Cook et al., 2013
A paper by John Cook,
an Australia-based blogger,
and some of his friends,
published in Environmental
Research Letters,
review the abstracts
of peer-reviewed papers,
from 1991 to 2011.
They found 97% of those
that stated a position,
explicitly or implicitly,
suggested human activity
is responsible for some warming.
This exercise
in abstract-counting
doesn’t support
the IPCC claim
that climate change
is both man-made
and dangerous.
It doesn’t even support
IPCC’s claim that
a majority of global warming
in the 20th century
was man-made.
This study was quickly debunked
by Legates et al. (2013)
in a paper published
in Science & Education.
Legates et al. found
“only 41 papers
– 0.3% of all 11,944 abstracts
or 1.0% of the 4,014
expressing an opinion,
and not 97%, had been found to endorse
the standard or quantitative hypothesis.”
Most of the papers they studied
are not about climate change,
and its causes, but were taken
as evidence anyway.
Papers on carbon taxes, for example,
naturally assume that carbon dioxide
emissions cause global warming
– but merely using that assumption
does not mean your own paper
does anything to support that assumption!