the 97% claim has been debunked. appeal to numbers is a logical fallacy science is not a democracy
even the liberal guardian disagrees with the 97% consensus
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2014/jun/06/97-consensus-global-warming
Dana Nuccitelli writes that I “accidentally confirm the results of last year’s 97% global warming consensus study”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I show that the 97% consensus claim does not stand up.
At best, Nuccitelli, John Cook and colleagues may have accidentally stumbled on the right number.
Cook and co selected some 12,000 papers from the scientific literature to test whether these papers support the hypothesis that humans played a substantial role in the observed warming of the Earth. 12,000 is a strange number. The climate literature is much larger. The number of papers on the detection and attribution of climate change is much, much smaller.
Cook’s sample is not representative. Any conclusion they draw is not about “the literature” but rather about the papers they happened to find.
Most of the papers they studied are not about climate change and its causes, but many were taken as evidence nonetheless. Papers on carbon taxes naturally assume that carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming – but assumptions are not conclusions. Cook’s claim of an increasing consensus over time is entirely due to an increase of the number of irrelevant papers that Cook and co mistook for evidence.