Adam “Global Warming” Boulton – you are (IMHO) either a liar or a fool or both!

Those of you who watch Sky News or read the Sunday Times will know that Adam Boulton is a leading political correspondent. In the Sunday Times this weekend, Boulton wrote a piece seeming to support the idea that human activity is responsible for supposed Global Warming.

Boulton wrote “But evidence is mounting and it goes beyond anecdote. Last week the journal Nature published a paper reporting that the Earth’s climate was more susceptible to carbon dioxide emissions than previously thought, and predicting global temperature could go up by 4C this century. True, as the tireless climate change “realist” Lord Lawson points out, the global temperature so far has not risen as much as some of the direst predictions but, equally, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded last September it was “unequivocal” that global warming was taking place because of human actions. The panel said its view was supported by 97% of scientific research.”

There are so many things wrong (deliberately?) with these few lines, that I can’t deal with them all here. But to answer just a few:

1. Boulton writes “ the global temperature so far has not risen as much as some of the direst predictions”.  That is a ridiculous statement. Temperatures have NOT risen at all over the last 16 or so years while CO2 emissions have shot up. This alone suggests no link between temperatures and CO2 whereas Boulton dares to write “the Earth’s climate was more susceptible to carbon dioxide emissions than previously thought”. Utter tripe from Boulton!

2. Boulton writes about climate change “realist” Lord Lawson and puts the “realist” in inverted commas as if laughing at one of the few people in British public life who dares to question the new Global Warming religion/cult

3. Boulton trots out the old “97% of scientists” argument as if it was actually true. 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 16 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 fantasy.

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 “97% of scientists agreed that Global Warming was caused by human activity” (Anthropogenic Global warming – AGW). There’s only one problem – Mr Cook (like Mr Boulton?) was (IMHO) 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 (97%) 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 97%!

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 97% 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 the “97% of scientists” claim.

It’s a pity that our leaders and journalists like the ever-podgier Adam “Global Warming” Boulton don’t check their facts before trying to mislead us with comp-letely bogus claims. What are you Mr Boulton? A liar or a fool or both?