Don't believe Democrats' climate deceptions and their false claim of "97% of scientists" agreement
For years, President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and the rest of the "usual suspects" peddling climate deception have spouted the claim that 97% of scientists agree the planet is warming and humans are responsible. While the warming was true for the last two decades of the last century, despite a hot summer and the typically hottest week of the year's temperatures, the claims of climate continuing to warm are grossly exaggerated and based on doctored historic temperatures — in other words, climate deceivers are cooking the books to justify their claims.
You can be certain that, holding their convention during what is traditionally the hottest week of the year, you will hear the climate-deceivers try to fear-monger the junk science of human-caused-climate-change.
As with the medical industry and the Affordable Care Act (aka, Obamacare), the Democratic Party’s leaders are determined to crush yet another American industry, energy production. And the best way to do that is to demonize relatively low-cost carbon-based fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) as a means to generate the energy needed to sustain an economically prosperous America that fuels job growth.
Don’t be fooled by their rhetoric and self-serving false claims.
There is no scientific evidence that human activity is creating any discernible impact on climate. None.
Yet you will hear at least once, some version of Obama’s claim that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous." Or his politicized NASA’s more mild-tempered claim, "Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities."
But what is the basis for the frequently-heard “97% of scientists” claim? Is the 97% figure legitimate, or just another scare tactic?
The short answer is that it is a fiction that stands the truth on its head!
A May 2014 article by Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer in the Wall Street Journal (The Myth of the Climate Change '97%’) looks at the claim and found convincing evidence it is a myth derived from deeply-flawed selective reviews of suspect material.
Here are some excerpts from The Wall Street Journal article:
“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,… [who] 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.”
But in order to reach her flawed conclusion, Oreskes had to play loose with the data.
“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.”
A clear example of cherry-picking data to get a predetermined result.
“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.”
”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.”
It would be hard for anyone to disagree that global climate warming had not occurred over the last two decades of the twentieth century.
But the key question is do they really believe “that humans are a significant contributing factor”?
”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, [and geologists] who are the scientists most likely to be aware of natural causes of climate change.”
”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.”
So the actual number of respondents to the survey who subscribed to the conclusion is really just 77 (97% of 79) of the 3,146 who were surveyed! This represents just 2% of all respondents. Conclusion: 98% of scientists disagree that “humans are a significant contributing factor” to rising global temperatures!
There is an obvious attempt by climate deceivers to buttress the fraudulent “97%” claim.
The article continues:
”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.”
Not only are the Love Anderegg findings “not evidence of consensus”, they are based on a subjective evaluation of the views of others rather than an actual poll of those others. Essentially, it is one man’s opinion of what others believe. It also fails to recognize that those who are on the government grant gravy train of massive funding of “climate research” will be the most prolific authors of papers based simply on the funding available. This is especially true since government grants are only approved for proposed research that attempts to prove (or is based on the assumption of) human responsibility for climate change. So this “research” is really just a better measure of the funding source and criteria for getting funded than of the actual belief of the scientific community at large.
And yet another transparent attempt to bolster the shady “97%” claim:
”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. 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 coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found ‘only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—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.”
So next time you hear someone mention the “97% of scientists agree” nonsense, you’ll know you’re either talking to a climate deceiver or someone who doesn’t realize that they’ve been duped by a slick campaign to turn a 0.3% to 2% view into a 97% consensus.
Of course, with its leader lying about climate change, health care, world peace, and whatever convenient fiction of the day he decides to opine on, and with its nominee a corrupt serial liar who speaks out of both sides of her mouth with a forked tongue, it should come as no surprise that the big lie will be the main feature of this coming week’s Democratic Party convention.
Author of "Looking Out the Window", an evidence-based examination of the "climate change" issue, Bob Webster, is a 12th-generation descendent of both the Darte family (Connecticut, 1630s) and the Webster family (Massachusetts, 1630s). He is a descendant of Daniel Webster's father, Revolutionary War patriot Ebenezer Webster, who served with General Washington. Bob has always had a strong interest in early American history, our Constitution, U.S. politics, and law. Politically he is a constitutional republican with objectivist and libertarian roots. He has faith in the ultimate triumph of truth and reason over deception and emotion. He is a strong believer in our Constitution as written and views the abandonment of constitutional restraint by the regressive Progressive movement as a great danger to our Republic. His favorite novel is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and believes it should be required reading for all high school students so they can appreciate the cost of tolerating the growth of unconstitutional crushingly powerful central government. He strongly believes, as our Constitution enshrines, that the interests of the individual should be held superior to the interests of the state.
A lifelong interest in meteorology and climatology spurred his strong interest in science. Bob earned his degree in Mathematics at Virginia Tech, graduating in 1964.
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