less than 97% but it 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. That’s a far cry from the 97 percent of all scientists claimed by President Obama and many of the media stories. And, as we will show below, even this admitted dramatically lower consensus claimed by the study is fraught with problems and falls apart further under examination.
Another criticism of the 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.
Princeton physicist William Happer in explained in Climate Depot, “if global warming were any other branch of science it would have been abandoned a long time ago.” Climate scientists are, of course, obsessed with man’s carbon dioxide emissions. But Happer says this is essentially nonsense. “All of the geological evidence indicates that CO2 is a minor player” in previous eras of warming, he said last week in a Climate Depot podcast. “We’ve had ice ages with 10 times more CO2 than we have today. That’s not supposed to happen, according to current computer models, but it did happen.”
The bottom line is that any objective examination of the methodology used by Cook and the University of Queensland will conclude that the 97% consensus figure has no basis in fact. And despite the fact that politicians and liberals are trying to shove the consensus down our throats, according to Pew Research, Americans aren’t buying it either.
