The "consensus" lie

We are constantly told that “there is an overwhelming consensus among the world's scientists that global warming is human-caused and is dangerous.”

We hear that “97 to >99% of experts agree.

“The science is settled,” they say.

Of course, anyone who has had any training in a physical science knows that there are disputes among scientists all the time.

If there is anything that self-proclaimed "climate experts" are guaranteed to agree on, it's that they don't want to lose their funding.

Where did this “97% consensus” originate from, you might ask?

Well, it was contrived from a study published in Environmental Research Letters (ERL), Cook et al. (2013).


The authors reviewed a total of 11,944 abstracts from climate-related peer-reviewed papers published in a 20-year interval between 1991 and 2011.

Of those examined, 7,930 (66.4%) of them expressed NO POSITION on the cause(s) of global warming. It even explicitly states this in the abstract.

Of the remaining 4,014 studies that took one position or the other, 3,896 (~97.1%) endorsed anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory (i.e., the idea that most, if not all of the warming since 1850 has been caused by mankind's greenhouse gas emissions).

For the Democrats reading this, 3,896 ÷ 4,014 ≈ 0.9706 or ~97.1%

So, what can we deduce from this?

The “97% consensus” was manufactured by sausage-making.

The authors omitted 7,930 (66.4%) of the 11,944 climate abstracts examined because they did not take a position
on the cause(s) of global warming over the last century +.

These methods were used again in a follow-up study, Lynas et al. (2021), also published in ERL, which claims there's a “99.5% consensus.”


In this study, 3,000 climate papers were selected at random. Of those, 282 were false positives, as it turns out they were not actually climate-related.

So, they were tossed out and left out of consideration, which is fine. So, the authors continued with examining 2,718 remaining papers.

Of those, 1,869 (68.8%) of them AGAIN took NO POSITION on the causes of global climate change.

849 of them did, and 845 (99.5%) endorsed the AGW theory. 845 ÷ 849 ≈ 0.995 or ~99.5%.

Between both studies, if the calculations were done correctly, we're looking at more like a 31.1-32.6% “scientific consensus” that >50% of global warming has been anthropogenic in origin.



Do you understand how "studies" can be manipulated for political ends, yet, or are you a Democrat?

 
In other words a vast example of "appeal to ignorance". "If the rest of you can't tell me exactly why it is happening then you agree with this minority who thinks they know."

Also equating studies to scientists is very wrong. Most researchers produce more than one study.

Those 3,896 might come from 200 people.
 
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