Written by William F. Jasper
We have all heard the smug Al Gore line, repeated innumerable times by condescending media scribblers and talking heads, that “the science is settled,” that 97 percent to 99 percent of climate scientists agree there is a global warming crisis and man’s carbon footprint is responsible for it. (Never mind that a few years ago, when it became evident the global temperature data weren’t showing significant warming, the mantra had to be changed from “global warming” to “climate change.”)
Professor Oreskes, together with Australian global warming activist John Cook, will play an important role in the upcoming battle with Trump over the UN’s climate pact, which is a radical, job-destroying, economy-destroying, multi-trillion dollar tax-regulate-transfer scheme that would do nothing to improve the environment or stop climate change.
President Barack Obama was citing John Cook when he tweeted on May 16, 2013: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”
The New American has repeatedly reported on the fraudulent methodology used by Oreskes and Cook to arrive at their ludicrous near-unanimous consensus claims. Prof. Richard S. J. Tol and Dr. Benny Peiser are but two of the experts who have called out Oreskes and Cook, showing that only one percent of climate research papers — not 97 percent — support the “consensus” view claimed by the AGW alarmists. (See here, here, and here.)
Cook’s most damning exposé, though, was self-inflicted. In a series of e-mails, he let the cat out of the bag that, far from being a dispassionate scientific undertaking, his tabulation effort, called The Consensus Project (TCP), was actually a marketing and propaganda scheme calculated to convince the public that a non-existent consensus among scientists did in fact exist.
However, no amount of debunking, and no amount of evidence, will change the “crisis” mindset that grips many of the media commentators. CNN’s Chris Cuomo is a prime example of the arrogance of ignorance among the committed AGW mediameisters. In a combative “interview” on December 12, CNN’s Chris Cuomo went after Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci, repeatedly citing the false claim that the science is settled and that “science” has declared we must accept vast new global governance and controls to avert planetary catastrophe.
Unfortunately, the Trump spokesman did not challenge Cuomo’s bogus consensus assertions, but merely argued that scientific consensus has often been wrong in the past. This is true, but as an argument it fails terribly by allowing the AGW alarmists to coopt “science” and make it appear that only a few crackpot “deniers” and scientists in the pay of Big Oil disagree with the alarmist CO2 thesis. Since so many of the frightful scenarios in the global-warming scare campaign involve complex geophysical and chemical processes, as well as data gathering and measuring beyond the grasp of most of us mere mortals, there is a tendency of many laymen to lean in favor of “science” — if the claims of “overwhelming consensus” are true. In the case of anthropogenic global warming, the consensus claims — very definitely — are not true. But that won’t stop AGW alarmism banshees from shrieking their fake news consensus even louder, in the days and weeks ahead.
