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 the 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 abstracts
expressing an opinion,
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
the paper
does anything
to support
that assumption !