March 25, 2019

Making Sense of Climate Science Denial

Above is the headline of an hilarious new "course" being run out of the University of Queensland, about a 15 minutes drive from where I live.  The mover and shaker of it appears to be the famous "Mr 97%", John Cook, the cooker of books.

The "course" purports to prove the truth of imminent catastrophic  global warming and to explain why there are some deranged people who don't accept the "truth" of it.

But the very first words in the introduction to the course are a lie.  We read:

"In public discussions, climate change is a highly controversial topic. However, in the scientific community, there is little controversy with 97% of climate scientists concluding humans are causing global warming."

That contrasts with the fact that Cook's own research showed  that less than ONE THIRD (not 97%) of climate scientists endorsed global warming.  Here are the words from the originating paper:

"We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW"

So in a great green feat of magic, 32.6% has become 97%.

And it gets worse than that.  Cook et al. did a second study where they mailed out questionnaires  to climate scientists asking if they agreed with global warming.  Only 14% replied!  So that time they could not even get up to 32.6% agreement. They got only 14%. A full 86% declined to say that they agreed with global warming.  That 97% swam even further away the second time around!

I pity anyone who takes this absurd "course".  The prospectus for it is here.




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