I have three problems with the methodology of global warming activists evaluating abstracts to determine a climate change "consensus":
First:
It doesn't matter if 97%, 77% or 33% of scientists agree on something -- science is not based on votes, or a consensus.
In fact, scientific progress often requires consensus beliefs to be proven wrong.
Second:
It's wrong for global warming activists to evaluate scientific papers rather than real scientists who actually understand the subject matter.
Third:
It's really wrong to evaluate a scientific paper ONLY by reading the abstract.
A short abstract provides an incomplete, and often misleading, summary of the whole paper.
--- Here's how the now thoroughly discredited
John Cook "97%" survey was done in 2013:
Global warming activists evaluated 11,944 abstracts found by searching a database for the topics: "global climate change" and "global warming", for papers published over a 21-year period.
Based ONLY on reading the short abstracts, the global warming activists assumed two-thirds (66.4%) of the papers took no position on man made global warming.
The remaining one-third of the abstracts were sorted into seven categories, ranging from “explicit, quantified endorsement”, to “explicit, quantified rejection” (of the IPCC "consensus" that global warming after World War II was caused mainly by human activity).
Cook falsely concluded: “97.1% endorsed the consensus (IPCC) position.”
Quite a few scientists/authors later publicly said Cook and his global warming activists misinterpreted their papers.
Cook never cared whether or not scientists who wrote the papers thought climate change was dangerous (catastrophic, in leftist terms) or harmless.
Cook also never cared that a majority of papers that took a position on man made climate change merely made that assumption -- they did not examine any evidence in support of their position.
Cook and his activists used three of the seven rating categories to imply “endorsement” of the IPCC "consensus", when only one rating category (1) really supports the IPCC "consensus":
(1) man is mainly responsible, with quantification,
(2) man is responsible, without quantification, and
(3) the abstract “implies” man is involved.
Only category (1) actually says man is MAINLY responsible for global warming … which I disagree with, because there is no scientific proof that is true, and no explanation of why 4.5 billion years of natural climate change suddenly stopped, and man made CO2 suddenly became the "climate controller" after World War II.
Category (1) included only 0.5% of all 11,994 abstracts -- which is certainly not 97%.
Other people who decided to read the actual articles and papers, rather than just the short abstracts, claim the 0.5% should have been 0.3% -- and that's certainly not 97%.
Their real analysis found only 41 abstracts of the 11,944 Cook and his global warming activists reviewed – just 0.3% – actually said man is MAINLY responsible for global warming.
Cook's global warming activists never read the actual articles, or the full studies with backup data, that the abstracts briefly summarized.
They did try to contact some of the authors:
“To complement the abstract analysis, email addresses for 8,547 authors were collected … authors were emailed an invitation to participate in a survey in which they rated their own published papers (the entire content of the article, not just the abstract) with the same criteria as used by the independent rating team."
There were 11,944 papers with 29,083 authors.
Only 8,547 of 29,083 authors were sent e-Mails
Only 2,136 papers were eventually self-rated by one or more of the authors.
Only 224 out of 2,136 self-rated papers were said to support the consensus IPCC position (Category 1).
That’s a 10.5% Category 1 "consensus" of those authors whose e-Mail address could be found, who then voluntarily decided to rate their own papers.
10.5% is certainly not 97%.
Many of the author ratings of their own papers disagreed with the abstract ratings by Cook's global warming activists.
Cook didn't care.
For Cook, a global warming activist reading just the abstract, can decide if a scientific paper he never read supports a climate hypothesis … and the global warming activist's opinion was used for the 97% myth, even when an actual author of the paper disagreed with his rating!
You can count on leftists to lie and mislead in support of their causes.
John Cook "cooked the books" -- that crooked Cook !
And people who mindlessly parrot his false 97% consensus claim, such as President Obama, are misguided fools -- for Obama creating a memorable sound byte, using a bogus statistic, is more important than telling the truth.
The truth is that no one knows exactly what causes climate change, or if humans have much of an influence.
The truth is that "consensus" has no meaning, and no value, in science.
The truth is that no one knows the future climate, beyond assuming a continuation of the past climate - in the past Earth's climate has always been changing -- sometimes warming, sometimes cooling -- since long before humans existed.
The truth is the climate in 2016 is excellent, and has been improving for humans, animals and plants, for every decade of our lives.
Leftists, however, don't want you to enjoy the wonderful climate today -- they want to scare you about the future climate, and then claim you must do everything they say to avoid a future climate catastrophe.
Leftists are lying, as usual.