Climate consensus research is the worst, most invalid research ever published in journals

From Valid Science by José Duarte, PhD

And social “scientists” use it to mislead participants

José Duarte

Consider the captivating journal article “An alternative carrier solvent for fingermark enhancement reagents”, published in Forensic Science International.

It was counted as part of the purported 99% scientific consensus on human-caused climate change by Lynas, et al. (2021).

It’s a paper about solvents for exposing fingerprints. It has nothing to do with climate science or the focused empirical question of human contributions to the observed warming. Why was it included?

It was included because it mentioned global warming in its abstract. I kid you notly. This obviously hints at a deeper problem. Why would a journal article be counted as part of a “consensus” to begin with (since the unit of consensus is people, not articles), why is the abstract relevant, who cares if an abstract mentions global warming, and how could a paper about fingerprint solvents possibly be included? (You can read the abstract in Appendix A below.)

It’s not an outlier. Here are some other articles that were counted as relevant “climate science” papers and included in the false 99% estimate:

• “Climate justice, small island developing states & cultural loss”. This is a political philosophy paper that applies the leftist construct of “climate justice”, written by a random political theory lecturer in Ireland.
• “Calcium leaching from waste steelmaking slag: Significance of leachate chemistry and effects on slag grain mineralogy”. This is a paper about calcium leaching from steelmaking slag.
• “Properties and corrosion behaviors of mild steel in biodiesel-diesel blends”. This is a paper about steel.
• “Comparison of refrigerated warehouse energy demand with R-717 and R-507 using eQUEST model”. This is a paper about a refrigerant comparison test in a Cincinnati warehouse.

None of these papers have anything to do with climate science. Some of them have nothing to do with science. What happened here?

This climate change consensus study was conducted by leftist activists who did the following:

1. Not knowing how to perform a literature search or a systematic review on pertinent climate science questions, they simply searched the academic literature for the keywords “climate change”, “global climate change”, and “global warming”.
2. They took a random sample of 3,000 of the resulting papers and had their team of lay activists read the abstracts — just the abstracts.
3. Their team of activists rated the abstracts on whether they took a position on human-caused warming and their level of endorsement of the proposition that humans are causing warming.
4. They then counted the papers/abstracts they scored as endorsing the proposition and divided that by the total that they claimed took a position on the topic. They called the resulting percentage the “scientific consensus” on human-caused climate change.

Why would anyone do this? It’s not a method known to science and has no name. It’s not a remotely valid way to measure a consensus on any topic. It’s a spurious recreational activity that has no epistemic standing — it tells us nothing about anything. As “research” published in a peer-reviewed journal article, it’s completely insane and marks an unprecedented collapse of scientific standards.

We don’t care about anyone’s subjective ratings of abstracts with respect to the authors’ views on a topic. That’s not anything. Given that Lynas and friends counted a fingerprint solvent paper and several steelmaking papers as relevant climate science research, they lack the intelligence to even implement their invalid method properly. But even if restricted to relevant climate change attribution papers, their method would still be invalid — it would still be spurious recreational activity that has no place in a peer-reviewed journal.

We simply can’t do anything with a count of papers based on someone’s opinions of their abstracts, the set based on a keyword search, or any subsequent acts of division or other arithmetic. That’s not anything. Yet this study was widely promoted by legacy leftist media like the Guardian:

These activists didn’t come up with this on their own. They copied the method from an earlier team of activists who published the infamous 97% consensus paper (Cook, et al., 2012), which was also fraudulent in addition to being invalid. It was Cook who had the deranged idea of having lay leftist activists working from home (including the founder of Timbuk2 luggage) rate the abstracts of thousands of irrelevant journal articles they didn’t understand, drawn from “climate change” keyword matching. Cook’s 97% “climate science consensus” includes a welding paper by Volvo engineers, several other steelmaking papers, several diarrhea papers, an article on cooking stove use, etc. (More here.) But again, the deeper issue is that the core method of rating and counting abstracts is irreparably invalid.

The same journal — Environmental Research Letters — published both of these papers, under Editor-in-Chief Daniel Kammen. He’s a deranged political partisan — in 2017 he resigned as a State Department Science Envoy and in his resignation letter to President Trump, he spelled out the word IMPEACH with the first letter of each paragraph… (seven months into Trump’s first term). That’s the kind of people we have waving the banner of “science”. See more on Kammen in Appendix B.

To measure the consensus on human-caused warming, we’d survey relevant climate scientists with smart, focused, well-written questions on human causation, the likely extent of any human contribution, confidence in various future projections and scenarios, confidence in any effects on non-warming variables like extreme weather, hurricanes, etc. The unit of consensus is people, not papers — papers cannot be used for several obvious reasons, and they certainly can’t be assessed by lay leftist activists (and not merely through their abstracts!).

That’s how you’d measure the climate science consensus. There’s no other core method — you have to ask the relevant scientists directly. Such surveys are best implemented by non-leftists, people committed to rigor. Note that we’d still need a reason to care about this topic and any consensus around it…

Zoom out

Caring about a “consensus” on any topic is optional and we need a fuller epistemological framework to have an informed stance on the question of consensus and in what contexts we’d take it into consideration. Referring to an expert consensus is an authoritarian heuristic and we only need heuristics in emergencies or when substantive, rational methods aren’t available. Recent history is full of false scientific consensi, especially when driven by leftist ideology, for example that abolishing the use of test scores in college admissions would be fine, that sterilizing and mutilating trans-identified children is supported by quality evidence1, various claims about racism in policing, claims that COVID vaccines prevented infection and transmission, and that there was good evidence that masking in public reduced COVID spread (it’s not clear why these random empirical COVID positions became leftist dogma, though they fit the authoritarian nature of the left).

Caring about climate change is also optional. By the somewhat abstract and computationally complex measure Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST), the earth has warmed about 1.5 °C in 150 years, likely driven by human carbon emissions, at least in part. A moderate IPCC scenario might project another 1 °C of warming by 2100, an average of about 0.02 °F per year. You can care about that if you want, but there’s no way you or any other biped could notice it over the course of your life — even if you stayed in the same town for 70 years and it saw the same increase as GMST (moving would yield much larger changes up or down, destroying a “climate change” signal). The media can make you think you notice it, but that’s just the power of earth-on-fire imagery and propaganda. Being blasted with climate change propaganda is a profoundly novel way for humans to live, and it’s worth meditating on its effects. Warming is just (mild) change and we have no apparent reason to view the 19th-century baseline as optimal or to particularly care about a complex global average temperature (you live where you live), and cold is much deadlier to humans than warmth.

Enter Social Psychologists

Leftist activist and NYU social psychology professor Jay Van Bavel led a study that tried to trick participants into adopting a leftist ideological perspective on “climate change”. The researchers particularly wanted to spur activism for coercive left-wing policies like carbon taxes and even taxing meat and dairy (which would harm health). Research aimed at tricking participants to be more leftist is common in social psychology — leftists control the field and activism is an explicit goal of many researchers and organizations.

How did the study approach this? It fed participants propaganda like this:

“Did you know that 99% of expert climate scientists agree that the Earth is warming and climate change is happening, mainly because of human activity (for example, burning fossil fuels)? [Myers et al., Environmental Research Letters; Lynas et al., Environmental Research Letters; Doran and Zimmerman, EOS]”

Yes, they actually cited the insanely invalid Lynas study — the one that counted fingerprint solvent and steelmaking papers as quanta of climate science consensus.

Van Bavel and colleagues couldn’t be troubled to carefully read these journal articles. They just assumed they were valid and true, which is a huge mistake to make about academic output, but of course they’re academics and are unlikely to approach journal articles with the necessary exogenous intelligence and rigor, especially those that advance their political ideology.

They misled their participants by citing one false study (Lynas), one rigged study (Myers), and an old study that asked if human activity was a “significant” factor in warming, not whether warming was mainly due to human activity (Doran and Zimmerman, 2009).

And they didn’t cite any of the higher quality climate consensus research that gave lower estimates than these three cherry-picked papers. As I reported here, high quality studies by professional survey researchers had the consensus at 78-84%. Van Bavel and colleagues showed no rigor or real interest in the topic by not citing the much more valid Farnsworth and Lichter (2012), Bray and von Storch (2014), or Stenhouse, et al. (2014) and using their estimates instead of the 99%.

Key to these numbers was asking if human activity was responsible for most or all of the observed warming. In that case, the results were 78-84%. If asked simply if human activity was a factor or a significant factor, the results are in the high-90s, as with Doran and Zimmerman.

At this point it might not matter. In the decade since the 78-84% studies, the climate scientists who would say human activity is a factor but not the only or primary factor have probably been driven out of the field or retired, so it wouldn’t surprise me if a high-quality survey in 2026 resulted in a 95% or higher estimate.

Note that Van Bavel purports to study “misinformation” and yet he misled his participants citing an insane study that treated fingerprint solvent and philosophy papers as quanta of climate science consensus. Like every academic “misinformation researcher”, he spews a remarkable volume of misinformation into his host civilization. I’ve addressed some of his other false claims here and social psychologist Nathaniel Bork checked my work here.

Zoom In

The Lynas team are activists at an NGO called Alliance for Science…

Yes, sadly we’ve gotten used to leftists naming things the exact opposite of their true nature. Here’s what the “Alliance for Science” had to say about climate “misinformation”:

The second misinformation theme related to the claim that the ongoing climate emergency is ‘fake’ because warming so far has been “mild” and that “life on Earth thrived (and was far greener) when CO2 levels were at least 5X higher than today’s”.

They refer to “the ongoing climate emergency” as an inarguable descriptive fact. Whether 1.5 °C of warming in the last 150 years amounts to an emergency is a subjective judgment, an opinion on a matter of opinion. Leftist dogma is rife with this conversion of subjective appraisals on complex topics into inarguable descriptive facts, and the appraisals are often that something is an “emergency” or “crisis”.

They don’t just convert neurotic opinions on matters of opinion into facts. They treat this dissent as “misinformation” and then try to censor it, using government, social media companies, etc.

That this organization talks this way gives the lie to their mission being about “science”. This is ideology, not science. You can think climate change is an emergency or that it’s mild — that’s an opinion, an appraisal, and it isn’t a matter settled by science. The way different people even approach the question will vary, including the extent to which science is an input, and which science they refer to.

Lynas also said “the debate about whether climate change is real is well and truly over and is now almost entirely relegated to the lunatic fringe”.

This is a familiar formulation on the left — that “climate change is real”. Van Bavel also traffics in that phrase and seems to think that saying “climate change is real” says something important and makes the case for the whole leftist totalitarian policy package, from taxing energy to taxing or banning food that leftists have long targeted, especially meat.

Climate change is real? Okay… Yes, I’m real, you’re real, komodo dragons are real, and climate change is real. Now what?

The climate has always changed and always will. So what? Let’s tighten it up: I assume they mean that human-caused climate change is real.

Sure, though that’s awkward wording and “climate change” is too broad and vague. Let’s fix it to: human activity has contributed to the recent warming of ≈ 1.5 °C since the 1800s.

And let’s finish the thought by saying we’ll see more warming through 2100, maybe another 1.0 °C, and this will be partly or mostly driven by human activity.

All good? Now what?

Why would we care about warming? Well, we might care if 1) it affected us or humanity generally in significant, harmful ways, and 2) we could prevent these future harms, or reverse any harms we think are currently playing out.

Point #1 alone unfolds into a complex, highly variable topic. I myself have no climate harms to refer to. That is, I don’t know of any harms to me or to anyone I know. Nor do I anticipate any. Leftists increasingly group all bad weather, storms, hurricanes, even wildfires as human-caused “climate change”, but that’s not scientifically rigorous and it’s straightforwardly false in many cases.

Even if I wanted to do that, I wouldn’t be able to detect any impact on my life, say of 0.2 more extreme weather events per year where I live. I don’t know how to notice something like that, and the leftist lifestyle of consuming daily climate change propaganda that attributes so many random climate phenomena to an “ongoing climate emergency” is deeply irrational, unscientific, and unhealthy.

For Point #2, we’d need to be confident that there’s something we could do to prevent or reverse harmful climate change. I’m not sure why we’d believe that. Note that this proposition is far beyond the core proposition for which there is a documented 78-84% consensus — that human activity is the main driver of the observed warming.

Assuming you care about a consensus of academics working in the relevant fields, I’m not aware of any published consensus surveys on questions like whether we could prevent another 1 °C of warming with specific policies or what have you.

The science of mitigation is extremely complex and we need a serious epistemic framework capable of evaluating climate science and its long-term projections and modeling. We don’t have that framework. That is, we don’t have any validated way of assessing climate science at that level of rigor. We might have climate scientists claiming that we can dial back warming with such and such reduction of carbon emissions, but we have no way of evaluating such claims. As a society, we’re not yet operating at that level of rigor and intelligence, and climate science itself might not be operating at the needed level of rigor to satisfy such an epistemic framework.

Now, if we had the necessary exogenous framework and tools, it wouldn’t logically imply support for the totalitarian policies of the left. No one has to support anything. You might not think it’s appropriate or ethical to ban or tax meat in order to cut a 1 °C increase in GMST to a 0.5 °C increase, for example. Or to make energy more expensive for the same purpose. Energy is critical to life.

You might have all sorts of values, principles, and concerns that trump GMST, sea levels, or storm counts. That’s your prerogative as a sentient being. No one is obligated to be a climate-focused utilitarian/totalitarian. You might not think that optimizing the climate of 2100 is a valid government function. Or you might think that the premise that a 1-2 degree cooler world is in fact optimal is unfounded, or that even the idea of an “optimal” GMST is invalid.

You might also be aware that climate propaganda has been full of false and inherently implausible scenarios like the recently retracted RCP8.5, which many legacy/leftist media outlets presented as serious science without disclosing its absurd assumptions and methodology.

You might think taxing or banning meat, dairy, or hydrocarbons is a violation of important human rights, and that concerns about climate change, backed by the best current climate science, cannot justify such human rights violations. You might think that the people of 2100 do not in fact have a cashable right to a 1-2 degree lower GMST, or any regulatory claim on the people of 2026 to that end — a poorly articulated premise of much leftist discourse.

Leftists aren’t cognizant of the myriad valid reasons why someone might not care about climate change or support their coercive policy agenda. Their way of being on this issue consists of a handful of simple formulations like “climate change is a real” and “climate emergency”, with an eagerness to believe any and all claims that climate change is causing {insert harm}. No purported harms are rejected or seriously scrutinized. Legacy media routinely make false claims about climate science, from promoting or mischaracterizing junk like RCP8.5 and the Lynas 99.9 percent consensus study, to calling people who approach the issue with rigor “climate deniers”.

I’ve never seen anything like the consensus studies by Cook (2012) and Lynas (2021) — measuring consensus by having conflicted political activists read the abstracts of irrelevant journal articles scraped from an amateur keyword search, followed by deranged arithmetic. Ours was supposed to be a scientific civilization, and this is tantamount to pulling out a Ouija board and crystals. This whole topic is begging for a massive epistemic and scientific upgrade.

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Joe Duarte grew up in small copper mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. You can find him on X here and contact him at gravity at protonmail.com.

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Appendix A: The fingerprint solvent abstract

Here’s the abstract for “An alternative carrier solvent for fingermark enhancement reagents”:

Solstice® Performance Fluid (PF), trans-1-chloro-3,3,3-trifluoropropene, is presented as an alternative to HFE7100, methoxy-nonafluorobutane, as a carrier solvent in a number of chemical formulations used for the visualisation of latent fingermarks. The supply of HFE7100 may be at risk due to a recent European Union regulation to control global warming. Laboratory trials using split depletions and a pseudo-operational trial of 1000 porous samples have shown that Solstice® PF is a viable alternative to HFE7100 for the chemical formulations of ninhydrin and 1,2-indanedione. Other preliminary trials have also indicated that Solstice® PF can be used as a carrier solvent for the zinc toning of marks found using ninhydrin as well as the α-naphtholflavone fixative solution for iodine developed marks. Results from the pseudo-operational trial demonstrate that the number of marks detected by ninhydrin and 1,2-indanedione formulations for each carrier solvent is comparable. When compared to HFE7100, advantages of Solstice® PF include a very low global warming potential and atmospheric lifetime in addition to a higher wetting index and lower costs. This study also provides a validation study that supports the potential replacement of DFO with 1,2-indanedione.

The Lynas team read this abstract and thought it counted as input into the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. It merely mentions EU regulations regarding global warming and touts the lower “global warming potential” of a new fingerprint solvent, a product category that cannot possibly significantly impact the earth’s surface temperature. This paper has nothing to do with climate science or climate change attribution, but even if it did, no one’s opinions of the abstract are relevant to an estimate of a climate science consensus.

Appendix B

Daniel Kammen was Editor-in-Chief of Environmental Research Letters for both the Cook, et al. (2012) and Lynas, et al. (2021) consensus studies where lay leftist activists read the abstracts of irrelevant journal articles, inferred the authors’ views on anthropogenic warming, and did some invalid paper counting and arithmetic to generate a “scientific consensus” figure.

I wrote to Kammen after he published Cook, et al. and informed him of the invalidity of the method and the fact that Cook had committed fraud.

In their paper, they stated that their raters were blind to author and journal, that they could only see the paper title and abstract. Their methodology was inherently invalid, so nothing they did would’ve mattered. In any case, they presumably thought this blindness was important because they’d heard of double-blind studies where researchers are blinded, and given that they maintained an Enemies List of climate scientists who they deemed insufficiently alarmist on their website, they anticipated being accused of bias if they could see that the authors of a given abstract were their leftist comrades or named enemies.

Well, they lied about being blind to authors and journals. They maintained a private web forum for their raters, and at least one rater openly broke blindness, saying that an abstract “smelled like Lindzen” and that he looked it up and indeed it was authored by Richard Lindzen, MIT emeritus, one of the climate scientists on their Enemies List. Since they were amateurs working from home, blindness couldn’t be enforced anyway and we wouldn’t normally be expected to believe that such a motivated team of political activists could be trusted to police themselves at home.

Kammen was evasive and would not retract the Cook, et al. paper. It turned out that he was a staunch leftist and had campaigned for and donated to Obama. Obama had tweeted about the Cook study, even adding a false claim that the consensus included the appraisal that climate change was “dangerous”, an issue that Cook’s home workers did not purport to address. Kammen had already proudly blogged about Obama’s tweet touting the study.

I hadn’t thought about Kammen in years, until he pulled this childish, maniacal stunt seven months into Trump’s Presidency:

What’s he up to these days? Well, this is his most recent social media post, four days ago:

This is extraordinary. This is something the maintenance guy at a trailer park would post. It’s gutter level, low-IQ nonsense. (And yes, the text is fake.) This is the person responsible for the viral and false 97% consensus claim. And the equally invalid 99.9% claim, and perhaps next year’s 109.9% consensus figure. He’s supposed to be a scholar of some description, yet he’s manifestly a low-information, conspiratorial, malicious maniac.

These are the people who complain about Republicans politicizing science. No, the reality in front of us is that the left politicized and corrupted science (and the humanities) for decades, comprehensively. The public is in the early stages of noticing.

1 As though the question of whether we should chemically sterilize and/or surgically mutilate children is a legitimate scientific question, rather than an instantly answered ethical one. See my report here.