The primary paper that is often trotted out in support of the notion of “97% consensus” was written by John Cook. Published in 2013, it is the most widely referenced work on the subject of climate consensus and has been downloaded more than 600,000 times. Of note, the project was self-described as “a ‘citizen science’ project by volunteers contributing to the website.” The team consisted of two dozen climate activists who did not leave their climate prejudices at home. Nor were they in any way qualified to be part of this type of what claimed to be a peer-reviewed paper.

“They reviewed the actual papers used by Cook and found that only 0.3% of the 11,944 abstracts and 1.6% of the smaller sample that excluded those papers expressing no opinion endorsed man-made global warming as they defined it. Remarkably, they found that Cook and his assistants had themselves marked only 64 papers — or 0.5% of the 11,944 they said they had reviewed — as explicitly stating that recent warming was mostly man-made. Yet they stated, both in the paper itself and subsequently, that they had found a “97% consensus” explicitly stating that recent warming was mostly man-made.”

Michael Crichton “Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

concensus fraudulent link

Author John Cook. Former cartoonist link

Psychology today article, climate skepticism is a mental disoder link



John Cook Bio, George Mason. Degree cognitive science link

consensus a lie of epic propostions link

the Legates study:

The 97 consensus per cent figure derives from a survey sent to 10,257 people with a self-interest in human-induced global warming who published “science” supported by taxpayer-funded research grants. Replies from 3146 respondents were whittled down to 77 self-appointed climate “scientists” of whom 75 were judged to agree that human-induced warming was taking place. The 97 per cent figure derives from a tribe with only 75 members. What were the criteria for rejecting 3069 respondents? There was no mention that 75 out of 3146 is 2.38 per cent. We did not hear that 2.38 per cent of climate scientists with a self-interest agreed that humans have played a significant role in changing climate and that they are recipients of some of the billions spent annually on climate research.

97.1% of science papers, more than half of warming from man

The paper claimed that published scientific papers showed there was a 97.1 per cent consensus that man had caused at least half of the 0.7C global warming since 1950. How was this 97.1 per cent figure determined?

As part of a scathing critical analysis of this paper by real scientists, the original 11,944 papers were read and the readers came to a diametrically opposite conclusion. Of the 11,944 papers, only 41 explicitly stated that humans caused most of the warming since 1950 (0.3 per cent). Of the 11,944 climate “science” papers, 99.7 per cent did not say that carbon dioxide caused most of the global warming since 1950. It was less than 1 per cent and not one paper endorsed a man-made global warming catastrophe.