Today's subject: The bogus claim of a "97%" consensus among scientists on the climate, as if a consensus has anything to do with real science!
Not one honest survey reflects a scientific consensus that global warming is man-made and is a serious, or even moderate, problem.
Survey questions are sometimes worded so even I would seem to support the IPCC climate consensus (humans and their CO2 emissions are evil) … when, in fact, I believe adding manmade CO2 to the air has been (inadvertently) the best thing humans have ever done to improve the climate of our planet (slightly warmer, and faster green plant growth).
ANALYSIS OF 4 POPULAR FAKE STUDIES
A group of retired Canadian Earth and atmospheric scientists ("Friends of Science") reviewed four surveys in 2014.
They reviewed surveys (or papers) for the percentage of respondents (or percentage of abstracts) that EXPLICITLY agreed with the IPCC (human activity responsible for more than half of the global warming since 1880).
1 Oreskes survey found only 1.2% agreement,
not 97%
2 Doran & Zimmerman survey - 3.4% agreement,
not 97%
3 Anderegg et al. survey - 66% agreement,
not 97%
4 Cook et al. survey - 1% agreement,
not 97%
FAKE SURVEY #1
Naomi Oreskes
2004 essay in the journal SCIENCE, by a "science historian", whatever that means.
Oreskes claimed to have examined abstracts from 928 papers found in the Institute for Scientific Information database (published in scientific journals from 1993 to 2003), found by a search for the key words: “global climate change.”
She claims 75% supported the IPCC view, and not one directly dissented.
SURVEY ERRORS:
Didn't differentiate between small, medium or large human effect on climate.
Didn't differentiate between benign or dangerous manmade climate change.
Falsely assumed non-scientists reading abstracts is equivalent to real scientists reading the actual papers! (Abstracts often overstate research findings and are loaded with “keywords” to ensure they're picked up by search engines and cited frequently by other researchers.)
Didn't differentiate between papers written by scientists vs. those written by non-scientists.
Didn't mention many papers simply assume IPCC climate claims are true, and then focus on a different topic.
The search term “global climate change” missed at least 90% of the estimated total number of scientific papers on climate.
Medical researcher Klaus-Martin Schulte used the same database and faulty search term as Oreskes to examine papers published in the next three years (from 2004 to February 2007).
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Schulte found only 45% endorsed the “IPCC consensus”, not 75%, and only 7% did so explicitly.
FAKE SURVEY #2
Doran and Zimmerman, 2009
(University of Illinois student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, and her master’s thesis advisor Peter Doran.)
They claim “97 percent of climate scientists agree” mean global temperatures have risen since the 1800s, and that humans are a significant contributing factor.
SURVEY ERRORS:
The two-minute online survey deliberately excluded thousands of scientists likely to think the sun and other external variables affected the climate (survey excluded all solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists and astronomers).
Only 5% of respondents self-identified as climate scientists.
To get to 97%, the authors deliberately focused on only 79 scientists who “listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change.”
Most skeptics of man-made global warming would answer their two questions the same way as climate alarmists would.
FAKE SURVEY #3
Anderegg et al., 2010
William R. Love Anderegg, a student at Stanford University, used Google Scholar to identify the views of the most prolific climate change writers.
He claimed to find “97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of anthropogenic (manmade) climate change outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change"
This college paper was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences only after the late addition of three academics as coauthors.
SURVEY ERRORS:
Not a survey of scientists in general, or of climate scientists -- a simple count of the number of articles found on the Internet published in academic journals by 908 scientists who were prolific writers.
Falsely assumed abstracts of papers accurately reflected their findings.
Did not determine how many of the authors believe global warming is harmful.
Didn’t count as “skeptics” those scientists whose work found gaps in the IPCC theory, or contradicted their claims that man-made climate change will be catastrophic.
Climate alarmists published twice as often as climate skeptics.
The difference in writing productivity between climate alarmists and skeptics is explained by several factors:
(1) US government paid $64 billion to climate researchers from 2010 to 2013, almost all dedicated to finding a human impact on climate, and almost none dedicated to study natural causes of climate change.
(2) It's common for academic articles on climate change to have many "authors", even a dozen, inflating the number of times a researcher can claim to have been published.
(3) Climate scientists who are skeptics tend to be older, and under less pressure to publish frequently.
The study asserts “top 50" publishers are more credible than scientists who publish less, but makes no effort to prove this claim.
FAKE SURVEY #4
Cook et al., 2013
Australia-based blogger John Cook and some of his friends published in Environmental Research Letters
They claim to have reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers from 1991 to 2011. For those papers stating a position, 97% of explicitly stated, or implicitly suggested, human activity is responsible for some warming.
SURVEY ERRORS:
This study was quickly debunked by Legates et al. (2013) in a paper published in Science & Education.
Legates et al. found “just 0.3 percent endorsement of the standard definition of consensus" (that most warming since 1950 is manmade).
They found “only 41 papers – 0.3% of all 11,944 abstracts" (or 1.0% of the 4,014 abstracts which actually expressed an opinion) endorsed the IPCC hypothesis.
Scientists whose work questions the IPCC consensus, including Nils-Axel Mörner and Nir J. Shaviv, protested that Cook misrepresented their work.
Many papers NOT about climate change and its causes were used to get to 97%.
The study did not examine whether authors thought global warming was dangerous.
Klaus-Martin Schulte
Schulte, a physician, tried to bring “Oreskes’ research up to date in 2008 by using the same search term on the same database to identify abstracts of 539 scientific papers published between 2004 and mid-February 2007.”
Schulte found:
“Though Oreskes did not state how many of the papers she reviewed explicitly endorsed the consensus that human greenhouse-gas emissions are responsible for more than half of the past 50 years’ warming, only 7% of the more recent papers reviewed here were explicit in endorsing the consensus even in the strictly limited sense she had defined.
The proportion of papers that now explicitly or implicitly endorse the consensus was now 45%, not 75% (I doubt if the consensus really changed from 75% to 45% -- I believe Oreskes' 75% claim was always grossly overstated baloney.)
Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch
These two German scientists conducted surveys in 1996, 2003, 2008, and 2010.
They consistently found climate scientists doubt the reliability of the science supporting claims of man-made climate change.
But, in spite of their private skepticism about the underlying science, in public they say man-made global warming is a serious problem.
This contrary behavior is called “herding,” -- academics facing uncertainty don't make waves, in an effort to advance their careers.
Surveys of Meteorologists and Environmental Professionals
In 2013 the American Meteorological Society (AMS) reported only 52% of members reported believing the warming of the past 150 years was mainly man-made.
The finding was reported in a table on the last page of a pre-publication version of the paper, but was not mentioned in the final peer-reviewed article.
A 2006 survey of US scientists conducted by the National Registry of Environmental Professionals, found 41% disagreed Earth's recent warming “can be, in large part, attributed to human activity".
Global Warming Petition Project (GWPP)
The GWPP is a climate change statement signed by 31,478 American scientists, including 9,021 with Ph.D.s.
The full statement includes these words:
"The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.
Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
Compare these 31,478 scientists to fewer than 100 scientists and nonscientists behind the UNs IPCC Summary for Policymakers.
The initial Summary is based on many volumes of back-up data.
But the initial Summary is edited by politicians all around the world, after which the back up documents are revised, by fewer than 100 scientists and non-scientists, to match the revised final Summary (this process is politics, not real science … not that as the IPCCs computer game wild guesses about the future climate were real science to begin with!).
Fewer than 100 IPCC people, a motley mix of scientists on government payrolls, and smarmy non-scientist "activists", have actually endorsed the main findings of the IPCC Summary AFTER it has been revised by world politicians.