Alleged 97% climate consensus dismantled: ‘When you explore the lineage of this cliché, it appears about as convincing as a North Korean election’ – ‘Among all the scientists who agree with the ‘consensus’ are all of the scientists who agree with the consensus’

Steven F. Hayward of The Weekly Standard: 'Most footnotes point to a paper published last year by Prof. John Cook of the University of Queensland, which purported to have reviewed the abstracts of over 11,000 climate science articles. But the abstract of Cook’s paper actually refutes the talking point...'

'In other words, two-thirds of the articles expressed no opinion about the human causation of climate change, while the one-third that did were twisted by Cook into a simpleminded tautology: Among all the scientists who agree with the “consensus” are all of the scientists who agree with the consensus.

Cook, incidentally, refused to share how he and his graduate students coded the 11,000 abstracts, which is reminiscent of the East Anglia cabal and their withholding of tree ring data. But as with the East Anglia group, someone at the University of Queensland left the data on the Internet, where blogger Brandon Shollenberger came across it and starting noting its weaknesses. The predictable happened: The University of Queensland claimed that the data had been hacked, and sent Shollenberger a cease-and-desist letter. Nothing bespeaks confidence and transparency like the threat of lawsuits.  

The only real surprise about Cook’s conclusion is that the number wasn’t 100 percent, since a human role in climate change is acknowledged by every single prominent climate skeptic including Pat Michaels, Roy Spencer, John Christy, Freeman Dyson, Judith Curry, and Richard Lindzen. Studies like Cook’s seek to establish something that virtually no one is arguing. The real argument is over how much future warming is reasonable to expect. Lindzen, Michaels, and others think that we’ve seen most of the temperature increase we’re likely to see, even with further increases in greenhouse gas levels.'