The claim that 97% of the world’s scientists agree is pretty much the ace of trumps in the whole climate debate after all who is going to argue against a consensus that is strongly backed by so many experts but what exactly are they supposed to agree on?
If you look behind the curtain no one seems sure what the experts actually said or indeed who they are.
In 2013 President Barack Obama famously tweeted a quote stating “97% of scientists agree climate change is real, man-made and dangerous”.
In 2014 his Secretary of State John Carey said “97% of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent”. In that same year CNN said “97% of scientists agree that climate change is happening now, that it is damaging the planet and that it is man-made”
That is pretty much what most people think when they hear the 97% slogan every scientist believes man made climate change is an urgent crisis but there are millions of scientists in the world how many exactly were surveyed when were they surveyed, who did it and what exactly did they agree on.
To begin with there are some ideas that pretty much all scientists accept Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas meaning it likely has some overall warming effect, that has been known since the mid 1800s, and if you did do a survey you WOULD find overwhelming scientific agreement on those points.
Also there are lots of indications that the world is somewhat warmer now than it was in the mid 1800s the end of a natural cooling period called the little ice age.
Finally, virtually nobody disputes that humans have changed the environment of our planet by releasing emissions into the air, changing the land surface putting things in the water and so forth these are not controversial ideas and they are accepted even by most climate sceptics what we don’t accept is any of them prove that humans are the only cause of global warming or that climate change is a dangerous threat.
If 97% of scientists believed that it would be troubling, but even so we would still have to find some plan whose benefits outweighed its costs, in any event that level of consensus that the problem was man made and urgent would certainly be noteworthy but the thing is they don’t agree on that.
A close look at the data we have and there isn’t much tells us yes there is a great deal of agreement that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that the earth has warmed in the last 160 years, and that humans affect their surroundings but that same survey data also tells us there is far less agreement on everything else including whether we face a crisis.
So where did this 97% claim come from and why is it so widely repeated?
The 97% claim seems to have begun with a Historian of Science named Naomi Oreskes who in 2004 claimed she had looked at 928 articles about climate change and scientific journals and that 75% of them endorsed the “consensus view” that earth’s climate is being affected by human activity and that none directly disputed it.
By 2006 in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth this finding had somehow morphed into a massive study of every scientific article and peer review journal written on global warming for the last 10 years and they took a big sample of 10% – 928 articles and you know the number of those that disagreed with the scientific consensus that we are causing global warming and it is a serious problem? Out of the 928 – 0. That was a “fib”.
Gore took a study that found 75% endorsed the idea that human’s have some effect on climate and turned it into proof that 100% of scientists believe it is a serious problem – it does no such thing!
And nor do the handful of other surveys on the subject – for instance 5 years later in 2009 a pair of researchers at The University of Illinois sent an online survey to over 10,000 Earth Scientists, asking 2 simple questions
Q1: Do you agree that global temperatures have generally risen since the pre-1800s? and
Q2: Do you think that human activity is a significant contributing factor?
They didn’t single out greenhouse gases, they didn’t explain what the term significant meant and they didn’t refer to danger or crisis.
Of the 3,146 responses received 90% said yes to Q1 and 82% said yes to Q2
Interestingly among Meteorologists only 64% said human activity was a significant factor, meaning a third thought that human activity played no part in global warming.
What got the most media attention was that among 77 respondents who described themselves as CLIMATE EXPERTS 75 said yes to Q2
75 ÷ 77 = 97% – bingo the magic number
It got no media attention that they chose 77 out of 3,146 responses but that is the key to this “little trick” they found a 97% consensus among 2% of the survey respondents.
Analysis
It is called fudging the figures to get the desired result – which is why we MUST never just accept a percentage point when presented to us as fact without understanding how that percentage point has been reached.
Authorities do it all the time on their consultation processes to impose their policies upon us – many many consultation results are flawed – the key is to always question the results and how they were obtained.
FACT CHECK RESULT on the 97% Climate Change Consensus = FAKE NEWS!
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