Climate Chumps and Climate Cheats – '97%' is the tell-tale to find them

The sails on some boats have short lengths of wool attached to them to show the manner in which the air is flowing past. They are called tell-tales, and let the sailor know if the sail needs trimming.

The '97%' statistic can act as a tell-tale to let you know the manner of person you are dealing with when it is deployed to promote alarm over our impact on climate. I make the crude division of those who deploy it that way into climate chumps or climate cheats. The former have merely been deceived themselves, the latter want to deceive others.  

The basic deceit being that something like 97% of climate scientists or 97% of climate science papers support an alarmist view of climate change and our contribution to it.  Who could argue with such numbers?  Well, many people can and have.  When the sources of such claims have been checked out, they are found to be so unimpressive that it is grossly irresponsible for anyone to rely on them. At best, they indicate support for banalities such as 'climate changes', 'there was global warming in the 20th Century', 'CO2 is a greenhouse gas', 'humans contribute a warming effect by releasing CO2 into the atmosphere'.  None of these is intrinsically alarming.  For example, they are all perfectly consistent with the assertion that there is no problem.

The climate chumps relay the '97%' in conversation, in blog comments, and so on, but they do so in complete ignorance of the shoddy nature of the various derivations of this stinky statistic. Lots of ordinary members of the public might fall into this category. They may know next to nothing about the climate system, but they have heard the relentless propaganda in school, on tv, or in their newspapers for years and maybe the 97% number just struck them as impressive. They need your gentle help to get a clearer view.

The climate cheats know, or ought to know, that the '97%' is a stinker of a statistic, but nevertheless, they make a big deal out of it, even seeing it as a clincher in PR-work and other carefully produced materials. They include specialist journalists, bloggers, politicians, and civil servants. They ought to check the origins of prominent statistics used in their arguments. They deserve your sharp criticism for deploying something so shoddy and deceptive.

So, when you see the 97% being deployed in ways that are meant to impress and convince you that you should believe in climate catastrophe, or 'dangerous global warming' as President Obama put it, regard it as a tell-tale that you are reading/listening/watching either a chump or a cheat. A couple of questions, or maybe just a little more of your attention, should help you decide which label is the right one. If it is being used in this way in school materials which you or your children are exposed to, then make a formal complaint about them.

Andrew Montford has recently written a GWPF report (link is to the pdf file) on one of the most prominent and recent sources of '97%' - the notorious Cook et al. paper of 2013 - and he summarises some of the criticisms made about it by academics: 

e.g. Mike Hulme:

The [Cook et al.] 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 that the energy minister

should cite it. It offers a similar depiction of the world into categories of ‘right’ and

‘wrong’ to that adopted in [an earlier study]: dividing publishing climate scientists

into ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’. It seems to me that these people are still living

(or wishing to live) in the pre-2009 world of climate change discourse. Haven’t

they noticed that public understanding of the climate issue has moved on?

e.g. Richard Tol

Reported results are inconsistent and biased. The sample is not representative and

contains many irrelevant papers. Overall, data quality is low. Cook’s validation test

shows that the data are invalid. Data disclosure is incomplete so that key results

cannot be reproduced or tested.

e.g. Jose Duarte

. . .completely invalid and untrustworthy (and by customary scientific standards,

completely unpublishable.) I had no idea this was happening. This is garbage,

and a crisis. It needs to stop, and [such] papers need to be retracted immediately,

especially Cook, et al (2013).

Montford quietly concludes 'The figure of 97% is entirely discredited, whatever the nature of the

consensus.'

For an introduction to criticisms of Cook et al. and other sources of '97%', see my earlier post:

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/occams-broom-and-stink-of-97-of-climate.html

Update 27 March 2015:  A useful summary of the Cook et al.  nonsense is given by Richard Tol here: http://richardtol.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/now-almost-two-years-old-john-cooks-97.html

Update 18 May 2015. Ross McKitrick undermines the '97%' nonsense even further by pointing to ignorance on the part of many of those classed in surveys as 'climate scientists':  http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/climate-change-consensus-among-the-misinformed-is-not-worth-much

Update 19 February 2019
The tell-tale is still needed, still working, but this post has a neat rejoinder :  http://www.cfact.org/2019/02/17/32717/

Climate Teachers, Concerned Parents – here is a new scientific society worthy of your support to raise standards in climate science, and improve public outreach.

The somewhat strangely named 'Open Atmospheric Society', or OAS for short, has been officially launched and offers associate membership which is open to all to apply for, regardless of academic qualifications. There is a full membership category for those with professional qualifications in relevant fields.

Here is how their Home page begins:

'Welcome

Welcome to The Open Atmospheric Society, known as “The OAS”.

We give you a voice where other societies may not.

The OAS is an international membership society for the purpose of studying, discussing, and publishing about topics in atmospheric related earth sciences, including but not limited to meteorology, hydrology, oceanography, and climatology. It is open to anyone with an interest at the associate level, but student and full memberships also are offered.

The purpose of the society is to foster quality atmospheric science and atmospheric science communications through outreach, member education, member publishing, and electronic media.'

Why is this being posted here on Climate Lessons?

Joining the new society as an associate or as a full member, will provide it with financial and moral support. The benefits to society in general will include an online journal freely available to the public, press releases for each publication, statements and positions regarding atmospheric science as it relates to current news, and video production assistance for authors to explain papers. If the directors and other participants in this new venture maintain the high standards they have set for themselves, all of these things could provide a timely and much-needed counter-balance to the loaded-science and dogma-dominated media coverage of climate science that we have had to endure for decades. This could help create a calmer, more rational debate in the public square and within political circles, and in due course lead to higher quality textbooks and other materials for schools currently being bombarded with politically-biased and often scaremongering works of various kinds on climate.

Associate membership is open to all with an interest in the subject matter and in supporting the goals of the society.  It costs 45 US dollars for one year.

Full membership is open to professionally qualified people in relevant subjects, and costs 85 US dollars for one year.

Membership application forms can be found here: http://theoas.wildapricot.org/

Here is the welcome that awaits you there: 
'We welcome professionals, educators, students, and the general public/laymen who have an interest in open atmospheric science. There is a membership level to meet everyone's situation.'

Climate Alarm Virus Alert: new films starring DiCaprio will spread misinformation to the young

Filmstars often have a great many young fans for whom they can do no wrong.  Those who wish to bombard the young with climate scares can also find them attractive as vehicles for their propaganda, and it seems that a new series of short films starring DeCaprio are to be released with that end in mind.  Here are three extracts from an article in the New York Post by Tom Harris and Bob Carter, two experts in climate studies and in the tricks of the climate-scare trade which they so oppose (I have put one sentence in each extract in bold):

(1)

'In the run-up to the Sept. 23 UN Climate Summit in New York, Leonardo DiCaprio is releasing a series of films about the “climate crisis.”

The first is “Carbon,” which tells us the world is threatened by a “carbon monster.” Coal, oil, natural gas and other carbon-based forms of energy are causing dangerous climate change and must be turned off as soon as possible, DiCaprio says.

But he has identified the wrong monster. It is the climate scare itself that is the real threat to civilization.

DiCaprio is an actor, not a scientist; it’s no real surprise that his film is sensationalistic and error-riddled. Other climate-change fantasists, who do have a scientific background, have far less excuse.

Science is never settled, but the current state of “climate change” science is quite clear: There is essentially zero evidence that carbon dioxide from human activities is causing catastrophic climate change.'

(2)

'Oregon-based physicist Gordon Fulks sums it up well: “CO2 is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea ice melt that is not occurring . . . and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.”

Consider:

•  According to NASA satellites and all ground-based temperature measurements, global warming ceased in the late 1990s. This when CO2 levels have risen almost 10 percent since 1997. The post-1997 CO2 emissions represent an astonishing 30 percent of all human-related emissions since the Industrial Revolution began. That we’ve seen no warming contradicts all CO2-based climate models upon which global-warming concerns are founded.
• Rates of sea-level rise remain small and are even slowing, over recent decades averaging about 1 millimeter per year as measured by tide gauges and 2 to 3 mm/year as inferred from “adjusted” satellite data. Again, this is far less than what the alarmists suggested.
•  Satellites also show that a greater area of Antarctic sea ice exists now than any time since space-based measurements began in 1979. In other words, the ice caps aren’t melting.
•  A 2012 IPCC report concluded that there has been no significant increase in either the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events in the modern era. The NIPCC 2013 report concluded the same. Yes, Hurricane Sandy was devastating — but it’s not part of any new trend.

The climate scare, Fulks sighs, has “become a sort of societal pathogen that virulently spreads misinformation in tiny packages like a virus.” He’s right — and DiCaprio’s film is just another vector for spreading the virus.'

(3)

'Dr. Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, calculates that the European Union’s goal of a 20 percent reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2020, currently the most severe target in the world, will cost almost $100 billion a year by 2020, or more than $7 trillion over the course of this century.

Lomborg, a supporter of the UN’s climate science, notes that this would buy imperceptible improvement: “After spending all that money, we would not even be able to tell the difference.”'

Note added 10 October 2014  A noteworthy video has been made about the contrast between what DiCaprio says and what DiCaprio does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw2bkISm0Ys