Is this the same sort of survey that suggests 9/10 dentists recommend using Colgate minty fresh toothpaste?

Next thing you will quote something from the KOCH BROS as proof CC doesn't exist.

Dealing in Doubt

Part 1: A Brief History of Denial


    THE FUNDERS:

    ExxonMobil
    The Koch Brothers
    Donors Trust & Donors Capital: The ATM of Climate Denial

    THE PLAYERS:

    Climate Denial's "Continental Army"

    The Think Tanks

    THE ROOTS OF CLIMATE DENIAL: BORNE OUT OF BIG TOBACCO ANTI SCIENCE CAMPAIGNS


DEALING IN DOUBT: FULL REPORT
The 1990s: a network of denial is created



In the early 1990’s, as governments began negotiating a global agreement to tackle climate change, a number of lobby groups were set up to prevent it. These early groups included the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), the Climate Council and the Information Council on the Environment (ICE). The GCC called itself an “organisation of business trade associations and private companies established in 1989 to coordinate business participation in the scientific and policy debate on global climate change." Its membership was a list of the largest coal, oil and auto companies in the US – representing, it said, 230,000 companies and all companies that would stand to lose if they were held to account for the carbon they were pumping into the air for free.

The Climate Council staff included lobbyist heavyweight Don Pearlman a Washington, DC lawyer who became the right hand man of the Saudi, Kuwait and Russian governments . (Pearlman died in 2005).

ICE was formed by a group of utility and coal companies: the National Coal Association, the Western Fuels Association and the Edison Electric Institute.[1] In 1991, according to journalist Ross Gelbspan ICE:

    “launched a blatantly misleading campaign on climate change that had been designed by a public relations firm…[that] clearly stated that the aim of the campaign was to ‘reposition global warming as theory rather than fact’. Its plan specified that three of the so-called greenhouse sceptics – Robert Balling, Pat Michaels and S Fred Singer – should be placed in broadcast appearances, op-ed pages and newspaper interviews.”[2]

ICE prepared a series of newspaper ads, one of them headlined “If the earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis getting colder?” Fox News anchors suggested that the massive snowstorms on the East Coast of the US in early 2010 called into question the scientific consensus on global warming, comments that climate scientists rejected. January 2010 turned out to be among the hottest on record.

And the scientific evidence continues to mount. In August 2013, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s “State of the Climate” report, drawing on contributions from 384 scientists from 52 countries, outlined the latest set of records.

“Many of the events that made 2012 such an interesting year are part of the long-term trends we see in a changing and varying climate — carbon levels are climbing, sea levels are rising, Arctic sea ice is melting, and our planet as a whole is becoming a warmer place,” said its press release.

This network was constructed using money provided by fossil fuel companies. But there were a few companies who were central to this campaign.

THE FUNDERS:


ExxonMobil

When this report was first written, everybody focused on, at that point, the most obvious funder of the network of think tanks and front groups promoting climate denial: oil giant ExxonMobil, has spent $27.4 million supporting the climate denial movement between 1998 and 2012.

In 2008, after years of adverse publicity about its funding policies, ExxonMobil stopped its funding nine key groups, claiming their “position on climate change diverted attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Exxon slowly scaled back its funding to the denial machine from a peak of $3.5 million in 2005 down to $766,000 in 2012. Nonetheless, ExxonMobil continues to fund at least 12 groups campaigning against climate science, according to its own tax documents and corporate reports.

It should be noted that, due to the anonymity of Donors Trust, the decline in Exxon’s direct funding of the denial machine doesn’t necessarily mean there is not additional funding provided by the company’s employees that is not transparently reported.

The Koch Brothers

In early 2010, a Greenpeace investigation revealed that it wasn’t just ExxonMobil funding the climate denial machine. David and Charles Koch, of Koch Industries, who run the “biggest company you’ve never heard of,” have, through their company and family foundations, funnelled at least $67 million or more into the denial machine since 1997. The Kochs’ climate denial campaign is just part of a 40-plus year history of financing, influencing and, in some cases, leading a much broader conservative agenda.

The Koch focus has been on fighting environmental regulation, opposing clean energy legislation, and easing limits on industrial pollution.

This Koch money is routinely funneled through one of "charitable" foundations the Kochs have set up: the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation; the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation; and the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation and the less-known Knowledge and Progress Fund, used only to funnel money to Donors.

Since our investigation, many different investigations have looked further into what has become known as “The Kochtopus” – a massive network of funding tentacles that has spread across the US, from state to Federal level, a multi-decadal campaign involving events from local legislation to national decisions on pipelines, from funding for tenured professors at Universities to the potential purchase of major newspapers.

Perhaps most significantly, the Koch brothers set up Americans for Prosperity (with the tobacco industry), that masterminded the so-called grassroots “Tea Party” movement that has helped bring widespread climate denial into the heart of US Republican politics.
Donors Trust & Donors Capital: The ATM of Climate Denial

In 2007, after Greenpeace attempted to get a Vermont Court to release a list of clients funding climate denier Patrick Michaels’ company, “New Hope,’ the long-time denier made this comment in his [successful] affadavit opposing the Greenpeace application:

    "Large companies are understandably adverse to negative publicity. Thus, the global warming controversy has created an environment in which companies who wish to support New Hope's research and advocacy about global warming science are increasingly willing to do so only if their support remains confidential. For this reason, some companies that support New Hope financially do so on the understanding that their support will not be made public."

Only recently have the efforts of these big funders to hide that they’re spending money on climate denial come to light. In January 2012, a detailed study of Heartland Institute and other think tanks found connections with two donor advised funds based in Alexandria, Virginia: Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, set up in 2002.

After a climate scientist duped Heartland Institute into revealing its funders and plans in early 2012 (see Heartland Institute case study from Dealing in Doubt Part 2), one of the discoveries was a large anonymous donor. The detailed study plus newly-revealed internal plans were then combined to show Barre Seid as the major Heartland funder, using Donors.

Between them, from 2002 to 2011, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund provided $146 million to more than 100 groups, most of them running climate denial campaigns and many of them active in climate denial since the 1990s.

The Koch Brothers and wealthy businessmen such as billionaire Barre Seid have funneled money through these trusts, on whose boards sit well-known players in the climate denial campaign. It’s not just climate denial, but they also fight health care and other issues that could curtail corporate profit, under the banner of “freedom from Big Government.”

In October 2012, PBS/Frontline’s “Climate of Doubt” briefly mentioned Donors. In February 2013, The Guardian exposed these two organisations, based on a Greenpeace investigation on the Polluterwatch.com website and first outlined on DeSmogBlog in 2012. Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund don’t reveal who their funders are, advertizing and guaranteeing anonymity for their donors, thus shielding the funders themselves from public anger.

Further stories revealed it wasn’t just secret funders in the US financing climate denial – there was a network of wealthy businesspeople in the UK doing the same especially with the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), well-linked with related entities in the US and Canada.

THE PLAYERS:


Climate Denial's "Continental Army"

“There’s really only about 25 of us doing this. A core group of skeptics. It’s a ragtag bunch, very Continental Army.”

- Steve Milloy talking to Popular Science, June, 2012.

The organizations funded by Exxon, the Kochs, Donors Trust and others support a central team of spokespeople and strategists who set out to misinform the world and deny the science of climate change. Their names frequently appear in the media challenging the science of global warming: Fred Singer, Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon, Richard Lindzen, Patrick Michaels, Steve Milloy and many others.

Many forged a career out of denying environmental problems before climate change became a public policy issue. Together, they form a network that is still, 25 years later, challenging the climate science, no matter how much more work and how many thousands of scientific papers have been written since.

Although widely discredited, many of these same, media-savvy individuals continue to pollute the airwaves and travel all over the world casting doubt on well-established scientific facts.

Steve “The Junkman” Milloy, is the man who launched his corporate science denial career with The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, a Phillip Morris-funded front group formed to fend off the growing scientific consensus of the links between secondhand tobacco smoke and health problems. But today there are many more such celebrity deniers.

We have attempted to identify Climate Denial's “Continental Army” as described by Milloy – see Appendix 1 for the list of around 30 of the key players in the more than 20 year campaign and links to their updated profiles on DeSmogBlog.com or Polluterwatch.com
The Think Tanks

The denial machine today is run by a network of free market think thanks, largely based in the US, but with outposts around the globe.

In part 2 of this report, we case study The Heartland Institute as an example of how these think tanks and front groups continue to operate with their corporate cash.

In Appendix 2 we set out a list of the think tanks currently being funded by Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, and a tally of ExxonMobil’s funding. We have a full breakdown of the ExxonMobil funding and a pdf of Donors funding. Greenpeace’s detailed tracking of Koch Industries' spending on the front groups.

Another set of these groups could be seen in the membership of a coalition that has been around since the late 90’s, set up and run by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cooler Heads Coalition.
THE ROOTS OF CLIMATE DENIAL: BORNE OUT OF BIG TOBACCO ANTI SCIENCE CAMPAIGNS

The fossil fuel companies were not the original architects of the blueprint for deflecting blame and denying responsibility.

In March 2013 an academic study published in the journal Tobacco Control and funded by the National Cancer Institute at the National Council of Health found that the notorious US “grassroots” organisation at the centre of today’s climate denial campaign and dysfunctional political system, the Tea Party, was started in 2002 by front groups closely who had been associated with – and funded - by Big Tobacco and the Koch Brothers since the early 1980’s.

The reason? Big Tobacco was looking for support in its fight to stop regulation on secondhand smoke. This diagram from the study shows the web of groups set up by the tobacco industry and their staff people, many of whom ended up working for think thanks and front groups around today.

One key group set up by Phillip Morris and its PR firms APCO and Burson Marsteller was The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), set up in 1993 to “promote sound science.” Steve Milloy, hired by Phillip Morris at TASSC in 1997, is still involved in climate denial campaigns today.

From Big Tobacco to the Tea Party

Caption: From Big Tobacco to the tea party. Source: ‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third-party efforts: the tobacco industry and the Tea party’

Further investigation has revealed more links between Big Tobacco to climate denial than even this study showed.

Take the efforts of Tom Borelli, who worked at Philip Morris throughout the 90’s and into the 2000’s, when he took up a job as a coal lobbyist at FreedomWorks. (CSE later split into two groups: Freedomworks and the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity).

In the early 1990’s, big tobacco had taken a major hit and its credibility was low. But the issue of secondhand smoke was hot and smoking bans were being actively discussed across the US: a major threat to the tobacco industry. Phillip Morris and its PR company APCO were setting up The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition in Europe.

One of the objectives suggested in a memo from APCO to Philip Morris’s man in Europe, Matt Winakur, was to link tobacco science to more “politically correct” issues, such as global warming, to make the tobacco science look more mainstream.

The TASSC’s draft “scientific principles” were “too vague”, so APCO got Borelli to “review and tighten” them. As Borelli confirmed to his boss: “The principals [sic] are intended to be a basis for policymakers to evaluate scientific studies. The principles will also serve as a foundation for state legislative criteria to review the scientific basis for new regulations.”

Climate and secondhandsmoke science denier Patrick Michaels pitched in to help with the final draft. Borelli went on to set up both funding and PR links with the George C Marshall Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for their reports and work on challenging the science of climate change.

Dealing in Doubt
Appendix 1
On this page

    Individuals associated with think tanks
    The Echo Chamber
    The “Scientists”

Dealing in Doubt --> Appendix 1.

DEALING IN DOUBT: FULL REPORT

Return to Table of Contents
Climate Denial's "Continental Army"

“There’s really only about 25 of us doing this.  A core group of skeptics. It’s a ragtag bunch, very Continental Army.”

- Steve Milloy talking to Popular Science, June, 2012.

Steve The Junkman Milloy, arguably one of the very first global warming deniers, first shot to fame through his challenges to the links between tobacco science and health problems when he was paid by Phillip Morris to direct the front group it set up in 1997 to defend the science of second hand smoke:  The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC).  He then turned to denial of climate change, and has been at the heart of that campaign ever since.

Milloy has claimed the campaign is driven by a small group of about 25 people.  So who might this “Continental Army” of about 25 people be?  We’ve found 31. Of course there are more who have come and gone, but this gives a fairly comprehensive picture. 
Individuals associated with think tanks



Joseph Bast, Heartland Institute

James Taylor, Heartland Institute

Sandy Liddy Bourne (Heartland, American Energy Freedom Center, ALEC)

Myron Ebell (CEI)

Christopher Horner (CEI and American Tradition Institute)

Marlo Lewis (CEI

Fred Smith (CEI)

Bob Ferguson, Science and Public Policy Institute

Craig Rucker Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow

Steven F Hayward (DCF, Power Line blog)

Nigel Lawson Global Warming Policy Foundation

Benny Peiser, Global Warming Policy Foundation

Paul Driessen, CFACT
The Echo Chamber



Along with the think tanks pushing climate denial, there’s a large “echo chamber” in the blogosphere, largely led by a small band of bloggers.  They have a larger echo chamber in the form of conservative media such as Fox News, Rush Limbaugh et al. 

Anthony Watts: Wattsupwiththat.com

Marc Morano climatedepot.com

Steve McIntyre ClimateAudit

James Delingpole, The Daily Telegraph (UK)

Steve Milloy JunkScience.com

Andrew Bolt Australian Murdoch columnist
The “Scientists”



S Fred Singer (SEPP)

Richard S Lindzen

Patrick Michaels (Cato)

Willie Soon (and Sallie Baliunas) Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics

David Legates State Climatologist for Delaware

John Christy

Craig Idso – Center for the Studey of Carbon Dioxide & Global Change

Roy Spencer

Bob Carter (former JCU, Australia, now ex JCU)

Ian Plimer

Tim Ball



Special category: non scientists who pretend to have expertise

Lord Christopher Monckton

The roots of climate denial: borne out of Big Tobacco anti science campaigns

The fossil fuel companies were not the original architects of the blueprint for deflecting blame and denying responsibility

In March 2013 an academic study published in the journal Tobacco Control and funded by the National Cancer Institute at the National

Council of Health found that the notorious US “grassroots” organization at the center of today’s climate denial campaign and

dysfunctional political system, the Tea Party, was started in 2002 by front groups closely who had been associated with – and funded

– by Big Tobacco and the Koch Brothers since the early 1980’s.

The reason? Big Tobacco was looking for support in its fight to stop regulation on secondhand smoke. This diagram from the study

shows the web of groups set up by the tobacco industry and their staff people,many of whom ended up working for think tanks and front

groups around today.

One key group set up by Phillip Morris and its PR firms APCO and Burson Marsteller was The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition

(TASSC), set up in 1993 to “promote sound science.” Steve Milloy, hired by Phillip Morris at TASSC in 1997, is still involved in

climate denial campaigns today.

IPCC
1990—The IPCC’s First Assessment Report

During the final drafting of the IPCC’s First Scientific Assessment Report in 1990,

Brian Flannery, Exxon’s Chief Scientific Advisor and climate lobbyist, took issue with the recommendation for 60

to 80 percent cuts in CO2 emissions, in light of what he suggested were “uncertainties” about the behavior of

carbon in the climate system.
23
(In keeping with UN rules, the IPCC grants industry association members like ExxonMobil “observer status” at

its meetings, along with NGO’s).

Although the consensus of opinion remained against him, Flannery continued to demand that the IPCC

report’s Executive Summary state that the range of model results were “quite scientifically uncertain.”

24
He was unsuccessful: the summary concluded that greenhouse gas emissions at present rates would certainly

lead to warming.

25
This statement made the IPCC report a direct threat to business as usual in the fossil fuel sector. Having

failed to derail the IPCC from within, industry set out to discredit it. The attack focused on the IPCC’s statement

that it was “certain.”

In February 1992, at a press conference in New York during the negotiations that led to the UN Framework


Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the GCC used Fred Singer to attack the IPCC science, issuing

a briefing entitled “Stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions would have little environmental benefit,”in which it

cited denier Professor Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Singer is a serial denier and has published little, if any, peer reviewed climate science in the last 20 years.

27
He has spoken out as a scientific expert on subjects including second hand smoke, acid rain, ozone depletion,

nuclear energy, pesticides, and the environmental impacts of nuclear war. (see Appendix I:

Climate denial’s “continental army”).

Throughout 1992 the GCC used well-known climate deniers like Patrick Michaels Robert Balling and Fred

Singer (all of whom have been partly funded by either Exxon or other energy companies

at one time or another) as ’experts’ at press conferences in its attempts to undermine the credibility of accepted

climate science and the findings of the IPCC.



30
The same year, Exxon’s Flannery was quoted by the World Coal Institute in a briefing for climate negotiators:

“because model-based projections are controversial, uncertain, and without confirmation, scientists are divided

in their opinion about the likelihood and consequences of climate change.”

31
In 1994 The GCC continued the attack on the IPCC when it hired a public relations firm to take climate denier

Dr. Sallie Baliunas on a media tour.

1995 The Second Assessment Report (SAR)

When the IPCC released its Second Assessment Report (SAR) in 1995, it met a similarly aggressive response. Among the key findings

of the IPCC was the acknowledgement of a “discernable” human impact on climate and a prediction that sea levels could rise 15 to 95

cm by 2100, in line with temperature increases ranging from 1 °C to 3.5 °C (1.8 °F to 6.5 °F)35.

The SAR’s Summary for Policymakers contained the conclusion that, “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on

global climate.”


That one sentence set the deniers on fire. One called it the “most disturbing corruption of the peer-review process in 60 years.”

Charles DiBona, president of the American Petroleum Institute, called the report “inflammatory,”while oil-producing countries such as

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia tried to delay the report’s release because of this “strong language,” and argued against the use of the

words “appreciable,” “notable,” “measurable,” and “detectable” in place of “discernable.”

The attacks weren’t restricted to the science or the report. In a sign of desperation, the deniers turned to ad hominem attacks on

key scientists were added as part of an escalating strategy of increasingly under handed and dirty tricks, a strategy that continues

to this day (See case study, Part 2).

The GCC co-ordinated vicious personal attacks on Dr. Ben Santer, one of the key authors of the report. The aim was to discredit the

process by which the IPCC worked. This began a campaign of attacks on scientists that continues to this day, some examples of

whichare outlined in Part 2 of this report.

Fred Singer meanwhile used the 1997 climate negotiations to launch an attack on the chair of the IPCC,

Bert Bolin. Following a debate at the talks, Singer twisted quotes from Bolin, attempting to suggest that he had changed his mind

about climate change, saying: “Bolin remained adamant that there has been some human influence on climate, but conceded that

“man-made increases in temperature are so small as to be barely detectable.

This would be achieved by recruiting and training five ‘independent’ scientists – ‘new faces... without a

long history of visibility in the climate debate’ to participate in media outreach. The API aimed to ‘maximize the impact of

scientific views consistent with ours, with Congress, the media and other key audiences’ and admitted shamelessly that it would

target teachers and students, in order to ‘begin to erect a barrier against further efforts to impose Kyoto-like measures in the

future.’

Though this plan ended up being revealed on the front page of the New York Times, it is assumed that ExxonMobil and others went ahead

with essentially the same game plan starting in 1998. The education section of it was taken up by various groups including the

American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) –

See case study, Part 2 of this report.


To be continued.......

Ohh  F/F/S as if it's going to change your closed mind.

97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.
Climate Myth...

There is no consensus
The Petition Project features over 31,000 scientists signing the petition stating "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide will, in the forseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere ...". (Petition Project)

Science achieves a consensus when scientists stop arguing.  When a question is first asked – like ‘what would happen if we put a load more CO2 in the atmosphere?’ – there may be many hypotheses about cause and effect. Over a period of time, each idea is tested and retested – the processes of the scientific method – because all scientists know that reputation and kudos go to those who find the right answer (and everyone else becomes an irrelevant footnote in the history of science).  Nearly all hypotheses will fall by the wayside during this testing period, because only one is going to answer the question properly, without leaving all kinds of odd dangling bits that don’t quite add up. Bad theories are usually rather untidy.

But the testing period must come to an end. Gradually, the focus of investigation narrows down to those avenues that continue to make sense, that still add up, and quite often a good theory will reveal additional answers, or make powerful predictions, that add substance to the theory.

So a consensus in science is different from a political one. There is no vote. Scientists just give up arguing because the sheer weight of consistent evidence is too compelling, the tide too strong to swim against any longer. Scientists change their minds on the basis of the evidence, and a consensus emerges over time. Not only do scientists stop arguing, they also start relying on each other's work. All science depends on that which precedes it, and when one scientist builds on the work of another, he acknowledges the work of others through citations. The work that forms the foundation of climate change science is cited with great frequency by many other scientists, demonstrating that the theory is widely accepted - and relied upon.

In the scientific field of climate studies – which is informed by many different disciplines – the consensus is demonstrated by the number of scientists who have stopped arguing about what is causing climate change – and that’s nearly all of them.  A survey of 928 peer-reviewed abstracts on the subject 'global climate change' published between 1993 and 2003 shows that not a single paper rejected the consensus position that global warming is man caused (Oreskes 2004).

A follow-up study by the Skeptical Science team of over 12,000 peer-reviewed abstracts on the subjects of 'global warming' and 'global climate change' published between 1991 and 2011 found that of the papers taking a position on the cause of global warming, over 97% agreed that humans are causing it (Cook 2013).  The scientific authors of the papers were also contacted and asked to rate their own papers, and again over 97% whose papers took a position on the cause said humans are causing global warming.

consensus pie chart

Lead author John Cook created a short video abstract summarizing the study:

Several studies have confirmed that “...the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes”. (Doran 2009). In other words, more than 97% of scientists working in the disciplines contributing to studies of our climate, accept that climate change is almost certainly being caused by human activities.

We should also consider official scientific bodies and what they think about climate change. There are no national or major scientific institutions anywhere in the world that dispute the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Not one.

In the field of climate science, the consensus is unequivocal: human activities are causing climate change.

......................................................................................

Understand....Comprehende.....Believe???

Please publish more than one or even one PEER REVIEWED STUDY CONFIRMING YOUR BIAS.



YOU cant and that's a fact.....................because the deniers refuse to submit any fake study they do ....to a CLIMATE SCIENTIST

for review.

They only operate through the friendly media like that good citizen MURDOCH and the TEA PARTY and the LIBERAL PARTY


What a bunch of shonks ......the lot of them.

Coming from someone that believes that the Moon Landing was a conspiracy and shot in a film/Television studio........... then i'm


happy to oppose your views on this.




Look up in the sky.........................................
































It's Elvis

The Cook et al. (2013) 97% consensus result is robust

What the science says...

The 97% consensus has been independently confirmed by a number of different approaches and lines of evidence.


Climate Myth...

97% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven

Cooks ’97% consensus’ disproven by a new peer reviewed paper showing major math errors (Anthony Watts)

....................................................


Communicating the expert consensus is very important in terms of increasing public awareness of human-caused climate change and support for climate solutions.  Thus it's perhaps not surprising that Cook et al. (2013) and its 97% consensus result have been the subject of extensive denial among the usual climate contrarian suspects.  After all, the fossil fuel industry, right-wing think tanks, and climate contrarians have been engaged in a disinformation campaign regarding the expert climate consensus for over two decades.  For example, Western Fuels Association conducted a half-million dollar campaign in 1991 designed to ‘reposition global warming as theory (not fact).’

The 97% Consensus is a Robust Result

Nevertheless, the existence of the expert consensus on human-caused global warming is a reality, as is clear from an examination of the full body of evidence.  For example, Naomi Oreskes found no rejections of the consensus in a survey of 928 abstracts performed in 2004.  Doran & Zimmerman (2009) found a 97% consensus among scientists actively publishing climate research.  Anderegg et al. (2010) reviewed publicly signed declarations supporting or rejecting human-caused global warming, and again found over 97% consensus among climate experts.  Cook et al. (2013) found the same 97% result through a survey of over 12,000 climate abstracts from peer-reviewed journals, as well as from over 2,000 scientist author self-ratings, among abstracts and papers taking a position on the causes of global warming.

In addition to these studies, we have the National Academies of Science from 33 different countries all endorsing the consensus.  Dozens of scientific organizations have endorsed the consensus on human-caused global warming.  Only one has ever rejected the consensus - the American Association of Petroleum Geologists - and even they shifted to a neutral position when members threatened to not renew their memberships due to its position of climate denial.

In short, the 97% consensus on human-caused global warming is a robust result, found using several different methods in various studies over the past decade.  It really shouldn't be a surprise at this point, and denying it is, well, denial.
Quantifying the Human Global Warming Contribution

There have also been various studies quantifying the human contribution to global warming, as we have previously documented.

attribution 50 yr

Figure 1: Net human and natural percent contributions to the observed global surface warming over the past 50-65 years according to Tett et al. 2000 (T00, dark blue), Meehl et al. 2004 (M04, red), Stone et al. 2007 (S07, light green), Lean and Rind 2008 (LR08, purple), Huber and Knutti 2011 (HK11, light blue), Gillett et al. 2012 (G12, orange), Wigley and Santer 2012 (WS12, dark green), and Jones et al. 2013 (J12, pink).

Again, there's very little controversy here.  The scientific literature is quite clear that humans have caused most of the global surface warming over the past half century, as the 2013 IPCC report is expected to state with 95% confidence.

In Cook et al. (2013), we broadened the focus beyond definitions that quantify the human contribution, because there's a consensus gap on the mere question of whether humans are causing global warming.  Nevertheless, we used the 2007 IPCC position as one of our consensus position definitions:

    "We examined a large sample of the scientific literature on global [climate change], published over a 21 year period, in order to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW)."

The IPCC position (humans causing most global warming) was represented in our categories 1 and 7, which include papers that explicitly endorse or reject/minimize human-caused global warming, and also quantify the human contribution.  Among the relatively few abstracts (75 in total) falling in these two categories, 65 (87%) endorsed the consensus view.  Among the larger sample size of author self-rated papers in categories 1 and 7 (237 in total), 228 (96%) endorsed the consensus view that humans are causing most of the current global warming.

The self-ratings offer a larger sample size on this quantification question because of the limited real estate in a paper's abstract.  Most journals have strict word limits on their abstracts, so authors have to focus on the specifics of their research.  On the other hand, the author self-ratings are based on the full papers, which have much more real estate and are thus more likely to both take a position on the cause of global warming, and quantify the human contribution.
Confused Contrarians Think they are Included in the 97%

There have been a number of contrarians claiming that they are part of the 97% consensus, which they believe is limited to the position that humans are causing some global warming.  The first error in this argument is in ignoring the fact that the data collected in Cook et al. (2013) included categories that quantify the human contribution, as Andrew Montford and the GWPF recently did, for example.

The second error has been made by individuals claiming they're in the 97%, but failing to actually check the data.  For example, Roy Spencer claimed in testimony to US Congress that he is included in the 97% consensus.  Since we made all of our data available to the public, you can see our ratings of Spencer's abstracts here. Five of his papers were captured in our literature search; we categorized four as 'no opinion' on the cause of global warming, and one as implicitly minimizing the human influence.  Thus Spencer's research was included in the fewer than 3 percent of papers that either rejected or minimized the human contribution to global warming.  Bjorn Lomborg made a similar error, claiming:

    "Virtually everyone I know in the debate would automatically be included in the 97% (including me, but also many, much more skeptical)."

In reality Lomborg is included neither in the 97+% nor the less than 3% because as far as we can tell, he has not published any peer-reviewed climate research, and thus none of his writings were captured in our literature search.  The 97% is a consensus of climate science experts, and that, Lomborg is not.

Nir Shaviv took the opposite approach, claiming he was wrongly included in the 97%.  Though Shaviv also admitted that Cook et al. correctly classified his abstracts based on their content, but claimed that he worded the text in a way to slip it past the journal reviewers and editors.

    "I couldn’t write these things more explicitly in the paper because of the refereeing, however, you don’t have to be a genius to reach these conclusions from the paper."

However, Shaviv, Spencer, and all other authors were invited to participate in the self-ratings process that resulted in the sae 97% consensus conclusion.

Tol's Rejected Comment

Richard Tol has also advanced various criticisms of Cook et al. (2013).  It's worth noting that Tol does not dispute the existence of the consensus, writing:

    "There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct."

Tol has nevertheless criticized the methods applied during the Cook et al. survey.  For example, he has argued that the literature search should have been conducted with Scopus rather than the Web of Science in order to capture more papers, but also that fewer papers should have been included in the survey in order to focus on those specifically researching the causes of global warming.  Tol has also applied various statistical tests comparing the abstract ratings to the author self-ratings, but these tests are invalid because the two phases of the survey considered different information (abstracts only vs. full papers) and are thus not comparable.

In fact, when we released the self-rating data, we explicitly discussed the difference between the two datasets and how the difference was actually instructive.  As John Cook wrote,

    "That's not to say our ratings of abstracts exactly matched the self-ratings by the papers' authors. On the contrary, the two sets measure different things and not only are differences expected, they're instructive."

Ultimately Tol submitted his criticisms to Environmental Research Letters as a comment, but the submission was summarily rejected by the editor who described it as a speculative opinion piece that does not identify any clear errors that would call the paper's conclusions into question.

In short, the 97% consensus has passed peer-review, while Tol's criticisms have not.  Moreover, all of Tol's criticisms only apply to the abstract ratings, while the self-ratings also found the same 97% consensus result, completely independent from the abstract ratings.
Taking Consensus Denial to the Extreme

One critique of the consensus has been published in a paper in the journal Science & Education.  The argument made in the paper was first published by Christopher Monckton on a climate contrarian blog.  Monckton has also suggested the conspiracy theory that the journal Environmental Research Letters was created (in 2006) specifically for the purpose of publishing Cook et al. (2013).

The Monckton paper takes the point about quantification above to the extreme.  It focuses exclusively on the papers that quantified human-caused global warming, and takes these as a percentage of all 12,000 abstracts captured in the literature search, thus claiming the consensus is not 97%, but rather 0.3%.  The logical flaws in this argument should be obvious, and thus should not have passed through the peer-review process.

Approximately two-thirds of abstracts did not take a position on the causes of global warming, for various reasons (e.g. the causes were simply not relevant to or a key component of their specific research paper).  Thus in order to estimate the consensus on human-caused global warming, it's necessary to focus on the abstracts that actually stated a position on human-caused global warming.

When addressing the consensus regarding humans being responsible for the majority of recent global warming, the same argument holds true for abstracts that do not quantify the human contribution.  We simply can't know their position on the issue - that doesn't mean they endorse or reject the consensus position; they simply don't provide that information, and thus must first be removed before estimating the quantified consensus.

As noted above, when we perform this calculation, the consensus position that humans are the main cause of global warming is endorsed in 87% of abstracts and 96% of full papers.  Monckton's argument is very similar to the myth that CO2 can't cause significant global warming because it only comprises 0.04% of the atmosphere.  99% of the atmosphere is comprised of non-greenhouse gases, but these other gases are irrelevant to the question of the CO2 greenhouse effect.  The percentage of CO2 as a fraction of all gases in the atmosphere is an irrelevant figure, as is the percentage of abstracts quantifying human-caused global warming as a percentage of all abstracts captured in our literature search.

It's also worth noting that based on Monckton's logic, only 0.08% of abstracts reject human-caused global warming.
Climate Consensus Denialism

Overall, the critiques of Cook et al. (2013) have all exhibited the characteristics of scientific denialism.  Given the long history of consensus denial campaigns by fossil fuel interests and climate contrarians, continued resistance to the consensus is an expected result.  Nevertheless, the 97% consensus is a robust result from several different studies taking a variety of approaches, including two independent methods used by Cook et al. (abstract ratings and author self-ratings).  The criticisms of the paper have all exhibited the same few logical flaws, some more extreme than others, but all erroneous.

Last updated on 5 May 2014 by dana1981. View Arch

personally i am proud of the 75 climate scientists ... ooops ... i mean the 97% 

proud because NOT ONE OF THEM risked their reputation and acted as a witness for the defence of Al G ... when the highest judicial court in the UK ... the High Court ... handed down its ruling on his inconvenient mischief

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the ruling was this ...

Al Gore, the former US vice president and environmental activist calls on people to fight global warming because "humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb".

But Judge Michael Burton ruled yesterday that errors had arisen "in the context of alarmism and exaggeration" in order to support Mr Gore's thesis on global warming.

A British High Court judge this week exposed nine inaccuracies in former U.S. vicepresident Al Gore's award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, labelling it "a political film" and calling many of its claims about climate change "alarmist" and "exaggerated."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3310137/Al-Gores-nine-Inconvenient-Untruths.html

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well done the 75 ...

keep putting up the good fight AFL - the flat earthers are still out there

CS is great .. we're learning more and more all the time

the exaggeration & alarmism is offensive tho .. but it is being exposed over and over .. (sometimes in court eh Al lol) 

now if we were gonna do something about it .. what we do

we could  ... follow the bankers like little sheep and hand over our sovereign wealth to the long con schemers in a filthy tax/trade gambit ... like the poor europeans ... who have blow hundreds of BILLIONS of their citizens hard earned money in the past decade ... for NO change to the environment

or ...

?

as expected AFL logs in posts on another Tony Abbott hate thread - looks at this thread and ignores the questions - logs out

AFL (St Jude..patron saint of the hopeless) jealous of the rich because he isn't..........yet happy to come on here and argue the case for................wait for it...........the filthy bankers wanting to rip all and sundry off.....just doesn't make sense

BIGGEST RORT EVER

Coming from someone that believes that the Moon Landing was a conspiracy and shot in a film/Television studio...........

then i'm happy to oppose your views on this.