What is the origin of the false belief – constantly repeated by President Obama, the media and others – that almost all scientists agree about global warming?
Claims continue to be made that “97% of scientists agree that climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” That’s what Secretary of State John Kerry told graduating Boston College students. It’s what President Obama said in his State of the Union address and a recent tweet.
There’s just one problem – aside from the fact that this assertion is being used to help justify policies and regulations that are closing down fossil fuel power plants and crippling our economy. The claim is completely bogus. As Heartland Institute president Joe Bast and climate scientist Roy Spencer make clear in this article, the papers used to create and perpetuate the 97% claim are seriously and fundamentally flawed. The alleged consensus simply does not exist; much less does it represent anything remotely approaching 97%.
By Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer
The myth of the climate change 97%
What is the origin of the false belief that nearly all scientists agree about global warming?
Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer
Secretary of State John Kerry, President Obama and others frequently claim that climate change will have “crippling consequences,” and that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree that climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” In reality, the assertion is science fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and exercises in counting abstracts from scientific papers – all of which have been contradicted by more reliable research.
One frequently cited source is Naomi Oreskes. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928 articles and to have found that 75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming over the previous 50 years, while none directly dissented. Ms. Oreskes’s definition of consensus covered “man-made” influences but left out “dangerous” – and excluded scores of articles by prominent scientists who question the consensus. She also failed to acknowledge that a study published in the journal Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren’t substantiated in the papers.
Another widely cited source for the consensus view is an article in Eos: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union. It reported the results of a two-question online survey of selected scientists, and claimed “97 percent of climate scientists agree.” Most scientists who are skeptical of man-made catastrophic global warming would nevertheless answer “yes” to both questions. However, the survey was silent on whether the human impact – or the rise in temperature – is large enough to constitute a problem. It also failed to include scientists most likely to be aware of natural causes of climate change.
There is no basis for the claim that 97% of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem.
To read the rest of their article, go to http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303480304579578462813553136
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97% of scientists agree that climate change is real ? If true, that matches the 97% political funding.
They came,
They lied,
They chose 97%,
They lie still.
Tom out of port, lost in lies.
First you must know a lie from a hole in the ground.
Once you see the hole, step around it, not into the life of the liars.
To vote or not to vote for a lie that is the question.
You have sailed out of Port, forgot your rudder, now listing to Port the rocks will do you soon.
Good bed/fellows for these 97%’ers, Stalin, Mubarak, Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, all these others voted in by 97% and higher %’s. Mubarak got mad as hell when he only got 94% and he put the vote counters in jail for that failure.
Steven Mosher says:
May 30, 2014 at 5:50 pm
—————
Mosher, I know you have it in you!
Just do it!
Video redacted>
It amazes me, but I suppose it shouldn’t, that Obama and Kerry and Nuccitelli and the other climate liars don’t notice the resemblance between their “97 percent” and the 95-97-99+ percent majorities in “elections” in totalitarian states. Of course the 97 percent is no more representative of actual constituency opinion than those “election” results.
Obviously, Nuccitelli is feeling the heat from the certainty that the Wall Street Journal op-ed is reaching a wide audience. He’s obviously scared to death that the skeptic position is gaining ground in the debate, probably the more so since members of Congress in both houses are becoming more outspoken (witness the cutting of climate change funding out of the Pentagon budget).
It sure would help if Brandon Shollenberger could release the dirt he has on John Cook, though I would never ask Brandon to put himself in legal jeopardy.
Of course, the problem we have everywhere is that we are dealing with absolutely unabashed, unashamed liars. It is getting more urgent that ever that we demonstrate publicly the falsity of their assertions.
97% of alcoholics agree that whiskey is good medicine.
Politicians and the news media are 97% certain. Everything is because of “Climate Change” Add this to the list: Today the first quarter results for the North American economy were announced and noted as being poorer than expected because to the weather in North America disrupting manufacturing and supplies sue to the extreme COLD. They said the cold was due to “Global Warming” and we should expect more of the same in years to come:
http://globalnews.ca/news/1148831/watch-global-national/ See 13:07
Total trash from a brain dead media.
Harold says:
May 30, 2014 at 8:43 pm
97% of alcoholics agree that whiskey is good medicine.
The other 3% enjoy a beer what’s your point?
Latitude says:
May 30, 2014 at 2:18 pm
Yup!
The Friends of Science issued a major report titled “97% CONSENSUS? NO! GLOBAL WARMING MATH MYTHS & SOCIAL PROOFS” at;
http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=744
It gives a lot of information about the faulty consensus studies. We issues several news releases via PRWeb about the report and the nonexistent 97% consensus.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=745
http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=655
http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=657
No one who has been through the school system in the western world over the last 10-15 years has been taught anything other than the CAGW meme. The debate is being lost by the realists and he agenda is being set by those with specific objectives and world view. This article accurately debunks the 97% myth but no one is listening.
“If the lie is big enough…” H Goering
How much credibility do YOU place in what YOU “think”.
Too much. Like all at the UK Met Off, they are troughing to their hearts content. Betts moves this way a little then that way a little but, like the last 20 years of temperature, he never moves enough to lose his funding. Follow Slingo !
Thanks for a very good summary.
I have come to the conclusion that there are two simple questions that can be asked of anyone regarding global warming: do they accept the validity of the 1998 Mann hockey stick, and do they accept the 97% consensus? If the answer to either is ‘yes’, then you know that they either haven’t bothered to find anything out for themselves (and are merely parroting what they have heard elsewhere) or don’t give a damn about facts, they only care about The Cause.
I wrote my own summary of the 97% consensus here , it’s a bit more light-hearted and goes on to include the Recursive Fury farce.
Interesting how it wasn’t that long ago that Mr. Bast was making the same argument against the consensus on second hand smoke that he is making against environmental protection today. http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2007/11/01/wheres-consensus-secondhand-smoke
You all are completely misrepresenting the 97 percent studies on global warming. How about a little intellectual honesty.
theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/may/28/wall-street-journal-denies-global-warming-consensus
The liberal media has definitely destroyed its credibility through its support for CAGW fraud, as matayaya has pointed out.
CAGW support has been created primarily through the use of Tavistock/Aspen Institute brainwashing, or perception management. The promotion of a perception of consensus is the primary method of Tavistock manipulation. It’s been used not only in the misrepresentation of the support of climate scientists for CAGW based on Cook’s 97% consensus fraud, but also in the misrepresentation of the statistical formula defining a confidence interval in IPCC reports as scientists’ “confidence” in experimental results; this isn’t an error on the part of scientifically illiterate IPCC bureaucrats who’ve written the final IPCC reports, but intentional propaganda and an essential means of promoting the scam.
Another of the Republican witnesses at the House hearing with Botkin was Richard Tol. He said this
“I mean it’s pretty clear that most of the science agrees that climate change is real and most likely human-made”
Tol has also previously acknowledged,
“The consensus is of course in the high nineties”
theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/jun/02/republican-witness-global-warming-consensus-real
Regarding the Doran , Kendall Zimmerman paper
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009EO030002/pdf
Aside from the biased questions,
1. Do you think mean global temperatures have risen since the period prior to 1800
2. Do you think human activity is a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?
to get the 97%, they had to rely on “cherry picking”, .
They mailed the “survey” to 10, 257 people and got 4146 responses, so 69% of those receiving a survey mailer could see the biased , worthless nature of the “survey”, and trashed the questionnaire. Naturally, those willing to respond would tend to be biased in favor of the push-pull questionnaire- which was equivalent to a political questionnaire asking
“Do you think President Obama is doing an awful job and should be opposed by congress?
If yes, please donate $50 or $100 to the RNC”
Aside from the biased questions,
1. Do you think mean global temperatures have risen since the period prior to 1800
2. Do you think human activity is a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?
to get the 97%, they had to rely on “cherry picking”, .
Note that even with only two biased, leading questions, only 82% not 100% of the 3146 responders answered “yes” to the second question. By changing the emphasis to the 79 who had published AGW articles, , they fell into the “cherry picking” error.
Once you decide on a question and a group to poll, breaking it down afterrwards is a “NO NO”.
Example: You want to handicap horse races and figure that betting Post position 1 will make you money, since the horse on the inside of the track runs a shorter distance than the others.
When you get the stats, you find out that your theory didn’t pan out,-results were insignificant at the 5% level, but if the inside horse was ridden by the winningest jockey at the track, for the season, the results WERE significant at the 5% level, so you go to the track and lose, not realizing that your final results were likely to happen .
5% (betting the inside horse at post position 1 shows significance at the 5% level by chance alone)
+ 95%(0.05) for a total of a 9.75% chance of getting positive results by dumb luck.
With multiple factors in a horse race, post position, jockey, total winnings, results last race, days since last race, etc- it was easy for me to fall into that cherry picking trap. It DID make me aware of the cherry picking problem through sad real life results.
It also failed to include solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists or astronomers, who are the scientists most likely to be aware of natural causes of climate change.
It also failed to include engineers who specialise in data analysis to search for messages in apparently random data. While this may appear irrelevant expertise to the clearly inadequate ability type who go into climate studies, it is essential that the claim of deviation should be made not from some arbitrary over simplistic basis of the signal’s projected future pattern but from a proper analysis of the signal structure to determine the likely pattern that should be used as a baseline.
In the final analysis if one scientist or even a redundant sewage worker produces a theory that produces a near match but a large percentage even if it is only 55% rather than 97% produce one that is beaten by a three year old throwing a dice as the current theory is, the one person is the real scientist.
[They found that “only 41 papers – 0.3% of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0% of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1% – had been found to endorse” the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming.]
Ah, the new 0.3% consensus!
It’s like the Ad man’s trick: 84% of 63 women agree that ‘Wrinkle Go’ wonder cream reduces the effects of aging after two weeks!
Here’s another statistic for you: 99.99% of politicians have an axe to grind.
The scientific irony is that those professing a strong belief in AGW lack the intellectual capacity to notice how unscientific those 97% consensus surveys are, yet somehow have the superior intellectual capacity to ascertain the validity of the science
Just one more example of the “Big Lie Theory” If you’re going to tell a lie………….. make it a big one
Nice try but Oreskes is not the source of Obama’s Tweet and not the sole source for scientists 97%, a much newer study done by Cook et al. 2013 is the source: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article
“The latest and most high profile study to survey the scientific literature was led by John Cook, of the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute and founder of the Skeptical Science website, and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters in May 2013.
Cook et al analysed close to 12,000 global warming studies from 1991 to 2011 to see how many accepted or rejected the fact that human activities are causing climate change. The researchers also asked scientists themselves to look at their own papers and confirm whether they endorsed the scientific consensus.
The central finding, reported widely and even Tweeted by Barack Obama’s campaign team, was that 97 percent of the scientific papers on climate change found that humans were causing it.”
http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/05/30/richard-tol-s-attack-97-cent-climate-change-consensus-study-has-critical-errors
Finally, carbon isotopes C12 and C13 in our atmosphere are the smoking gun indicating climate change is manmade.
[Please re-read the first paragraphs above. Several studies (including Cook and Oreskes and others) are critiqued in detail. .mod]
greenladyjen:
If you believe that 97% nonsense then the ‘green’ propaganda has colonized your mind, and no facts or rational discussion will pierce the bunker.
You couldn’t get 97% of Italians to agree that the Pope is Catholic. But 97% of scientists believe in CAGW? You are being led by the nose and you don’t even know it. Your whole post reeks of confirmation bias: you want to believe, so you cherry-pick whatever narrative they emit, and you’re happy with it.
Your big problem is posting your nonsense opinion here, where intelligent, thinking people sift verifiable facts from endless propaganda. Your mind is closed tighter than a submarine hatch, and glaciers could once again cover Canada a mile deep. You would still Believe, because that is what True Believers do.
No sir my mind is educated with facts I learned from real climate scientists not weather men posing as experts.