Just 0.3% of Scientists Agree Humans Are Causing ‘Climate Change’

April 23, 2023 Stan

New data has emerged that directly conflicts with claims by the United Nations about so-called “climate change.”

The globalist UN claims that “97 percent” of scientists agree that climate change is caused by humanity.

According to the UN and its allies, the remaining three percent of scientists who don’t support that “climate crisis” narrative are “science deniers.”

However, according to Gregory Wrightstone, the executive director of the CO₂ Coalition, a lot more than 3% of scientists are skeptical of the party line on global warming.

The many scientists, engineers, and energy experts that comprise the CO2 Coalition are often asked where they “believe in climate change.”

“Yes, of course we do: it has been happening for hundreds of millions of years,” Wrightstone explains.

“The real question of serious importance is, ‘Is climate change now driven primarily by human actions?’

“That question should be followed up by ‘is our changing climate beneficial or harmful to ecosystems and humanity?’”

There are some scientific truths that are quantifiable and easily proven.

It is, therefore, possible that at least 97% of scientists agree with such statements as:

Carbon dioxide concentration has been increasing in recent years.
Temperatures, as measured by thermometers and satellites, have been generally increasing in fits and starts for more than 150 years.

However, it is impossible to quantify the actual percentage of warming that is attributable to increased anthropogenic (human-caused) CO₂.

There is no scientific evidence or method that can determine how much of the warming we’ve had since 1900 was directly caused by humans.

We know that temperature has varied greatly over the millennia.

We also know that for virtually all of that time, global warming and cooling were driven entirely by natural forces, which did not cease to operate at the beginning of the 20th century.

The claim that most modern warming is attributable to human activities is scientifically insupportable, Wrightstone asserts.

The earliest attempt to document a “consensus” on climate change was a 2004 paper cited by Al Gore in his “non-fiction” book, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

While Gore attended a natural science class at Harvard, he got a D grade for it.

The author of the cited paper, Naomi Oreskes, asserted that 75% of nearly 1,000 papers she had reviewed on the question of climate change agreed with the “consensus” proposition favored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”).

The IPCC states: “Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”

None, she maintained, dissented from this line of reasoning.

The primary paper that is often trotted out in support of the notion of “97% consensus” was written by John Cook and several other climate extremists.

Published in 2013, it is the most widely referenced work on the subject of climate consensus and has been downloaded more than 1.3 million times.

Cook runs a climate website that promotes climate fear rhetoric.

The website specializes in attacks against those who have provided evidence that refutes the dogma of impending climate doom.

The project was self-described as “a ‘citizen science’ project by volunteers contributing to the website.”

The non-scientific team consisted of radical 12 climate activists who did not put their prejudices aside.

These volunteers, many of whom had no training in the sciences, said they had “reviewed” abstracts from 11,944 peer-reviewed papers related to climate change or global warming, published over the 21 years 1991 – 2011, to assess the extent to which they supported the “consensus view” on climate change.

As Cook’s paper said:

We analysed a large sample of the scientific literature on global CC [climate change], published over a 21-year period, in order to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW).

The paper concluded:

Among abstracts that expressed a position on AGW [anthropogenic global warming], 97.1% endorsed the scientific consensus. …

Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.

The paper asserted – falsely, as it turned out – that 97% of the papers the reviewers examined had explicitly endorsed the opinion that humans are causing the majority of the warming of the last 150 years.

However, a closer look at the data shows that 7,930 of the papers took no position at all on the subject and were arbitrarily excluded from the count on this ground.

When all of the papers reviewed are included, the 97% claimed by Cook and his co-authors falls to 32.6%.

A closer look at the paper reveals that the so-called “97%” included three categories of endorsement of human-caused climate change.

Only the first category amounted to an explicit statement that humans are the primary cause of recent warming.

The second and third categories would include most skeptics of catastrophic anthropogenic warming, including the scientists of the CO₂ Coalition.

CO₂ Coalition scientists accept that increasing CO₂ is probably causing some, probably modest, amount of warming.

However, they argue that the amount is likely rendered insignificant by natural causes of warmer weather.

Cook could only conclude that there is any type of “consensus” by casting a wide net.

Agnotology is defined as “the study of how ignorance arises via circulation of misinformation calculated to mislead.”

This is how David Legates and his co-authors (2015) describe the Cook paper and similar attempts falsely to promote the notion of broad scientific consensus surrounding the subject of a looming, man-made, climate apocalypse.

They reviewed the actual papers used by Cook and found that only 0.3% of the 11,944 abstracts and 1.6% of the smaller sample that excluded those papers expressing no opinion endorsed man-made global warming as they defined it.

Remarkably, they found that Cook and his assistants had themselves marked only 64 papers – or 0.5% of the 11,944 they said they had reviewed – as explicitly stating that recent warming was mostly man-made.

Yet they stated, both in the paper itself and subsequently, that they had found a “97% consensus” explicitly stating that recent warming was mostly man-made.

It appears that Cook and his activist co-authors manipulated the data to present an altogether untrue narrative of overwhelming support for catastrophic human-caused warming.

Note that the official “consensus” position – supported though it was by just 0.3% of the 11,944 papers reviewed – says nothing more than recent warming was mostly man-made.

Even if that were the case – and the overwhelming majority of scientists take no view on that question, for it is beyond our present knowledge to answer – it would not indicate that global warming is dangerous.

From the information we have just reviewed, the percentage of scientists who agree with the notion of man-made catastrophic global warming is significantly less than advertised.

Several unbiased attempts have been made to assess what the actual number might be.

One of the largest petitions concerning climate change was the Oregon Petition, signed by more than 31,000 American scientists, including 9,029 holding PhDs, disputing the notion of anthropogenic climate alarmism.

More recently, in 2016, George Mason University (Maibach 2016) surveyed more than 4,000 members of the American Meteorological Society and found that 33% believed that climate change was not occurring, was at most half man-made, was mostly natural, or they did not know.

Significantly, only 18% believed that a large amount – or all – of additional climate change could be averted.

Science does not advance through consensus, and the claim of consensus has no place in any rational scientific debate.

If those promoting man-made climate fear need to resort to an obviously flawed consensus opinion, rather than argue the merits of the science, haven’t they already conceded that their argument cannot be won through open debate?

“Cook’s 97% nonsensus [sic] paper shows that the climate community still has a long way to go in weeding out bad research and bad behavior,” Professor Richard Tol said of the data.

“If you want to believe that climate researchers are incompetent, biased, and secretive, Cook’s paper is an excellent case in point.”