I’ve already, like many others, beaten up on the recent paper claiming there is a 97% consensus of Hotcoldwetdry doom. Here’s Lord Christopher Monckton on the further destruction of the meme, doing a guest post at William W. Briggs (via Tom Nelson)
A major peer-reviewed paper by four senior researchers has exposed grave errors in an earlier paper in a new and unknown journal that had claimed a 97.1% scientific consensus that Man had caused at least half the 0.7 Co global warming since 1950. (Snip)
The new paper by the leading climatologist Dr David Legates and his colleagues, published in the respected Science and Education journal, now in its 21st year of publication, reveals that Cook had not considered whether scientists and their published papers had said climate change was “dangerousâ€.
The consensus Cook considered was the standard definition: that Man had caused most post-1950 warming. Even on this weaker definition the true consensus among published scientific papers is now demonstrated to be not 97.1%, as Cook had claimed, but only 0.3%.
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.
What the original Cook paper was attempting to do was find a way to link consensus, which is not science, to papers that were supposedly scientific, and say “see? Consensus is science!”
Make sure to read the whole thing.
