September 07, 2017

Amusing:  Warmists outdo 20th century dictators

When 20th century dictators -- Communist or otherwise -- wanted to boost their legitimacy, they would hold an election and announce that somewhere between 97 and 99% of the population had voted for them. Such a consensus was routinely denounced as phony in real democracies.

But Warmists can out-phony that. Naomi Oreskes in her unreplicable study announced that 100% of climate scientists supported global warming.  Her study was however very slapdash and open to critisism so the Hayhoe and others have recently got together to repeat the exercize in a more opaque way.  We find an article titled: "Those 3% of scientific papers that deny climate change? A review found them all flawed".  Isn't that fabulous?  Informed dissent is completely eradicated.

I have of course no intention of reading the claims.  With old stagers like Dana Nuccitelli, John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky involved, I know that I can expect mere propaganda in lieu of real scholarship. I have no doubt that the debunking will readily be debunked.  Knowing how Warmists treat modelling results as gospel, if something a skeptic said diverged from some model results, I am sure that that alone would invalidate a claim to a Warmist.

But the whole enterprise is wrong-headed.  The origin of the 97% claim lies in John Cook's famous paper.  Cook merely collected up all the papers he could find  that bore on global warming and classified them (very arbitrarily) as for or against global warming. What he found was that only one third of the papers took any stance at all on global warming. Only one-third expressed an opinion on global warming.  And it was 97% of that one third who became the great comforter for Warmists.  In typical Green/Left slipperiness, the result of the survey is routinely quoted as "97% of climate scientists agree" -- when the actual finding was that only one third of climate scientists agreed.

So the present study seems to be of 3% of one third, which surely tells us little.  Even more to the point, most of the papers were not specifically designed to prove or disprove global warming.  They just expressed an opinion on it.  So showing that they did not disprove global warming is no surprise and is completely trivial.




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