Iain Aitken
[Note: This essay is abstracted from my eBook Myths: Widely Held But False Beliefs In The Climate Change Crisis, available on Amazon]
In their Fifth Assessment Report the IPCC, the ‘internationally accepted scientific authority on climate change’, gave their opinion of how much of the recent global warming was caused by human activity: ‘It is extremely likely [95-100 percent confidence] more than half of the observed increase in global mean surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic [i.e. man-made] increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together’. Reflecting that opinion Wikipedia states that the ‘Scientific consensus on climate change’ is that ‘the Earth is warming and… this warming is mainly caused by human activities’. It claims that 97-100% of actively publishing climate scientists endorse this opinion. Similarly, NASA claim that, ‘A consensus on climate change and its human cause exists… human activities are the primary cause of the observed climate-warming trend over the past century.’ And in an October 2020 interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes climatologist Dr Michael Mann said, ‘There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity.’ So is it actually true that 97-100% of climate scientists explicitly or implicitly endorse this key IPCC opinion?
Although science is not remotely democratic (it only needs one scientist to prove that the ‘consensus view’ is wrong and it is wrong) the fact remains that if this 97-100% consensus assertion is true then it is indeed very powerful. If the ‘internationally accepted scientific authority on climate change’ says something is almost certainly true and almost all climate scientists in the world agree then it almost certainly must be true – mustn’t it? Whilst there is undoubtedly almost total scientific consensus amongst the scientific authorities (literally dozens of scientific academies from around the world explicitly or implicitly endorse the IPCC’s opinions) that does not necessarily reflect the consensus view amongst climate scientists themselves. So what exactly is it that climate scientists agree on?
The consensus argument is epitomized by Barack Obama’s 2013 tweet that, ‘Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous’. He tweeted this immediately after the publication of the most famous climate change consensus survey, Quantifying the consensus on man-made global warming in the scientific literature (John Cook et al, 2013) conducted by Skeptical Science, a small group of climate change activists, who, despite their name, are precisely the opposite of climate change skeptics (their strapline is ‘Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism’). This study examined the Abstracts from 11,944 climate science papers published over the twenty-year period from 1991 to 2011. It concluded that 97.1% of the Abstracts (that actually expressed an opinion on the causes of global warming) endorsed the view that man-made greenhouse gas emissions (or, at least, greenhouse gases) cause global warming. Although this was 97% of Abstracts, not 97% of climate scientists, it is not unreasonable to suppose that, based on this survey, about 97% of climate scientists endorse the view that man-made greenhouse gas emissions (or, at least, greenhouse gases) cause global warming. It said nothing whatsoever about how much warming those emissions were causing and whether or not such warming was ‘dangerous’. It is probably the case that at least 99.9% of people who might describe themselves as climate scientists (including those most skeptical about the climate change crisis idea) endorse the view that man-made greenhouse gas emissions (or, at least, greenhouse gases) cause global warming, i.e. some global warming. That is not in any serious dispute. The dispute is about how much global warming human activity is causing and whether or not it is ‘dangerous’. So the study revealed nothing that was not already well known and uncontroversial.
Skeptical Science summarized their findings with the statement, ‘97% of climate papers expressing a position on human-caused global warming agree: global warming is happening and we are the cause’ – where ‘we are the cause’ clearly implied ‘we are the sole cause’ instead of what it actually found, viz. that we are the cause of some of the global warming. If the study had been able to show convincingly that 97% of climate scientists endorsed the IPCC’s opinion that human activity was the predominant cause of global warming between 1951 and 2010 then that would certainly have strongly supported the view that there was almost total scientific consensus that the IPCC was right. But of all the Abstracts reviewed in this study only 0.3% explicitly endorsed that central IPCC opinion1. Even (ex-IPCC) Mike Hulme has noted that, ‘The Cook et al study is hopelessly confused… in one place the paper claims to be exploring “the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW [Global Warming]” and yet the headline conclusion is based on rating abstracts according to whether “humans are causing global warming”. These are two entirely different judgements.’ The recently published paper Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature (Lynas et al, 2021) claims that the consensus is actually 2% higher – but once again only actually finds a 99% consensus that human activity contributes to climate change to some extent2; in fact about 99% of the papers reviewed in this study failed to explicitly quantify the extent. A survey3 of more than 1,800 climate scientists conducted in 2015 concluded that just 43% of them would endorse the IPCC opinion about our recent predominant role in global warming (and how many of them were agreeing based primarily on their faith in the IPCC and/or their self-interest in staying ‘on message’ to the climate change crisis narrative?)
Mike Hulme has stated that, ‘Claims such as “2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate” are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts.’ Supporting that view, an independent study4 found that the views expressed by the IPCC were the consensus of a leadership cadre of just 53 (about 2%) of them, 44 of whom were very closely linked professionally, having co-authored papers with one another and so very likely to share the same opinions. The author of the study, John McLean (climate data analyst at the Australian Climate Science Coalition and an Expert Reviewer for the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report), concluded that ‘Governments have naively and unwisely accepted the claims of a human influence on global temperatures made by a close-knit clique of a few dozen scientists, many of them climate modellers, as if they were representative of the opinion of the wider scientific community.’
One of the most comprehensive reviews5 ever performed of surveys of the scientific consensus on climate change concluded:
- The articles and surveys most commonly cited as showing support for a ‘scientific consensus’ in favor of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis are without exception methodologically flawed and often deliberately misleading.
- There is no survey or study showing ‘consensus’ on the most important scientific issues in the climate change debate.
- Extensive survey data show deep disagreement among scientists on scientific issues that must be resolved before the man-made global warming hypothesis can be validated. Many prominent experts and probably most working scientists disagree with the claims made by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
So what is the real scientific consensus on climate change? There is almost total scientific consensus that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing, that that increase is predominantly due to human activity, that the climate system is warming, that climate change is happening and that human activity has contributed to some extent to the warming, changing climate. Note again that skeptical scientists, like Dr Roy Spencer and Dr Judith Curry and Dr Richard Lindzen, are part of this ‘scientific consensus on climate change’; the idea that they constitute the 3% of scientists who do not support the scientific consensus on climate change is a false idea, misrepresenting what the ‘scientific consensus on climate change’ actually is6. This misrepresentation is designed to bolster the ‘climate change crisis’ narrative and to marginalize and neutralize the skeptical scientists by making their views appear to fall far outside the overwhelming consensus view, even though they actually share that consensus view. Basically, the ‘consensus’ breaks down over the issue of whether or not human activity has been predominantly responsible for recent warming – and whether or not that warming is ‘dangerous’. The power of the false ‘97% scientific consensus that human activity has been predominantly responsible for climate change’ meme, perpetuated by Wikipedia, NASA, Facebook (and many others) is that it can be used very effectively to strangle at birth any debate about the science. As Dr Richard Lindzen has put it, ‘The claim is meant to satisfy the non-expert that he or she has no need to understand the science. Mere agreement with the 97 percent will indicate that one is a supporter of science and superior to anyone denying disaster. This actually satisfies a psychological need for many people.’
So if we return to Dr Michael Mann’s statement that, ‘There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity’ this is very disingenuous. Whilst there is almost total scientific consensus that climate change is ‘real’ and happening and that there has been some human-caused influence, there is no such scientific consensus over the extent of the human-caused influence and whether or not it could reasonably be described as ‘dangerous’, let alone a ‘crisis’.
References
1 Legates et al. (2015), Science & Education and ‘Consensus? What Consensus?’, GWPF Note 5, thegwpf.org, September 2013 and ‘Richard Tol’s Excellent Summary of the Flaws in Cook et al. (2013) and ‘The Infamous 97% Consensus Paper’, wattsupwiththat.com, 26 March 2015 and ‘The Cook ‘97% consensus’ paper, exposed by new book for the fraud that it really is’, wattsupwiththat.com, 12 March 2016
2 ‘Cooked Up Consensus: Lynas et al “Should Rather Be Classified As Propaganda, Bad Science”’, wattsupwiththat.com, 26 October 2021
3 Bart Strengers, Bart Verheggen and Kees Vringer (2015), Climate Science Survey, Questions and Responses, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, pp 1 – 39
4 ‘Prejudiced authors, prejudiced findings’, John McLean, (Science and Public Policy Institute), July 2008
5 Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming (2015) – Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, S. Fred Singer
6 ‘Study: 3% Contrarians Derailing the 97% Climate Consensus’, wattsupwiththat.com, 18 December 2021
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Appears to me that the Government PsyOp staff has used the same techniques on the COVID Realignment Program as the Envirowhacos did to establish AGW, Global Warming, Climate Change, whatever firmly part of the political ideology and programs.
Scientific consensus does not exist. Galileo and Einstein did not need that. It’s against scientific method.
I’m sorry, but the 97% thing has been debunked here more times than I care to count. I think another debunking is just redundant.
For something that has been debunked, there are still a lot of people who believe in it.
Until the number of people who believe in it approaches 0%, more debunkings are always useful.
Appraching asymptotically might take Eternity. Boredom is sure to set in long before…
WUWT better make sure boredom does not set in, at least for those who’ve been there done that.
The consensus argument means absolutely nothing. It is the shutting down of debate and attempted silencing of alternative positions that is anti-science and criminal in how it is being achieved. There are multiple examples of counter viewpoints against ‘scientific consensus’ that are not treated like those in the climate change discussion. Want to argue that evolution is not how mankind came to be and put forth the evidence that ancient extraterrestrial intelligent beings made humans? – you get a show on the History channel. Want to claim Earth is flat? – your Facebook group is fine to continue. Say that global temperature rise is not catastrophic and you are labeled a science denier. Say that CO2 doesn’t have enough influence on the climate to drive the global temperature, you are labeled a terrorist by DHS. It is beyond criminal.
And what would the consensus be on the existence of BigFoot if, like John Cook, I limited my study to self described “BigFoot researchers”, who are currently publishing about BigFoot, and claim to know the origins of BigFoot? It’s so easy to select the participants to get the result you are looking for.
conduct the survey at an alien convention?
Are you an alien researcher?
Do you believe aliens visit, have visited, or are visiting earth?
Do you believe aliens will visit earth in the future and we will have issues with them?
RESULT WOULD BE: ‘99% of Alien researchers believe aliens are coming, and we will have to deal with them. Therefore we should allocate the needed resources right now.
Some relevant viewpoints from a scientist who has helped bring many products to the marketplace while working at Polaroid (SX 70) and RCA (thin film solar cells) is in three articles here:
1) The Scientific Process, 2) Numbers in Science, 3) and Pathological Science.
Article 3 specifically addresses catastrophic global warming and many of the above topics, while articles 1 and 2 present and define most of the concepts in science that are needed for article 3.
The author has made (and reported on) atmospheric measurements (two of the many examples: ozone and particle size distributions of aerosols using light scattering) while developing a communications system based on UV (solar blind) light scattering. He has also conducted cooperative research projects with Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Penn State, and the University of Delaware.
One of the earliest 97% consensus paper was entitled “Expert Credibility in Climate Change”. But was the paper itself credible?
The authors did not survey a broad set of scientists and engineers well versed in climate issues; instead, they arrived at this conclusion by reviewing publications written by a group of 1,372 researchers who often published papers on the topic of climate change and global warming. The authors of the study did not interview or poll these researchers; they concluded for themselves what the selected researchers support and what they don’t by nothing more than reading their papers. So should you trust their conclusions?
The study’s authors consisted of a climate campaigner for the Rainforest Action Network with a Master’s degree in BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION and a summer-school certificate in “Complex Systems” from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Harold), a computer programmer with a double-degree in POLITICAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY (Prall), a STUDENT of Ecology, Evolution, and Population Biology (Anderegg), and a (now deceased) MECHANICAL ENGINEER working in “Environmental Biology and Global Change” (Schneider). Not only did these authors not have any demonstrated experience in climate science, each author had a severe conflict of interest as the result of their study would influence how much funding they would receive to continue their “work”.
In addition, their approach was highly flawed as the papers they reviewed were handpicked from journals known to be hostile to papers that criticize the poor quality of work done in the “Global Warming” field. Finally, they did not ever claim that there is a consensus that global warming will be ‘dangerous’, ‘catastrophic’ or a ‘crisis’; that implication comes almost entirely from a vocal group of alarmist activists.
If is this is the study I’m familiar with, they also only counted those papers that explicitly disagreed with the global warming narrative as being negative. All papers that didn’t mention global warming at all, were included in the “supporting” column.
meab,
One the one hand you have mis-stated the method of the Anderegg study, while also missing the the mistakes that made it far worse than you think.
To determine author’s views, they collected singed letters that explicity supported or opposed the IPCC. The paper would have been questionable but worthy of discussion had they stopped there. The first main problem was that in addition to counting scientists that overtly supported the IPCC as ‘convinced’, they added 619 scientists listed as a supporting authors by the IPCC – even though the standard to be in that group was to merely have the IPCC make any reference of your work. Some author have sued to be removed from the IPCC works and lost, because they are merely references. Anderegg acknowldged they were added by assumption; subtract those 619 and the result is 2 to 1 opposition to the IPCC.
To make matters worse, Anderegg decided to judge expertise based on the number of papers published in the field. A scientist that pubshiled ten individual papers that each took a week of research would be considered an expert, one that pubished five papers that took five years each was not. By his standard, Einstein’s opinions on physics could be disregarded when he first published on Special Relativity because most of his published work before that were revews of others work.
Different paper.
Different from this paper by Anderegg with 1,372 scientists?:
https://www.pnas.org/content/107/27/12107
Please post a link.
The majority of AGW endorsements in the Cook et al, 2013 paper were implicit, and the report’s example of such support was: “carbon seqestration in soil is important for mitigating global climate change“. How does a statement like that imply that man is the cause of the carbon? This is their best example for the largest support for their consensus?
John Cook’s mangling of methods and data in his “climate consensus” paper is a poster child for the warmist movement: cherry-picking only the data that supports their claims while ignoring the wealth of data that contradicts them.
His team picked 11,944 papers that mentioned “global climate change” or “global warming” then sorted them into several categories.
-Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%: 64 papers (0.54%)
-Explicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimise: 922 papers (7.72%)
-Implicitly endorses AGW without minimising it: 2910 (24.36%)
-No Position: 7970 papers (66.73%)
-Implicitly minimizes/rejects AGW: 54 papers (0.45%)
-Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW but does not quantify: 15 papers (0.13%)
-Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW as less than 50%: 9 papers (0.08%)
The vast majority took no position, 66.73%. Only 32.62% explicitly or implicitly endorse the theory of AGW and 67.38% explicitly or implictly rejected AGW or took no position.
So to get 97%, what Cook apparently did was discard 10,934 papers that didn’t support his position (91.5%) and only counted the 1,010 that either explicitly endorsed or rejected AGW. Of that small subset, 986 endorsed AGW (97.62%) and only 24 rejected AGW (2.38%).
In reality, you could say that 33 percent of climate studies appear to say that humans are either contributing to global warming (32.08%) or are the primary cause (0.54%). To claim that 97% say so is a big fat lie.
Just to be clear.
When there’s consensus it’s not science, when it’s science there’s no consensus. Richard Feynman.
The title here implicitly assumes that science and consensus can go together in climatology. It is therefore wrong.
I would not be surprised if 97% of the people who have dedicated their entire working lives to climate change, and who would not only be out of a job but out of a career if climate change was not man made or not a world threatening fact, believe that climate change is man made and threatens the world.
Whenever I think of Michael Mann this is the image that comes into my head…
From the above article:
Well, in truth Mann’s statement turns out to be scientifically accurate, but for a reason exactly opposite that he asserted.
According to current scientific observations and scientific consensus, dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe and dark energy makes up an additional 68%.
Scientist today simply do not understand the basis/composition of either dark matter or dark energy.
Since energy, as photons, exhibits the same properties as matter in terms of reacting to/creating gravity (more properly, to following spacetime deformation geodesics created by massive objects)—as Einstein predicted and as famously confirmed in 1919 by Sir Arthur Eddington’s photography of starlight during a solar eclipse— the obvious conclusion is that science today cannot explain the source of 95% of gravity that exists in the universe. In other words, there is NO scientific consensus on the origin of gravity . . . exactly the same situation as exists with AGW/CAGW.
Just amazing 97% of those who agree agree. Who would ever imagined that would be possible?
People get too gentlemanly in their critique of the 97% fraud. The Cook version (most quoted) took a sample size of around 11.5k papers and found 0.3% marrying up with their desired result that’s all there is to it.
The study is utter bollocks.
From the article: “Basically, the ‘consensus’ breaks down over the issue of whether or not human activity has been predominantly responsible for recent warming – and whether or not that warming is ‘dangerous’.”
Not to my mind. From my viewpoint, human CO2 warming does not appear to be present to any significant degree. The cyclical temperature patterns show it was just as warm in the past without the addition of CO2 and it’s no warmer today even with additional CO2, so where’s the warming from CO2? It can’t be separated out from natural variability.
Some people are just *assuming* CO2’s effects on the Earth’s atmosphere, without any evidence to back up any effects.
Is climate changing? – yes since Earth existed and always will while Earth exists.
Can open ocean surfaces get warmer than 30C? Briefly overshoot but not over annual average while the mass of the atmosphere is within a few percent of present mass.
Is there a “Greenhouse Effect”. This is a belief system that has no influence on Earth’s energy balance and no influence on climate.
Is there scientific consensus? The concept of consensus is not compatible with science.
Is there a “Greenhouse Effect”. This is a belief system that has no influence on Earth’s energy balance and no influence on climate.
97% of WUWT posters believe in the Greenhouse Effect..
The other 3% like science.
So why are Humans much healthier and wealthier than at any time in history?
Look up the UN data for yourselves since 1810 or 1900 or 1950 or 2000. A massive increase in population since 1900 ( 6 billion + ) and yet life expectancy today is 78 yrs and increasing every decade.
And our poorest continent Africa today has Human life exp of 64 yrs and yet the pop has increased by over 1 billion since 1970 ( then 46 yrs). Look up the data.
We’ve endured the greatest con trick and fra-d in our history and yet few understand how stupid their claims are and few seem to care?
Dr Rosling explained it all in just 5 minutes yet few understand or care about the data over the last 200 years. Why are we so stupid?
There is a consensus that a = 9.8 m/s2
Not surprising considering that I got the same result when I checked in high school.
Mann, and others, equate the consensus on climate change with this instead of apples will fall downwards from a tree.
Cook’s paper found (dubiously) that 3% of climate scientists wouldn’t get a tongue lashing from Greta
Oddly, MSM only seem to be able to find that small fraction of climate scientists who think we’re all doomed unless we start living like stone-age Africans.
Big ups to Sky Australia though, for putting Roy Spencer on to talk about what Google did to him.
Skeptical Science summarized their findings with the statement, ‘97% of climate papers expressing a position on human-caused global warming agree: global warming is happening and we are the cause’ –
This is the take away message Skeptical Science wants us to believe. The important part is “expressing an opinion on human-caused global warming”.
So they looked at the abstracts of 11944 scientific papers. How many of those 11944 abstracts expressed an opinion on whether global warming is human caused? How many expressed that human activity is a danger? These issues need to be addressed.
Later we learn that 0.3% explicitly endorsed the IPCC opinion. 0.3% of who agrees with the IPCC opinion? Of the 11944 papers or only of those who expressed an opinion whether humans cause catastrophic global warming? Let us say it was 0.3% of the 11944 abstracts, wouldn’t that only be 36 (rounding up) papers in agreement with the IPCC opinion? Or am I missing something here?
This consensus thing is not new :
Goya got it right , count the publications!
“And indeed that confession, that it is said we made, was no other than what was suggested to us by some gentlemen, they telling us that we were witches, and they knew it, and we knew it, which made us think that it was so; and our understandings, our reason, our faculties, almost gone, we were not capable of judging of our condition; as also the hard measures they used with us rendered us incapable of making our defence, but said any thing and every thing which they desired, and most of what we said, was but, in effect, a consenting to what they said.”
Letter from Mary Osgood, Mary Tiler, Deliverance Dane, Abigail Barker, Sarah Wilson and Hannah Tiler after Salem witch trials.
I’m guess that over 97% of the people in Salem said witchcraft was real.
[Mann said, ‘There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity] We certainly have all experienced the affects of gravity but do we really know that well what it is? [I don’t observe myself being in a state of constant acceleration]
The original government “scientists” were the educated clergy of the monarchies who provided the science of the day of the king’s right to rule by divine providence. Todays government scientists are little different and only provide credence to the ruler’s mandates to be able to take away the peasants liberty and property by consent. As Eisenhower stated in his parting address, “Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”