Today, a new “peer-reviewed” paper is being released from Cornell University titled Greater than 99% Consensus on Human Caused Climate Change in the Peer-Reviewed Scientific Literature.
The study is yet another attempt to convey the nebulous notion that widespread scientific consensus exists regarding the primary causal factor behind climate change. A previous study, spearheaded by climate blogger activist John Cook, concluded in 2013 there was “97 percent consensus.” Despite near universal acclaim and its citation by leading policymakers such as the United Kingdom’s energy minister, the study was inherently flawed.
Dr. Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia explains,
The ‘97% consensus’ article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country [UK] that the energy minister should cite it.
Even The Guardian – typically a stalwart supporter of climate activism – ran a headline stating: The claim of a 97% consensus on global warming does not stand up
After a thorough analysis, more than 100 published articles shredded the study’s faulty methodology and completely rejected its postulated consensus level of 97 percent.
Yet, Cook’s baseless study was still used as the inspiration for today’s release from Cornell – which, unsurprisingly, is similarly flawed. Regarding the researchers’ methodological approach, the article’s press release states, “In the study, the researchers began by examining a random sample of 3,000 studies from the dataset of 88,125 English-language climate papers published between 2012 and 2020.”
There are many issues with this approach, the primary concern being selection bias. The authors arbitrarily decide to look at just an eight-year range of climate papers, neglecting to examine the large number of papers published before 2012. This approach, therefore, conveniently “forgets” to incorporate the significant sample of climate skeptical papers written in response to the then-nascent concept of global warming in the 1970s.
They go on to say “case closed” even as the glaring bias of pre-selection ensures many skeptical papers from the 1970s, when global warming first appeared on the radar of science, to today, were excluded from the study.
Primary paper author Mark Lynas, visiting fellow with Cornell’s Alliance for Science, concludes:
We are virtually certain that the consensus is well over 99% now and that it’s pretty much case closed for any meaningful public conversation about the reality of human-caused climate change.
To cast further shadow upon the study’s conclusions beyond the glaring selection bias problem, Lynas himself inspires reason for distrust. The lead author has a history of climate activism.
Danish author Bjørn Lomborg, a former member of Greenpeace, penned a book titled The Skeptical Environmentalist. In that book, Lomborg suggested pragmatic solutions to climate issues. At a book signing in 2001 in Oxford, England, Lynas was caught on video throwing a pie in the face of a Lomborg, who was simply attempting to establish good scientific procedure. Rather than attempting to rationally object like an academic is expected to do, Lynas resorted to personal assault.
To further confound the aforementioned issues with the study and its authors, the entire focus of the study is based on the flawed premise that consensus matters, or should even be sought.
Dr. Richard Tol effectively summarizes this problem in his rebuke of this study’s conclusions, claiming,
Consensus is irrelevant in science. There are plenty of examples in history where everyone agreed and everyone was wrong.
Indeed, there are many such examples. Consensus does not require truth or accuracy, it merely establishes that a group of any number of individuals congregated and agreed to a certain perspective – which is often based on nothing but misinformed opinions.
Author Alex Alexander explains this sociological phenomenon in his article, When Consensus is a Bad Way to Decide,
Consensus is about persuasion and compromise, not right or wrong, not what works best. Consensus is about human interactions, which are mainly about emotions, jumping to conclusions, and negotiation, and may or may not include facts and analysis. Consensus is about compromise, and compromise means that someone, maybe everyone, has to set aside an idea that may have value in order to satisfy the group, or the leader of the group.
Even world-renowned physicist Albert Einstein recognized the fallacy of consensus when it is applied to science. When the Nazi Party of Germany decided they didn’t like Einstein because he was Jewish, they set about to discredit him by publishing One Hundred Authors Against Einstein in 1931. In total, 121 authors were identified as opponents to Einstein’s special relativity theory.
Einstein, one step ahead of them all is said to have riposted,
It would not have required one hundred authors to prove me wrong; one would have been enough.
This is the essence of science – it only takes one author employing sound scientific experimentation to provide effective evidence in support of a theory or hypothesis. Needless to say, this is not how Lynas and many of his peers have historically operated.
So, when Lynas asserts that the case is closed, he has provided little to no valid evidence in support of his theory. More methodologically sound forays into predicting the effects of global warming have been attempted, but their results range everywhere from “little effect” to apocalyptic scenarios. It simply depends on the scientist, the specific question being asked, and the methodology employed to test that question.
Science cannot necessarily provide us with a foolproof answer to the exact effects that global warming may have on our planet, but one thing is certain: science is not a popularity contest. The study released today only further cements that consensus is completely meaningless as a means of establishing proof.
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I find “we searched the web” to be a disqualifying criteria.
😎
A few keystrokes and the data is suddenly … different.
88125 papers and still no definite number for climate sensitivity, in fact the range of possible values has widened.
Lack of progress is an indicator of pseudoscience.
After reading the study I found the author made an error in calculations. In fact 104.375% consensus exists in peer reviewed papers. Which is the highest on record since satelite records began. We expect the consensus to be higher next year due to global warming.
There’s the problem. A serial liar concocted the whole mess by imitating J. Cook.
… and John Cook’s ‘study’ is a model of bad scholarship. It was soundly debunked by Legates et. al. … who proved that the actual consensus, using Cook’s own data, was 0.3%. This proves that fully 99.7% of scientists disagree with Cook’s premise.
Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change
“However, inspection of a claim by Cook et al. (Environ Res Lett 8:024024, 2013) of 97.1 % consensus, heavily relied upon by Bedford and Cook, shows just 0.3 % endorsement of the standard definition of consensus: that most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic.”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9
“bias of pre-selection ” must be large, because serious researchers checking the first “global warming” scare, after making sure that the case was bogus, and changed subjects. One is bored in spending time on the same thing, if one enjoys physics research.
892 papers out of 3000 = 99.9%. That’s new maths for you. 😉
the 88,125 was distilled down to 3,000
Which means they essentially made up the number they liked. IOW, business as usual for the bullshit “consensus” claims.
The only real purpose for claims of “consensus” is to make people stop thinking, questioning, researching, etc. Because they know the climate crap won’t stand up to the slightest bit of reason.
85,125 Were eliminated as to their stated views on Natural Warming
Article received 7 June 2021. The conclusion refers to IPCC AR6 from 9 August 2021. Strange.
What if the 4 skeptical studies mentioned in the paper are correct? In fact the very existence of skeptical peer reviewed papers proves that the science is not in fact settled.
This will eventually backfire on science itself. Once reality prevails at some point in the future, and the end of the world does not happen despite the unrelenting rise of CO2, people will blame science and scientists because they will see them as one undifferentiated blob, all agreeing 100%, rather than realising that a spectrum of opinions existed but groupthink, politics and money worked to suppress the more skeptical wing.
They’ve only moved the needle from 97% to 99.9%. If they were serious about the imminent climate apocalypse, the “sixth mass extinction”, the “existential threat”, they would have turned the dial up to 11. They should be talking about the 110% certainty. Maybe next year…
“Even The Guardian – typically a stalwart supporter of climate activism – ran a headline stating: The claim of a 97% consensus on global warming does not stand up”
A guest opinion piece by Professor Richard Tol, critical of the methodology. However
“The consensus is of course in the high nineties. No one ever said it was not. We don’t need Cook’s survey to tell us that.”
Richard Tol
Why are you Warmunists so obsessed with “consensus”? It has been explained many times on this blog that consensus is completely irrelevant.
Please present empirical evidence for the hypothesis that atmospheric CO2 controls temperatures.
Heh. Try this Google search: site:wattsupwiththat.com “97%” “consensus” “Cook”. Eight articles in the weeks following publication alone.
The point of formally quantifying the consensus is not to prove any scientific hypothesis, the motivation was that the degree of consensus was not generally known amongst the public and this had the potential to dilute the political will for action. From Cook et al.
An accurate perception of the degree of scientific consensus is an essential element to public support for climate policy Communicating the scientific consensus
also increases people’s acceptance that climate change (CC) is happening. Despite numerous indicators of a consensus, there is wide public perception that climate scientists disagree over the fundamental cause of global warming.
Given that the paper went viral and ‘97%’ is now a meme, you’d have to say Job Well Done 🙂
Yep.
Truly a Goebels-worthy effort.
Thank you so much for confirming my point. CAGW is entirely political and the so-called “Science” is merely window dressing.
When skeptical papers are actively being suppressed, is it any surprise that most papers published support the consensus?
No government will pay for “science” that undermines its policies. Since it is government funding CliSciFi, you get lots of pee-reviewed nonsense. Cargo cult science.
They could have also taken only the peer reviewed papers since 2010. Then there would have practically been only alarmist papers there due to selection bias of the journals themselveves.
Since the paper itself shows shy of 30% agreement with their search terms it is of course ridiculous. They say more than 2000 out of their subset of 3000 paper do not take any position on the issue. But of course, they ignore this and say that they only count their own definition of skeptical papers and thus come up with 99%. As if these guys would ever understand what ‘skeptical’ means.
Lynas is a total wimp, coward and mendacious scumbag.
But, being so brings home the bacon.
Why:
Because used the words highlighted:
Quote:”We are virtually certain that the consensus is well over 99% now and that it’s pretty much case closed for any mea…..’
That’s all you need to know and is in fact all that POTUS Trump needed to know.
Unfortunately we see where it got him.
As ‘someone famous’ once said: Beware of stupid people, especially when they occur in large numbers..
and *that* is The Problem we all have here, large numbers of stupid people.
It gets worse, much much worse because they are not intrinsically stupid – ‘something’ is making them so.
See if you can figure the connection with this
Clue: When you sit down for any one of your ‘3 square meals’ every day (and the snacks in between), are you hungry for the calories you get, or hungry for something else?
How would you know………….
How do you know when it’s time for another cigarette, a glass of wine or a spliff.
How DO you know?
Its a very telling picture of the Duchess in there isn’t it – how she towers over the 2 televisual muppets she’s addressing.
btw: How tall is Mr Trump? How tall was Abe Lincoln?
Attached: Another (pictorial) clue concerning/explaining the Duchess, (which I found when I learned to dance and something you’d notice if you did too)
(All a bit cryptic but, I want you to think, Not be told, Not click links, Not watch TV.
I want you to dig…)
Peta,
Don’t forget Lynas wrote the book ‘Six Degrees’ published in 2007 and in 2020 did a rewrite wth the even more lurid, sensationalist title ‘Our Final Warning – Six Degrees of Climate Emergency’
Needs to keep the bacon comlng in!
It is also 100% consensus that the temperature of the Baltic sea will increase if I pee in the water here in Stockholm, that is a fact. The dispute is not “if” but “how much” and if it is worsening the conditions for life or not and if there are tipping points that can be induced with CO2 outside of the climate models. (Earth history does not imply that)
They never state their null hypothesis.
“This is the essence of science – it only takes one author employing sound scientific experimentation to provide effective evidence in support of a theory or hypothesis.”
I am entirely on the side of the skeptics here, but I think we need to be hyper-careful about our own epistemology (since we hold alarmist epistemology in such generalised and justifiable contempt). Popper comes in. It is not that “it only takes one author to prove…”. It is rather that “it only takes one author employing sound scientific experimentation to provide effective evidence against a theory or hypothesis”.
I do hope we are nearing the end of this CAGW fantasy.
What a fitting name.
On my first read of the new paper I noted the following (in the “Conclusion” section on page 7 of 8 in the PDF file of the article I downloaded) :
Curious to see what “peer-reviewed” justification there was for this casual pre-dismissal of any possible “scepticism” about their beliefs, it turned out “Reference 14” was to a “Perspective” piece by Fritz Reusswig (of PIK) back in 2013 on the Cook et al paper.
It included :
It seems odd to me that Lynas (et al) decided to explicitly choose for their “References” section a commentary piece containing a “hypothesis” that the publication of yet another “97+% consensus” paper actually helps to falsify …
Lord Kelvin once said everything had been learned in physics. Only tidying up decimal points was needed. Until Roentgen, Curie, Einstein…. came along.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Thomson#Misattributed
By the methods used in Lynas 2021 — if they stuck strictly to their own rules, the consensus in published papers would be 100% — heck, even here at WUWT, the consensus that the world has warmed since the Little ice age and that the human population has caused at least some of that warming is 100%.
Even the CO2 Coalition, of which I am a member, would rate as a 100% Consensus organization!
They might as well have surveyed for papers that support the idea of gravity.
It’s about more than consensus, it’s about support and grant money for research. Think of the research that is suppressed by this kind of force requiring the focus on one issue.
So, who shall submit the counter weight according to the correct standards outlined in this piece? Bueller? PS I would pay money to fund a rebuttal.
Geophysical data almost always is ambiguous. Sometimes greatly so; sometimes only a bit so. People who post on this site often like to speak about “falsifiabilty”. Ambiguous data make any attempt to falsify a claim tricky. Instead, an alternative approach is to trim the question or claim back and then distill the data down to a robust residue. This carefully trimmed question or claim may not answer the question one hoped to answer in the first place, but it can establish an unassailable position which may still be fruitful.
To examine these 97% or 99.9% claims with great enough detail to establish their “bogusity” will pass over the head of ordinary persons. They will tune out. Thus the trimmed question to these specific claims, is “So what?” The 97% claim says nothing at all about the important questions: Does this establish a real problem with Earth’s climate? If so, what response should we enact? Is do nothing a viable option?
In the era of publish or perish combined with the zero likelihood of being published with a contra-narrative it would hardly be surprising to find the majority of papers agree with the existing dogma.