Dave Huber:
Five hundred thousand. That’s the number of downloads which has graced the University of Queensland’s John Cook’s paper which claims 97% of scientists believe humans are “largely responsible” for global war– er, climate change.
The average number of downloads for an academic paper is … 700.
The 97% figure has widely been touted by activists and politicians since the report was published. President Obama had said “Ninety-seven percent of scientists, including, by the way, some who originally disputed the data, have now put that [global warming debate] to rest.” (The president has since has upped the figure to 99.5%.)
The problem with Cook’s work, according to The Daily Caller, is that that 97% has been met with a lot of skepticism and outright denunciation:
Cook and his team got to 97 percent by running a keyword search for “global warming” and “global climate change” between 1991 and 2011, which yielded more than 12,000 papers. They then agreed upon definitions of possible categories the papers could fit into — “explicit or implicit endorsement of human-caused global warming, no position, and implicit or explicit rejection” — and used the paper abstracts and attempted to decipher the position of each paper.
Earth System Dynamics noted in a September, 2013, press release that there were errors in the math used to get the 97 percent number. “Only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate papers Cook examined explicitly stated that Man caused most of the warming since 1950. Cook himself had flagged just 64 papers as explicitly supporting that consensus, but 23 of the 64 had not in fact supported it.”
A paper by five climatologists in 2013 pointed out that Cook’s research “misrepresented the views of most consensus scientists.”
Also in 2013, Dr. Craig Idso, whose work was lumped in with the 97%, said that the Cook paper was “not an accurate representation of [his team’s] paper.”
“It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming,” he said.
The University of Sussex’s Richard Tol responded to the Cook team by saying “Consensus has no place in science,” and characterized the (Cook) data as “a load of crap.”
Now, if Cook and company had put out a paper trivializing global war– er, um, climate change, they’d be in the sights of alarmist academics and Democratic lawmakers who’ve considered the use of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, to investigate and prosecute them for fraud.
Recently in response, more than a dozen Republican attorneys general issued a counter-threat: If those who express skepticism about global war– uh, climate change can be investigated, so too can climate alarmists.
After all, consider:
Global warming the biggist fruad snice Piltdown man and the hitler Diaries and Al Capones Vualts in reality 97% of the scientists totaly reject this Man Made Global Warming stuff Al Gore is a con man and David Suzuki is a fruad
‘The sun goes blank again during the weakest solar cycle in more than a century’
While sudden strong solar storms can occur during these quiet phases, the aggregate results of low flare cycles will tend to make for cooler temperatures. Don’t expect this cooling pause to cease any time soon. The bad news is that cosmic rays tend to be worse during these calm periods, creating more danger of exposure to astronauts.
@Spurwing Plover: What about the Cardiff Giant? I also suspect that you didn’t consider The Clinton World Imitative and Obama Care because your topic was science frauds?
No doubt some supporting “scientists” are aware of the cooling nature of the solar cycle and are desperate to get their initiatives enacted and funded before it becomes apparent we will face cooling rather than warming.
Then the media can proclaim success; the left has saved the world… again.
@Bill:
First they have to figure out how they can turn a profit from it. Once they have the funding scam in place then they will flood the internet with reports of how global warming is creating a new ice age.