The 97% Consensus Claim About Climate Change Is Fraudulent

December 15th, 2015

Awake Goy

The claim that 97% of scientists agree with the man-made climate change model is false

It is often touted in the mainstream press and by politicians that “97% of scientists believe in man-made climate change”. The statistic is actually based on selective editing of survey data and completely fraudulent science.

A book by Mark Steyn, entitled A Disgrace to the Profession, featured the many scientists who refute the misleading claim that climate change is man-made, and offers evidence that demolishes the idea that 97% of the world’s scientists agree with this ludicrous nonsense.

Naturalnews.com reports:

From “A Disgrace to the Profession”:

An opinion survey of earth scientists on global climate change was conducted by Margaret R K Zimmerman, MS, and published by the University of Illinois in 2008.

Aside from his support from Dr Pantsdoumi, Mann often claims the imprimatur of “settled science”: 97 per cent of the world’s scientists supposedly believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming requiring massive government intervention. That percentage derives from a survey conducted for a thesis by M R K Zimmerman.

The “survey” was a two-question, online questionnaire sent to 10,257 earth scientists, of whom 3,146 responded.

Of the responding scientists, 96.2 per cent came from North America.

Only 6.2 per cent came from Canada. So the United States is overrepresented even within that North American sample.

Nine per cent of US respondents are from California. So California is overrepresented within not just the US sample: it has over twice as large a share of the sample as Europe, Asia, Australia, the Pacific, Latin America and Africa combined.

Of the ten per cent of non-US respondents, Canada has 62 per cent.

Not content with such a distorted sample, the researchers then selected 79 of their sample and declared them “experts.”

Of those 79 scientists, two were excluded from a second supplementary question. So 75 out of 77 made it through to the final round, and 97.4 per cent were found to agree with “the consensus”. That’s where the 97 per cent comes from.

So this is a very Michael Mann “reconstruction”: just as a couple of Californian bristlecones can determine the climate for a millennium, so a couple of dozen Californian scientists can determine the consensus of the world.

Nonetheless, the compilers also invited comments from respondents and published them in the appendices. In terms of specific scientific material, the hockey stick attracted three comments – one blandly positive, the other two not so much.

Wow, you mean the 97% consensus number comes from just 75 scientists that were hand-picked from an email survey?

Yep. Out of all the hundreds of thousands of scientists in the world, only 75 of them were selected to “count” for the climate change survey.

Not quite the “settled science” you’ve been told, is it?

So if I send out an email survey to 1000 people, and then I hand-pick the 75 responses I like the best, then can I proclaim those results to be “settled science” too? Will Al Gore champion my cause and demand billions in reparations from first world nations on my behalf?

Of course not. The very idea is total fraud. Yet this is the science fraud upon which the entire mainstream media and government climate frenzy is based.

It’s all just climate quackery.