The global warming consensus that isn’t

By Thomas Lifson, AMERICAN THINKER

At last, we have a peer-reviewed paper that accurately surveys how much support there is for anthropogenic global warming among relevant scientists. And the news isn’t good for Al Gore, nor for Barack Obama, who sees climate change as our number one national security threat.

The widely cited figure of 97% of scientists supporting man made global warming theory has always been a fraud:

…a Canada-based group calling itself Friends of Science has just completed a review of the four main studies used to document the alleged consensus and found that only 1 – 3% of respondents “explicitly stated agreement with the IPCC declarations on global warming,” and that there was “no agreement with a catastrophic view.”

“These ‘consensus’ surveys appear to be used as a ‘social proof,'” says Ken Gregory, research director of Friends of Science. “Just because a science paper includes the words ‘global climate change’ this does not define the cause, impact or possible mitigation. The 97% claim is contrived in all cases.”

The Oreskes (2004) study claimed 75% consensus and a “remarkable lack of disagreement” by the other 25% of the abstracts she reviewed. Peiser (2005) re-ran her survey and found major discrepancies. Only 1.2% or 13 scientists out of 1,117 agreed with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) view that human activity is the main cause of global warming since 1950.

Investor’s Business Daily reveals the devastating new research:

….a peer-reviewed paper showing that only 36% of 1,077 geoscientists and engineers surveyed believe in the man-made global warming crisis as defined by the United Nations’ Kyoto model.

According to the paper, the Kyoto position expresses “the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.”

Thirty-six percent is not insignificant. But it certainly is a long way from the oft-cited 97% “consensus” among scientists that man is causing temperatures to change.

Researchers behind “Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change,” which appeared in Organization Studies, also found “the proportion of papers” collected from a science database “that explicitly endorsed anthropogenic climate change has fallen from 75%” between 1993 and 2003 “to 45% from 2004 to 2008.”

The Heartland Institute’s James Taylor reminds us in Forbes that “survey results show geoscientists (also known as earth scientists) and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.”

A 36% consensus definitely is less impressive than 97%. In fact, it is a minority view.

Hello, Donald Trump!