The truth behind the "97% of scientists agree" claim.
Like everything else about the global warming scam, it's a huge lie.
Barry Soetoro*, AKA Barack Obama, probably popularized the “97% consensus” claim more than anyone else. Regardless of where you heard it first, it’s a complete crock. There are at least two prominent early sources for the claim that were publicized during Obama’s first term. I believe the first one was something called the ‘Doran Survey’, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois.
Whether referring to Doran or to something else, a number of 2500 IPCC United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “scientists” were often claimed to be the 100%, implying that about 2425 of them agreed that global warming was man made and was pretty bad to catastrophic.
Would you like to take a guess at how many “scientists” were actually included in the Doran Survey? Well it turns out that the survey reached far more than 2500 “scientists”, it actually reached 10,257. Oh wow, that’s a lot, right?? Well keep your pants on a minute, because that’s just how many were asked to respond. Out of those 10,000 plus, only 3,146 bothered to respond. Oh well, that’s still over 3,000, which is a lot, right?? Welllllll……
Are you sitting down? And you’re not eating or drinking anything? I’m asking because I’m about to tell you how the surveyors arrived at the 97% consensus, and I don’t want you to blame me if you read it and then spew food and/or drink all over the screen you’re reading from, and/or other items in your immediate vicinity.
For various reasons, the people behind the study whittled the 3,146 responses they got to their online survey down to 77!!! Yes, that’s Seventy Seven, as in less than 8 dozen. Of those 77, 75 then agreed with man made global warming based on just two simple questions. 75 out of 77 yields the original “97% consensus”!!!!
I told that number to a left winger on FascistBook a few years ago and he replied “Preposterous”. Then I showed him him the facts. This site has the best description of the Doran Survey I’ve seen, and if you read the article at the link it gets worse. The two questions were deliberately vague:
1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
The 2nd one in particular is bad, as there is no definition of “significant”. The linked article goes on to explain that vagueness and the further deceit of the two researchers taking the survey. My bold:
As for the second question, 82% of the earth scientists replied that that human activity had significantly contributed to the warming. Here the vagueness of the question comes into play. Since skeptics believe that human activity been a contributing factor, their answer would have turned on whether they consider a 10% or 15% or 35% increase to be a significant contributing factor. Some would, some wouldn’t.
In any case, the two researchers must have feared that an 82% figure would fall short of a convincing consensus - almost one in five wasn’t blaming humans for global warming - so they looked for subsets that would yield a higher percentage. They found it - almost - in those whose recent published peer-reviewed research fell primarily in the climate change field. But the percentage still fell short of the researchers’ ideal. So they made another cut, allowing only the research conducted by those earth scientists who identified themselves as climate scientists.
Once all these cuts were made, 75 out of 77 scientists of unknown qualifications were left endorsing the global warming orthodoxy. The two researchers were then satisfied with their findings. Are you?
Ponder that survey response reduction “process” for a bit and decide what it tells you. The researchers only got a 30% response rate overall, but even then they discounted over 97.5% of the responses they did get just so they could come up with an absurdly high final percentage of global warming believers!
In my vocabulary that’s complete fraud even without factoring in the vagueness of the questions. Factor in that vagueness and compare it to a perfectly reasonable added requirement that any given scientific expert must agree that over half of any actual warming since the industrial revolution is man made, and thus due to man made carbon dioxide emissions, and the human contribution will result in dangerous global warming over the next 50 to 100 years. If you make the question much more specific like that, the percentage agreeing with man made global warming might go all the way down to 50%. or maybe even lower. As in “scientists” are actually quite divided on the issue so there’s no damn consensus at all.
Then add in another super obvious factor. “Climate scientists” need research funding to do their “climate sciencing”. That means they need to persuade someone or some company to fund them. How much funding do you think there would be if a “climate scientist” went to a potential source of money and said “Well, there’s been some slight warming since the industrial revolution began, but it doesn’t look like that big of a deal. Maybe the oceans will rise between 3 and 6 inches in the next 100 years. And by the way, the increase in atmospheric CO2 just happens to be great for plant life on the planet.”?? How many sources of funding do you think there would be for any given “climate scientist” making that sort of case??? And how much money do you think would be spent overall on “climate science” research???
Then let’s throw in one more factor. The massive left wing bias of the media aside, the old adage is always true in the news business. “If it bleeds it leads.” This means anything sensational gets top billing and gets the most coverage. Failing something that’s actually big news without being exaggerated, whatever news that can be sensationalized will be sensationalized. (There’s a reason CNN was “The Missing Plane Network” for about 15 months before Trump decided to run for president.) If global warmists aren’t hyping and exaggerating the hell out of their claims, they’re not going to be newsworthy, and then there’s even less incentive for anyone to shell out up to millions of dollars a pop for a “climate science study”.
And finally, of course, if global warming is not some “existential threat”, then left wing tyrants can’t use it to control your life and enrich themselves beyond belief. Al Gore, for one obvious example, went from about $2 million net worth in 2001 right after his failed presidential run, to over $300 million by 2013!!
There are some other 97% consensus “studies”, but at least one is actually much worse in terms of what got excluded to arrive at the 97% number. Maybe more on that in another post. For a change, here’s one of my own pictures, showing desert fauna quite healthy in late November 2015 just outside Phoenix. This was less than 2 months before Al Gore’s doomsday clock expired. Does it look to you like it’s getting scorched? I can assure you that right now the desert around greater Phoenix is MUCH greener than what you see in this sunset picture.
Before you dismiss the name “Barry Soetoro” as a “conspiracy theory”, consider how many of those so called “conspiracy theories” have turned out to be “reality descriptions” in the past few years.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/18/what-else-did-the-97-of-scientists-say/