A closer look at the climate-change consensus. From National Review by Josh Gelernter

For starters, though, Reuters and the president are wrong about what Cook’s study claims. It does not claim that 97 percent of scientists believe that climate change is real, man-made, and dangerous. What it claims is that 97.1 percent of the relevant scientific literature agrees with the much more conservative claim that humans are contributing to global warming in an unspecified amount.

But even in making that considerably more anodyne assertion, the “consensus” is on shaky footing. According to the abstract for Cook’s paper, 66.4 percent of the abstracts Cook and his team looked at neither supported nor opposed the position that man causes global warming. Which gives you not a 97.1 percent consensus, but 97.1 percent of the remainder, which is 32.6 percent. That is, 32.6 percent of peer-reviewed global-warming literature agrees that global warming is man-made. That’s not overwhelming.

And even that number is highly suspect; many scientists have objected to their papers having been categorized as supporting Cook’s position. A number of avowed man-made-warming skeptics were evidently surprised to find their papers included in Cook’s 97 percent monolith. According to a paper written by University of Delaware professor David Legates, et al., for the journal Science & Education, just 0.3 percent — not 97 — of the papers Cook examined explicitly endorsed his position.

Professor Richard Tol of the University of Sussex published a rebuttal of Cook’s paper in the journal Energy Policy. According to Tol, the 97 percent claim, “frequently repeated in debates about climate policy, does not stand. . . . [Cook’s] sample is not representative and contains many irrelevant papers. Overall, data quality is low. Cook’s validation test shows that the data are invalid. Data disclosure is incomplete so the key results cannot be reproduced or tested

.”Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427055/climate-change-no-consensus

Tag Archives

The 97% Fraud- Part Deux

Recent Posts

Recent Comments