Posted on 07/11/2019 9:05:37 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
On Tuesday, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) sent NASA a formal complaint, asking the agency to withdraw the false claim that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that humans are the primary cause of global warming and climate change. The 2013 study purporting to demonstrate that number was fatally flawed and proved no such thing.
"The claim that 97% of climate scientists believe humans are the primary cause of global warming is simply false," CEI attorney Devin Watkins said in a statement. "That figure was created only by ignoring many climate scientists’ views, including those of undecided scientists. It is time that NASA correct the record and present unbiased figures to the public."
According to the CEI complaint, NASA's decision to repeat the false claim violated the Information Quality Act (IQA). Specifically, NASA claimed that "[n]inety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities." The claim appears on the NASA website on the page "Climate Change: How Do We Know?"
The claim traces back to a study led by John Cook entitled "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature" and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters in 2013.
The study is fundamentally dishonest, as the CEI complaint explains. The study analyzed all published peer-reviewed academic research papers from 1991 to 2011 that use the terms "global warming" or "global climate change." The study placed the papers into seven categories: explicit endorsement with quantification, saying humans are responsible for 50+ percent of climate change; explicit endorsement without quantification; implicit endorsement; no position or uncertain; implicit rejection; explicit rejection with qualification; and explicit rejection without qualification.
The study found: 64 papers had explicitly endorsed anthropogenic global warming (AGW) with quantification (attributing at least half of climate change to humans); 922 papers had explicitly endorsed AGW without quantifying how much humans contribute; 2,910 papers had implicitly endorsed AGW; 7,930 papers did not state a position and 40 papers were uncertain; 54 papers implicitly rejected AGW by affirming the possibility that natural causes explain climate change; 15 papers explicitly rejected AGW without qualification; and 9 papers explicitly rejected AGW with quantification, saying human contributions to global warming are negligible.
So how did Cook and his team come up with the 97 percent number? They added up the first three categories (3,896 papers), compared them to the last three categories (78 papers) and the papers expressing uncertainty (40 papers), and completely ignored the nearly 8,000 papers that did not state a position.
Of the papers Cook's team characterized as stating a position, 97 percent (3,896 of the 4,014 papers) favored the idea of man-made global warming.
See the problem? The study completely discounted the majority of the papers it analyzed (66.4 percent — 7,930 of the 11,944 papers analyzed). With those papers included, only 32.6 percent of the papers explicitly or implicitly endorsed AGW (3,896 of 11,944 papers).
But it gets worse. Many of the scientists who wrote the original papers Cooks' team analyzed complained that this study mischaracterized their research.
The survey "included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral," complained Dr. Richard Tol, professor of the economics of climate change at Vrije Universiteit.
He argued that of the 112 omitted papers, only 1 strongly endorses man-made global warming.
"That is not an accurate representation of my paper," wrote geography Ph.D. Craig Idso. "Nope ... it is not an accurate representation," Nir Shaviv, associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote.
Ph.D. physicist Nicola Scafetta complained that "Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AAGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission."
Cook's team categorized his paper as one that "explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%." Scafetta countered, "What my papers say is that the IPCC view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun."
Even including Scafetta's incorrectly categorized study, Cook's team only found 64 papers that explicitly endorsed man-made global warming and attributed more than 50 percent of it to human activity. That represents a minuscule 0.5 percent of the 11,944 papers. Even excluding the 66.4 percent of the papers that did not take a position, the 50 percent plus approach only accounts for 1.6 percent of all papers in the Cook study.
The study — and the 97 percent figure that depends on it — is fatally flawed, and NASA has 120 days to respond to the CEI complaint. It is far past time people reject this false claim.
I hope they plan on a lawsuit when NASA ignores them
Of course the majority of the papers did not reach a conclusion! It would be impossible to prove! Scientifically impossible. To propose otherwise is fraudulent. Anyone who comes down on either side and claims that their conclusion is scientific proof is a fraud
False scientists, but even if they told the truth it would stil
be wrong because common sense says other wise.
Long overdue!!!
The ultimate phony news story of this century and possibly of all time... The false narrative of Global Warming/ Climate Change and now as it’s commonly called... Climate Emergency fanaticism.
They need to keep changing the name of it because the more familiar people become with their soothsaying nonsense, the more they stop donating and paying attention to this money grabbing cause.
According to the CEI complaint, NASA's decision to repeat the false claim violated the Information Quality Act (IQA).
When your only tool is a hammer, it's not a bad idea to smash the enemy in the head.
Us Libertarians are good for something.
And typically, you propose a theory to explain an observation. You publish that theory openly for peer review.
AGW proponents modify the observation, applying “corrections” to increase/decrease temps and sea levels to meet the desired theory. Then they refuse to reveal the methodology used to calculate and apply these “corrections”, and their peers just accept it as fact rather than face backlash for questioning AGW dogma.
FURTHERMORE, the phony research ignores the issue of self-selection. In the 2000’s time frame, who chooses to do studies and write papers on climate change? Those who desire to show it, or those who desire to deny it? And which journals, even in the fields of science, choose to take on and publish papers from climate researchers? Journals sympathetic to AGW or those unsympathetic?
I have a friend who points specificially to the NASA website and its presentation of this 97% fraud as one of his reasons to be an AGW believer.
And by the way... the executive offices and the senior admin staffs and the public relations departments of federal agencies, the DoD, big corporations, and NASA are populated by those with spineless tendencies who respond to contemporary fashion and the loudest political fashion. Scientists did not put up this NASA website. Some executive staffer and some web flunky did. A bureaucratic politician and a weenie, not a climate scientist or astro-physicist.
Anyone that has paid any attention to 'man made climate change' knows that it is simply another communist scam to take other people's money.
In the 70's these same 'scientists' claimed that man made CO2 was causing the planet to freeze, 'Global Cooling'...didn't happen, so they claimed that CO2 was going to cause 'Global Warming' without explaining how that was even possible.
When that didn't happen, they now blame CO2 for 'Climate Change', which means they can never be incorrect, since we all agree that the climate changes every single second of every day... but humans have very little to do with it.
They get one right now and then LOL
“So how did Cook and his team come up with the 97 percent number? They added up the first three categories (3,896 papers), compared them to the last three categories (78 papers) and the papers expressing uncertainty (40 papers), and completely ignored the nearly 8,000 papers that did not state a position.”
So a “paper” is a “scientist”? Among other things, that would seem to bias the results severely toward a select group who manage to get a lot of papers published.
Bookmarked. The repeated citation of this entirely phony claim is infuriating.
Oh, thought it said Librarians. :^)
...how did Cook and his team come up with the 97 percent number? They added up the first three categories (3,896 papers), compared them to the last three categories (78 papers) and the papers expressing uncertainty (40 papers), and completely ignored the nearly 8,000 papers that did not state a position.
Oh, and they mischaracterized (lied about) the contents of some of those which remained.
In many cases the “warmies” dominated the editorial boards of climate publications and even set up their own journals. All of this guaranteed that papers would be published without serious review. The also set on each others students graduate committees so there would be a steady stream of those graduating spouting the party line. There was a congressional committee investigating a ways back (right after the GOP first took the House! - 1996 maybe?), where it was pointed out by several academicians that in many cases the publishing standards were a completely closed circle. For example something that was built almost entirely off statistical arguments often excluded independent statisticians from the review. They often excluded independent geoscientists too!
In other words:
They willfully and knowingly falsified official Government Documents, which used to be a FELONY!!
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