To all you friggin' dupes who have bought in to the supposed
"consensus"...
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer writing in the WSJ
* * *
Last week Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduating
students at Boston College of the "crippling consequences" of climate
change. "Ninety-seven percent of the world's scientists," he added,
"tell us this is urgent."
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
Where did Mr. Kerry get the 97% figure?
Perhaps from his boss, President Obama, who tweeted on
May 16 that "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is
real, man-made and dangerous."
Or maybe from NASA, which posted (in more measured
language) on its website, "Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists
agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to
human activities."
* MORONS...
Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that
climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called
consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that
have been contradicted by more reliable research.
One frequently cited source for the consensus is a 2004
opinion essay published in Science magazine by Naomi Oreskes, a science
historian now at Harvard. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928
articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that
75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the
observed warming over the previous 50 years while none directly dissented.
Ms. Oreskes's definition of consensus covered
"man-made" but left out "dangerous" — and scores of
articles by prominent scientists such as Richard Lindzen, John Christy,
Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels, who question the consensus, were excluded.
The methodology is also flawed. A study published earlier this year in Nature
noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren't
substantiated in the papers.
(*SMIRK*)
Another widely cited source for the consensus view is a
2009 article in "Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union" by
Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, a student at the University of Illinois, and her
master's thesis adviser Peter Doran. It reported the results of a two-question
online survey of selected scientists. Mr. Doran and Ms. Zimmerman claimed
"97 percent of climate scientists agree" that global temperatures
have risen and that humans are a significant contributing factor.
The survey's questions don't reveal much of interest.
Most scientists who are skeptical of catastrophic global warming nevertheless
would answer "yes" to both questions.
The survey was silent on whether the human impact is
large enough to constitute a problem.
Nor did it include solar scientists, space scientists,
cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists or astronomers, who are the scientists
most likely to be aware of natural causes of climate change.
(*SNORT*)
* FOLKS... SERIOUSLY... YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS $HIT UP!
The "97 percent" figure in the Zimmerman/Doran
survey represents the views of only 79 respondents who listed climate science
as an area of expertise and said they published more than half of their recent
peer-reviewed papers on climate change. Seventy-nine scientists — of the 3,146
who responded to the survey — does not a consensus make.
In 2010, William R. Love Anderegg, then a student at
Stanford University, used Google Scholar to identify the views of the most
prolific writers on climate change. His findings were published in Proceedings
of the National Academies of Sciences. Mr. Love Anderegg found that 97% to 98%
of the 200 most prolific writers on climate change believe "anthropogenic
greenhouse gases have been responsible for 'most' of the 'unequivocal'
warming." There was no mention of how dangerous this climate change might
be; and, of course, 200 researchers out of the thousands who have contributed
to the climate science debate is not evidence of consensus.
In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some
of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991
to 2011. Mr. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly
or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His
findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.
Mr. Cook's work was quickly debunked.
* BIG FRIGGIN' SURPRISE...
(*SNORT*)
In Science and Education in August 2013, for example,
David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and
former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three co-authors
reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found "only 41 papers — 0.3%
of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0% of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not
97.1% — had been found to endorse" the claim that human activity is
causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including
Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shaviv and Nils Axel Morner, whose research
questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or
misrepresented their work.
Rigorous international surveys conducted by German
scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch — most recently published in
Environmental Science & Policy in 2010 — have found that most climate
scientists disagree with the "consensus" on key issues such as the
reliability of climate data and computer models. They do not believe that
climate processes such as cloud formation and precipitation are sufficiently
understood to predict future climate change.
Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority
oppose the alleged consensus.
* WHAT COULD METEOROLOGIST POSSIBLY KNOW ABOUT... WEATHER
AND STUFF?
(*SMIRK*)
Only 39.5% of 1,854 American Meteorological Society
members who responded to a survey in 2012 said man-made global warming is
dangerous.
Finally, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change — which claims to speak for more than 2,500 scientists — is probably the
most frequently cited source for the "consensus." Its latest report
claims that "human interference with the climate system is occurring, and
climate change poses risks for human and natural systems." Yet relatively
few have either written on or reviewed research having to do with the key
question: How much of the temperature increase and other climate changes
observed in the 20th century was caused by man-made greenhouse-gas emissions?
The IPCC lists only 41 authors and editors of the
relevant chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report addressing "anthropogenic
and natural radiative forcing."
(*COUGHING*)
(*CLEARING MY THROAT*)
Of the various petitions on global warming circulated for
signatures by scientists, the one by the Petition Project, a group of
physicists and physical chemists based in La Jolla, Calif., has by far the most
signatures — more than 31,000 (more than 9,000 with a Ph.D.). It was most
recently published in 2009, and most signers were added or reaffirmed since
2007. The petition states that "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."
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