That’s about one in 20,000. So 99.9942% of climate scientists agree that man is changing the climate.
How, then, has nearly everyone from President Obama on down come to buy the claim of a 97 percent consensus? The figure comes from a 2013 article in Environmental Research Letters by Cook et al. titled “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature.” They reported that “Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming” (emphasis added). The 97 percent figure went viral and, not surprisingly, the qualifying phrase “expressing a position”—the fine print, if you will—got dropped. But those three words expose the false assumption inherent in the Cook et al. methodology.
[…] In other words, it’s 97% of studies that conclude man has played a role in climate change, not 97% of scientists. That’s a pretty significant difference.
[…] Of 24,210 abstracts, only five — one in 4,842 or 0.021 percent … rejected AGW, [and] excluding self-citations, only one of the five rejecting articles has been cited, and that article only once. … Two of the articles had the same author, so four authors of 69,406 rejected AGW. That is one in 17,352, or 0.0058 percent.
To put that into perspective:
- The odds of you winning an Oscar are 1 in 11,500.
- The odds of you getting struck by lightning in your lifetime are 1 in 12,000.
- The odds of you being murdered in your workplace are 1 in 18,000.
- The odds of you dying in an asteroid apocalypse are 1 in 12,500.
So it’s more likely that you either win an Oscar, get struck by lightening, get murdered in your workplace, or die in an asteroid apocolypse… than it is that climate change is real and caused by us.
Source:
“The Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming,” from The Skeptical Inquirer.
…by way of an answered question on Quora and with thanks to Geoff Arnold for getting all this in front of me!
