“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 considered 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 the “climate experts”. Why? And why include the views of anyone who was not in fact 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 alert, 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 about climate science. 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 a significant part of the climate science 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 does so 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 comparable to 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. That this misrepresentation could have been an innocent mistake is highly improbable. 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 Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (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
The IPCC is composed a small administrative staff hosting dozens of committees, each with dozens of members who are senior government bureaucrats from the UN’s member countries. Each committee has few, if any, climate scientists.
Committee members review research papers. But not all of the peer reviewed, scientific research papers published on their area of study since their part of last Assessment Report. Committee members only study papers “selected” by IPCC administrators.
IPCC committees operate by consensus which requires unanimous agreement on issues. For that to work members must be like minded to begin with. In this case being like minded about human generated greenhouse gases being the cause 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 a Draft Report which further homogenizes 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 the scarcity of climate scientists, discreet censoring by 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 Working Group 1 (causes of climate change) has taken current greenhouse gas levels and applied modelling with all its inherent inaccuracies to forecast (sophisticated guessing) the Global Warming Potential of today’s gas levels for the next 100 years (GWP100). They then “only recommend” actions governments should take. Their recommendations are the steel fist in the velvet glove because responsible governments will adhere to their recommendations. Until recently adherence translated into votes as exemplified by the Obama and Biden administrations of the United States.
At its founding in 1988 the IPCC’s mission was to (1) study human generated carbon dioxide as the cause of climate change, (2) how it is effecting the world and (3) how to limit/ reduce it. Its mission was based the early Greenland and Antarctic ice core data which 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. Most of the climate science community concurs with those findings. As shown in the article below, carbon dioxide does not lead temperature.
Yet the IPCC is restricted to humanity’s greenhouse gases. They must ignore all of the natural forces that have been causing climate change for millions of years. 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 third world 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 dry up the compensation money. Is there another compelling reason ?
CRITIQUES by Climate Scientists
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 more 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
Its highly compressed 600,000 year graph of ice core data is the 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.
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. Few scientists were astonished. “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 “In just the last century, scientists have discovered dramatic changes in the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf.” Source
Hurricanes
The book says four large hurricanes struck the United States in 2004. How is one year’s count proof of anything. Hurricanes did not strike the Atlantic and Gulf coasts in 2000, 2001, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2013 and 2015. Scientists have attributed the number and intensity of Atlantic and Gulf hurricanes to El Niño since 1987. Source
Tornadoes
“Also in 2004, the all-time record for tornadoes in the United States was broken”. How far back do the records go ? Not all 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.
End Notes
The book’s theme is that climate change is the fault of humanity’s carbon dioxide. It’s long on rhetoric and short on fact. It offers no evidence of the science behind the many causes of global warming and cooling. That includes the natural forces that have been changing the climate for billions of years without humanity’s carbon dioxide input.
500,000 years ago carbon dioxide fell while temperature rose for 5,000 years.
Then carbon dioxide and temperature rose for 20,000 years - but not by the same amount.
That was followed by 13,000 years where carbon dioxide fell while temperature rose.
DOING YOUR 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 without charge.
Wikipedia has become a reliable information website where every item posted has been reviewed by a team 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. There is a vast amount of misinformation on the internet and search engines can’t tell truth from trash. Is it coming from a quack or a climate scientist? Always check the sources.