“100% OF CLIMATE SCIENTISTS BELIEVE CARBON DIOXIDE IS THE CAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE.”
Where Did This Come From? The original claim of 97% was published in a 2013 IOPScience article stating “scientists overwhelmingly agree that the earth is warming due to human activity”. A 2021 revision of the article upgraded the claim to 100% while modifying the wording slightly to “mostly because of human activity”.
The Factual Basis The article claimed to have found 11,944 articles in the Web of Science data base published between 1991 and 2011; keywords ‘global warming’ or ‘global climate change’. Article authors were referred to as climate experts, not climate scientists. Dr. Cook, not a climate scientist, failed to provide the qualifications of their so-called “experts”. Why? And why include the views of anyone who was not a climate scientist?
The Authors At the time of publication Dr. Cook was a behavioural science professor along with six other academics none of whom were climate scientists. It’s interesting to note that Dr. Cook has a website called Skeptical Science. The name suggests it questions the importance of carbon dioxide in climate change - but no, bait and switch, it’s a full on sales pitch for human generated carbon dioxide causing global warming.
Curiously, Dr. Cook chose to submit the article for publication to IOPScience, a journal for physicists, rather than any of the major publications for climate scientists. Was he avoiding the climate science community - if so why?
Carbon dioxide advocates hyped the 97% claim to the media. The Obama administration saw votes and jumped aboard labelling those who disagreed “deniers”. That chilled potential opposition from American climate science researchers effectively achieving an end run of public acceptance around the climate scientist community.
Flaw No. 1
In addition to the articles which explicitly said humanity’s carbon dioxide was causing climate change, Dr. Cook and associates added the articles which did not state a specific position but in which they decided agreement was implied. Science is not about what someone thinks someone else implied. That’s guessing. Science is about proof that provides certainty. Anything less is not science. When a publication in an attempt to influence public opinion, it’s called propaganda.
Dr. Cook’s 2021 supplemental article said: “We sent 10 929 invitations to participate in our survey to a verified email list of geosciences faculty at reporting academic and research institutions and received 2780 responses.” Significantly 8,149 climate scientists (75%) chose not to respond. This was a highly unusual for climate scientists who welcome sharing and exchanging information. Their message of silence to Dr. Cook is unmistakable.
Flaw No. 2
Worse than guess work, it turns out that some authors had only written one article while other authors had written as many as twenty articles. Therefore it was not 97% of the authors as claimed, it was 97% of the articles published. That was a statistical slight of hand like dealing from the bottom of the deck in a card game. Was this an innocent mistake? Dr. Cook is a behavioural scientist and is therefore an expert in statistics. This could not have been a mistake. How did this misrepresentation get past the publisher’s peer review process?
The Financial Post and Forbes Magazine called out the 97% Claim in detail.
INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL on CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC)
The United Nations’ IPCC website proudly proclaims itself to be the World’s Leading Authority on climate change. As the world’s leading authority you’d expect it to have labs staffed by climate scientists, research assistants and technicians working to solving the many mysteries of climate change. But no, there are no labs and no scientists. “The IPCC does not conduct original research.” IPCC About Overview
It operates dozens of committees each with dozens of members who review some but not all of the research on their topic published in the seven year interval since their last report. Further, intergovernmental means its committee members are government bureaucrats with only a sprinkling of outside academics. Few if any committee members are scientists researching climate change.
IPCC committees operate by consensus which requires unanimous agreement on issues. That requires members who are like minded to begin with, in this case about human generated greenhouse gases causing climate change. While consensus presents the appearance of unanimity it suppresses differences of opinion.
Each committees has two or three writers who prepare a draft report. All committee draft reports go to the IPCC’s executive level writers for further editing and consolidation into an IPCC Draft Report, further homogenizing consensus. The draft publication then goes to the governments of all 195 UN member nations for their political policy people to review and comment, a polite way of saying ‘require changes’. The final publication is not released until every member nation agrees with the contents of the report.
Between scarcity of climate scientists, levels of consensus and adjustments by the government policy people of virtually every country in the world, the question has to be asked - how much of the final publication is objective science and how much is politics?
The IPCC takes current greenhouse gas levels and applies modelling with all its inherent inaccuracies to forecast (guess) what today’s gas levels and possible future increases in those gas levels (Global Warming Potential) might mean for the world 100 years from now which is called GWP100. They then recommend actions governments (industrialized nations) should take. Their recommendations are the steel fist in the velvet glove because good governments will adhere to their recommendations. Until recently adherence got votes as exemplified by the Obama and Biden administrations of the United States.
At its founding in 1988 the IPCC’s its sole mission was to (1) study human generated carbon dioxide as the cause of climate change, (2) how it will effect the world and (3) how to limit/ reduce it. Its mission was based the misinterpreted Greenland and Antarctic ice core data which at that time was mistakenly believed to show that carbon dioxide levels lead temperature change. The mistake was corrected by Dr. Caillon’s research team in 2003 definitively showing that temperature leads carbon dioxide by 800 years, +/- 200 years. Dr. Caillon’s 800 year finding was accepted by the climate science community. A few researchers have questioned the 200 year +/- variance - but not that temperature leads carbon dioxide.
Yet the IPCC is still restricted to carbon dioxide plus the other greenhouse gases. Why? In a 2013 interview by The Guardian (London, UK), then IPCC Director Dr. Rajendra Pachauri (2002-2017) said: “We are an intergovernmental body and we do what the governments of the world want us to do”. The IPCC confirmed that in 2021 saying it is to investigate only “…the causes and effects of human greenhouse gas emissions.” [IPCC, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis]
Why do the governments of the world want the IPCC to be restricted to the greenhouse gases as the sole cause of climate change? With wealthy nations promising hundreds of billions of dollars to poor nations, the phrase “follow the money” comes to mind. Countries in line to receive greenhouse gases compensation far out number those funding the compensation. A shift away from the belief that human generated greenhouse gases are the sole cause of climate change would cause the compensation money to dry up. Is there another compelling reason ?
CRITIQUES
What’s Wrong With The IPCC; Professor R. McKitrick Link
The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, Part 1; Clintel Link
On scholar.google.com search “IPCC criticism” for criticism by climate scientists.
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
The books lays out beautiful photographs of natural settings, an impressive graph and a seductive narrative. All of it blaming humanity’s carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as the sole cause of climate change and completely ignoring the natural world’s input. The problem with this masterful soft sell is that its evidence is a description of observed climate changes, not what’s causing the changes. Evidence of climate change comes from scientific research. It’s time for Fact Checking.
Carbon Dioxide & Temperature - Who’s The Leader
The highly compressed 600,000 year graph of ice core data is claimed to be proof that carbon dioxide leads temperature change. Each millimetre (1/25th inch) of the graph represents 2,500 years of earth’s climate history. When the graph is enlarged it’s easy to see temperature leading carbon dioxide multiple times. Example: Temperature leads carbon dioxide for 15,000 years about 470,000 years ago.
The graphs of carbon dioxide and temperature placed one above the other instead of over laid makes it harder to detect which line is leading the other. All of the many carbon dioxide-temperature graphs on the internet overlay the lines for ease of comparison. Why does this graph make it harder to see the relationship? Lines on a graph only suggest a relationship. Saying lines on a graph prove anything is called the Correlation Fallacy. It’s a rookie mistake.
Dr. Caillon’s research team conclusively proved that temperature leads carbon dioxide by 800 years in 2003. Source
Ward Hunt Ice Shelf
The caption beside the book’s photo showing a crack in thick ice says: “This image shows the largest ice shelf in the Arctic – the Ward Hunt shelf. Three years ago it cracked in half, to the astonishment of scientists. Scientists were not astonished. “In just the last century, scientists have discovered dramatic changes in the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf.” Source Few scientists were surprised. “Changes became apparent in the 1950s when ice-shelf investigators examined early 20th-century records of Arctic explorer Robert Peary”.(1906) “We estimate that this ice has now retreated by about 90 percent relative to Peary’s observations.” NASA
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/wardhunt
Hurricanes
The book says four large hurricanes struck the United States in 2004. How is one year’s count proof of anything. There were nine hurricanes in 2004 of which only two were category three storms and one was a category four storm. There no hurricanes in 2000, 2001, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2013 and 2015. Scientists determined that the number and intensity Atlantic and Gulf hurricanes is determined by El Niño in 1987 US hurricane landfalls
Tornadoes
“Also in 2004, the all-time record for tornadoes in the United States was broken”. How far back do the records go ? Not that far actually, “… the modern database…only goes back to 1950…and even the early part of this history is highly incomplete.” Source The graph in this source shows the lines of the strong and very strong tornadoes since 1950 are flat. It is the number of weak tornadoes that have increased which the site attributes mainly to the level of reporting since 1950. Source
The book’s theme that climate change is the fault of humanity’s carbon dioxide. Nature has been warming and cooling the planet for billions of years. The coldest period in the last ten thousand years ended just two hundred years ago. Earth is still half a degree below its ten thousand year average. And we’re still a full degree below the average temperature ten thousand to six thousand years ago.
DOING YOU OWN RESEARCH
Scholar.Google.Com is the search engine for academic research. You can find research by climate scientists without the politics and influencer fog of the wider internet.
Researchgate.Net has a wealth of current scientific research and does not charge to download research documents.
Sites That Charge usually provide a free summary (abstract) of what the document says but charge for a download of the full document. A search on the scientists who wrote the document may take you to a site where you can download the document for free.
Wikipedia has become a reliable information website where every item posted has been reviewed by a team of people with expertise in that topic. (Please consider a donation.)
Please Be Cautious with information from Internet and AI searches. They search for information relevant to your topic and formulate their response based on the average of what they find. The misinformation out there is vast and search engines can’t tell truth from trash. Is it coming from a quack or a climate scientist? Always check the sources.