He didn't like that I pointed him to literally dozens of links disproving this stupid 97% number. If I remember correctly (this was last week, and there was a long weekend in between) it goes something like this:
The original um "study" that generated the 97% number came from "research" done for a graduate student's masters thesis. He sent out surveys to over 10,000 scientists. This is where you'll see libs embellish the lie with "10K climate scientists surveyed agree..." BS.
You see, only about 3100 and change bothered to return the survey. (actually pretty good response if you ask me) However, of those only 157 self-identified as climate scientists. Our intrepid grad student somewhat arbitrarily decided that only 79 of these were fit to call themselves climate scientists, so those were the only ones he counted.
Now for the really fun part. You think there was some deep, insightful probing and discussion of the issue of climate change? Some exploration of the subtleties and nuances of climate science? Ha! There were exactly two questions he used to determine if these climate scientists agreed with him.
First, he asked if they thought the Earth was warmer now (at the time of the survey) than it had been in 1980. Now, I haven't bothered to check, but I'll bet you a dozen donuts that if we look at the temperature data 1980 will have been one of the cooler years in recent times. Thereby just about ensuring any climate scientists familiar with the temperature record would respond "yes" to this question.
The second question was do you think mankind has had a significant impact on this warming. Hmm, guess you pretty much have to have answered yes to the other one, or tacitly approve of a yes there to even answer this question. The weasel word in it is "significant." Well, what is "significant"??? Of course mankind's activities are warming the Earth some - we burn fuel, cities are know to generate heat islands around them etc.
From this very poorly worded, extremely shallow, and hysterically badly analyzed survey comes the BS of 97% of over 10,000 climate scientists agree... It would be knee slapping, drink coming out your nose funny if so many fools weren't repeating it and trying to make policy based on it.
You see, only about 3100 and change bothered to return the survey. (actually pretty good response if you ask me) However, of those only 157 self-identified as climate scientists. Our intrepid grad student somewhat arbitrarily decided that only 79 of these were fit to call themselves climate scientists, so those were the only ones he counted.
This is rather vague, as to where the 97% came from.
There were 81 respondents of the first question which were chosen to represent the original 10,000+ inquiries.
Of those, all 81 gave the desired response to the first question, but 2 failed to do so to the second question. The second question asked if the anthropogenic contribution contributed significantly to the "global warming."
Thus, 79 out of 81 climate "scientists" comes to 97%.
And the grand fraud was born.
Yes, we are expected to infer that the 97% refers to the original 10,000+ questionnaires, rather than the arbitrary 81 chosen to generate the answer the fraudulent graduate student desired..
In scientific language, the word "significant" has a very specific meaning. It means that the probability of an observation being random rather than being a result of the specific experimental conditions is less than 5%--or, as we scientists express it, the P value is less than 0.05. (P<0.05). Scientists use many weasel words (it reflects our acknowledgement that we can be wrong), but "significant" is not one of them.