The claim that “98% of scientists agree that humans are causing global warming” is a blatant lie

Ever since their infamous “Hockey Stick” graph was shown to be based on fraudulent data, the Himalayan glaciers didn’t melt as predicted and the earth stopped warming more than 15 years ago, the Warmists have been desperately looking for a new weapon with which to attack anyone who didn’t subscribe to their Man-Made Global Warming cult.

The Warmists thought they had found their latest weapon of mass deception when some guy called Cook (or should that be “Crook”?) published a study claiming that about “98% of scientists agreed that Global Warming was caused by human activity” (Anthropogenic Global warming – AGW). There’s only one problem – Mr Cook was either a liar or a buffoon.

Mr Cook’s group looked through the abstracts of 25 years of articles about supposed Global Warming – they didn’t read the actual articles! Based on just a few lines of each abstract (not the full article), they classed each article into one of 7 categories ranging from articles that appeared to endorse the AGW theory to those that rejected it (click to see the categories more clearly)

The results were as follows:

1. Endorsed AGW with quantification – 65

2. Endorsed with no quantification – 934

3. “Implicit” endorsement – 2,934

4. Uncertain – 8,269

5. “Implicit” rejection – 53

6. Reject without quantification – 15

7. Reject with quantification – 10.

Total papers included – 12,280.

Then Mr Cook’s group did something very clever/dishonest (delete as appropriate). They took out the 8,269 papers which didn’t take a position. That left 3,933 papers which possibly endorsed the AGW theory and just 78 which rejected it. So suddenly you have just 4,011 papers which expressed an opinion and of these 3,933 (98%) could be interpreted as endorsing the AGW theory. This is madness. This is an absurd abuse of all mathematical and scientific processes.

Let’s look at the figures another way. There were 12,280 papers discussing supposed Global Warming. Of these, a minuscule 65 (0.5%) endorsed the AGW theory and were confident enough to quantify by how much the earth would warm. Then there were just 934 (7.6%) which endorsed the AGW theory, but were not confident enough to make any numerical predictions about the expected warming. So, we actually have a pathetic 8.1% that explicitly backed up the theory of AGW. This is laughable! And it’s rather far away from the claimed 98%!

Then we have a big bunch – 2,934 scientific papers (23.9%) – which Mr Cook’s group (perhaps creatively) interpreted as “implicitly” supporting the AGW theory. So in total, out of the 12,280 abstracts reviewed, a mere 3,933 (32%) explicitly or “implicitly” could be interpreted as supporting the AGW theory and the rest (68%) either didn’t express an opinion or else disputed the AGW theory.

So, to claim that 98% of scientists agreed that humans were responsible for supposed Global Warming is utterly ludicrous. As usual with figures used by the Warmists, there seems to have been blatant manipulation of the data to prove a point that the data didn’t actually support.

Sorry there are so many numbers in today’s blog. But hopefully this analysis of the figures totally debunks once and for all the fanciful and misleading claim that the vast majority of scientists agree that supposed Global Warming is due to human activity.

It’s a pity that none of the politicians and journalists who have parroted the “98% claim” bothered to look at the original figures as I have done. You can’t believe everything you read in your papers. Sadly, my readership is probably around 0.02% of that of the serious national newspapers. So 99.98% of people probably still accept the claim that 98% of scientists agree that supposed Global Warming is caused by human activity.