Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring '97-Percent Consensus' Claims
Global warming alarmists and their allies in the liberal media have been caught doctoring the results of a widely cited paper asserting there is a 97-percent scientific consensus regarding human-caused global warming. After taking a closer look at the paper, investigative journalists report the authors’ claims of a 97-pecent consensus relied on the authors misclassifying the papers of some of the world’s most prominent global warming skeptics. At the same time, the authors deliberately presented a meaningless survey question so they could twist the responses to fit their own preconceived global warming alarmism.
Global warming alarmist John Cook, founder of the misleadingly named blog site
Skeptical Science, published a
paper with several other global warming alarmists claiming they reviewed nearly 12,000 abstracts of studies published in the peer-reviewed climate literature. Cook reported that he and his colleagues found that 97 percent of the papers that expressed a position on human-caused global warming “endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
As is the case with other ‘surveys’ alleging an overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming, the question surveyed had absolutely nothing to do with the issues of contention between global warming alarmists and global warming skeptics. The question Cook and his alarmist colleagues surveyed was simply whether humans have caused some global warming. The question is meaningless regarding the global warming debate because most skeptics as well as most alarmists believe humans have caused some global warming. The issue of contention dividing alarmists and skeptics is whether humans are causing global warming of such negative severity as to constitute a crisis demanding concerted action.
Either through idiocy, ignorance, or both, global warming alarmists and the liberal media have been reporting that the Cook study shows a 97 percent consensus that humans are causing a global warming crisis. However, that was clearly not the question surveyed.
Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring '97-Percent Consensus' Claims
Your article was written in 2013 and is the opinion of one man. Here is an update from the union of Concerned Scientists, a well-respected group.
Scientists Agree: Global Warming is Happening and Humans are the Primary Cause
Scientists Agree: Global Warming is Happening and Humans are the Primary Cause
Contents
Human fingerprints
Image: IPCC AR5
The evidence is overwhelming. Record-breaking temperatures, humidity, and sea level rise, along with many other indicators, show that the Earth is warming fast, and that all the heat-trapping emissions we release into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels is changing our climate.
The time to act is now. But, many powerful industry interests have hindered action and have,
largely through surrogates, spread dangerous myths about climate change.
One of the preferred tactics these groups use to sow confusion is to promote studies that either ignore or misrepresent the evidence of thousands of articles published in well-established and well-respected scientific journals, which show that global warming is happening and that it is caused by humans.
No matter how much contrarians try to cloak reality, the evidence is not going away.
Widespread scientific consensus
Scientists worldwide agree that global warming is happening, and that human activity causes it.
Image: IPCC Assesment Report 5 Cover
The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (
AR5), written by a panel of hundreds of climate experts and scientists from member countries of the
World Meteorological Organization the
United Nations Environmental Programme, plus a team of external reviewers, states unambiguously:
Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of green-house gases are the highest in history. […] Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.
The scientific consensus is clear. Building on two
previous studies, a landmark 2013
peer-reviewed study evaluated 10,306 scientists to confirm that over 97 percent climate scientists agree, and over 97 percent of scientific articles find that global warming is real and largely caused by humans.
A
more recent peer-reviewed paper examined existing studies on consensus in climate research, and concluded that the 97 percent estimate is robust.
This level of consensus is
equivalent to the level of agreement among scientists that smoking causes cancer – a statement that very few people, if any, contest today.
Yale Program on Climate Communication
The American public also increasingly agrees that global warming is happening.
A 2016 poll from Yale found that 70 percent of Americans believe global warming is happening, while record low number of Americans (12 percent) say the opposite.
A
Gallup poll from 2017 showed that the number of Americans who worry “a great deal” about global warming has increased from 37 percent in 2016 to 45 percent in 2017. The acceptance of human-caused emissions as the cause of warming is not keeping pace with those that believe it is happening, but it is at 53 percent.
