Cook et al., 2013
A paper by John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends, published in Environmental Research Letters, reviews 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 !