This courtesy of Stephen Heinz:

The Irrelevancy of Lynas ‘99.9 Percent Certainty Climate Change’ Consensus
By Anthony Watts

https://climatechangedispatch.com/the-irrelevancy-of-another-activist-written-consensus-study/

Today, a new "peer-reviewed” paper is being released from Cornell University titled Greater than 99% Consensus on Human Caused Climate Change in the Peer-Reviewed Scientific Literature.

The study is yet another attempt to convey the nebulous notion that widespread scientific consensus exists regarding the primary causal factor behind climate change. A previous study, spearheaded by climate blogger activist John Cook, concluded in 2013 there was "97 percent consensus.” Despite near universal acclaim and its citation by leading policymakers such as the United Kingdom’s energy minister, the study was inherently flawed.

Dr. Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia explains,
The ‘97% consensus’ article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country [UK] that the energy minister should cite it.
Even The Guardian – typically a stalwart supporter of climate activism – ran a headline stating: The claim of a 97% consensus on global warming does not stand up
After a thorough analysis, more than 100 published articles shredded the study’s faulty methodology and completely rejected its postulated consensus level of 97 percent.

Yet, Cook’s baseless study was still used as the inspiration for today’s release from Cornell – which, unsurprisingly, is similarly flawed. Regarding the researchers’ methodological approach, the article’s press release states, "In the study, the researchers began by examining a random sample of 3,000 studies from the dataset of 88,125 English-language climate papers published between 2012 and 2020.”

There are many issues with this approach, the primary concern being selection bias. The authors arbitrarily decide to look at just an eight-year range of climate papers, neglecting to examine the large number of papers published before 2012. This approach, therefore, conveniently "forgets” to incorporate the significant sample of climate skeptical papers written in response to the then-nascent concept of global warming in the 1970s. They go on to say "case closed” even as the glaring bias of pre-selection ensures many skeptical papers from the 1970s, when global warming first appeared on the radar of science, to today, were excluded from the study.

Read the rest!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:30 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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