After I posted a quote from the Economist regarding flat temperatures over the past 15 years, one of the commenters on that post went all 97% on me. What is that? It is the years old, pre-programmed, AWG/Media narrative response to any challenger (see ‘denier’) of the so-called settled science of human driven climate change.
But the number is based on a bad survey, poorly employed, and aggressively tweaked, based on a sliver of respondents, from only a few countries, who just happened to pick the correct answers, to achieve a desired outcome– much like the so-called science of Global Warming itself. (Delete the emails, hide the decline, block opposing research!).
Having invoked the 97% fraud discussion was no longer going to be an option.
This commenter was a fully programmed climate-denier denier. Someone who exists to troll the blogosphere and shout 97%! at anyone who dare question the prophets or their sacred texts. Not much left to do but wait to be called a Bush-loving, climate bigot who is a racist shill for big oil…or something.
I do not have much time to spare most days so chatting up climate zombies makes about as much sense as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest. But I do have time to cross-post research regarding the source of the 97% figure the climate propaganda hacks cling to and I happily reproduce it here for our mutual consideration.
(With thanks to Anthony Watts for posting it. For another look at the complicit fraud of those who invoke the 97%, see this post by Barry Woods–very detailed and lengthy but each new paragraph is guaranteed to make AGW advocates bleed out their decline-hiding eyes.)
Deceitful claim: 97% of climate scientists think humans contribute to global warming
by Lawrence Solomon December 30, 2010 – 2:35 pm
Original Link:
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/12/30/lawrence-solomon-75-climate-scientists-think-humans-contribute-to-global-warming/How do we know there’s a scientific consensus on climate change? Pundits and the press tell us so. And how do the pundits and the press know? Until recently, they typically pointed to the number 2500 – that’s the number of scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those 2500, the pundits and the press believed, had endorsed the IPCC position. [1]
To their embarrassment, most of the pundits and press discovered that they were mistaken – those 2500 scientists hadn’t endorsed the IPCC’s conclusions, they had merely reviewed some part or other of the IPCC’s mammoth studies. To add to their embarrassment, many of those reviewers from within the IPCC establishment actually disagreed with the IPCC’s conclusions, sometimes vehemently.
The upshot? The punditry looked for and recently found an alternate number to tout — “97% of the world’s climate scientists” accept the consensus, articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere have begun to claim.
This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers – in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout.
The two researchers started by altogether excluding from their survey the thousands of scientists most likely to think that the Sun, or planetary movements, might have something to do with climate on Earth – out were the solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists and astronomers. That left the 10,257 scientists in disciplines like geology, oceanography, paleontology, and geochemistry that were somehow deemed more worthy of being included in the consensus. The two researchers also decided that scientific accomplishment should not be a factor in who could answer – those surveyed were determined by their place of employment (an academic or a governmental institution). Neither was academic qualification a factor – about 1,000 of those surveyed did not have a PhD, some didn’t even have a master’s diploma.
To encourage a high participation among these remaining disciplines, the two researchers decided on a quickie survey that would take less than two minutes to complete, and would be done online, saving the respondents the hassle of mailing a reply. Nevertheless, most didn’t consider the quickie survey worthy of response –just 3146, or 30.7%, answered the two questions on the survey:
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 questions were actually non-questions. From my discussions with literally hundreds of skeptical scientists over the past few years, I know of none who claims that the planet hasn’t warmed since the 1700s, and almost none who think that humans haven’t contributed in some way to the recent warming – quite apart from carbon dioxide emissions, few would doubt that the creation of cities and the clearing of forests for agricultural lands have affected the climate. When pressed for a figure, global warming skeptics might say that human are responsible for 10% or 15% of the warming; some skeptics place the upper bound of man’s contribution at 35%. The skeptics only deny that humans played a dominant role in Earth’s warming.
Surprisingly, just 90% of those who responded to the first question believed that temperatures had risen – I would have expected a figure closer to 100%, since Earth was in the Little Ice Age in the centuries immediately preceding 1800. But perhaps some of the responders interpreted the question to include the past 1000 years, when Earth was in the Medieval Warm Period, generally thought to be warmer than today.
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 [2]. Are you?
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the author of The Deniers.—
[1] http://www.probeinternational.org/ipcc-flyer-low%5B1%5D.pdf
[2] http://probeinternational.org/library/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/012009_Doran_final1.pdf
Start with 10,000 plus people you think might go your way, ask two ambiguous questions, whittle that down to 75 out of 77 and call it settled science. Using those kinds of “survey methods” anyone could prove anything they wanted, but you have to be a climate zealot with the media machine behind you to make it an undeniable “fact.”
(Only 80% of Dentists recommend Trident for their patients who chew gum, says the company selling the gum.)
Don’t forget to check out the post by Barry Woods
