Rabid doomsayers revel in fear, ignorance and deceit
Chris Kenny
12:00AM September 19, 2020

We know fear and ignorance have a powerful and deleterious influence on human behaviour and we have tended to think that our age of instant knowledge and communications might have rendered them impotent. Now, confronted by pandemic and climate catastrophism, and deceptions, we can see that fear and ignorance are alive and amplified in the digital age.

From the deserted streets and shuttered houses of Melbourne to the Californian towns razed by fire, we see how fear and ignorance do enormous damage and distract us from practical protections. In both cases an ideological approach pretends a natural threat can be eliminated by grand government interventions; and alarmist tricks are used to frighten people into compliance.

No one should pretend that pandemics or wildfires are not worthy of legitimate concern. We know they are age-old natural threats that our ancestors endured repeatedly without the knowledge, contraptions and accoutrements that assist us now.

We need to overcome fear, keep our challenges in perspective, confront our dilemmas with rational approaches and avoid, rather than embrace, panic. We all need leaders that can be calm in a crisis, but increasingly we have leaders advancing political arguments with hysteria and hyperbole

It is instructive that the scare tactics and fearmongering come from those who want to change public behaviour and pretend they can vanquish, rather than manage, natural threats. This is a grand deceit based on a conceit — believing humanity can control the natural environment as though with an app.

Examples of fear and ignorance abound. This week Joe Biden stood in a park near his home in Delaware — while people were still battling devastating wildfires in California and Oregon, and battening down for hurricanes and flooding in Florida and neighbouring states — and read words from a teleprompter, with feeling, into the camera.

“If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?” he shouted. “If we give a climate denier four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised when more of America is underwater?”

Climate arsonist? This is the feral and unhinged language used by Greens senator Jordan Steele-John in this country while trying to leverage our bushfires for his climate change agenda. But Biden is running for president.

The core case presented here, that re-electing Trump will lead to more bushfires and flooding in the US, is so unscientific, irrational and blatantly false that it would not and could not be supported by any scientist. It calls into question the intellectual capacity of the man delivering the words.

The corollary is that if they elect Biden, Americans will be spared bushfires, hurricanes and floods. This is an insane proposition, made and amplified only to scare people into thinking climate policies can eradicate natural disasters, including an annual bushfire menace that predates human settlement of the American continent.

That public debate should be so base and false in this age of knowledge is perhaps the most frightening revelation of our time. Yet stuff like this is seldom interrogated by mainstream media — it is only those who challenge the catastrophism who have their claims fact-checked.

In a spiteful interview this week on the ABC’s 7.30, Leigh Sales harangued former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about how Donald Trump has misled the public “on everything from the coronavirus to climate change” — fair enough, Trump often contradicts himself. Then Sales zeroed in on comments Trump made when visiting the fire-ravaged West Coast this week about how temperatures “will start getting cooler” and how, when challenged on the climate science, the President said he doesn’t think “science knows, actually”.

The easiest and most common game to play is the inane one that amuses Twitter every day; testing the President’s meandering statements against a literal standard not applied to other politicians. Or we could recognise that, banal as it was, Trump was right to say cooler weather will ease the fire situation sooner or later, and that the science about the interplay between climate change, drought, floods and wildfires is far from certain or complete.

In his recent book, Apocalypse Never, environmentalist Michael Shellenberger detailed the latest science on fuel loads rather than climate change being the most telling wildfire inputs. Trump’s typically contrarian and unscripted remarks demonstrated a much closer relationship to reality than the maniacal claims from Biden.

Yet most media report Biden’s lunacy straight, as legitimate rhetoric, while slamming Trump’s reflections as madness. Trump’s arguments centred on forest management and fuel reduction — the pragmatic and proven way to reduce bushfire damage to people and property no matter what happens to climate — while Biden holds out the insulting silliness that his climate policies can relieve people of the fire-and-flood burden.

It is a reprise of the inanity we saw in Australia before, during and after last summer. Journalists even reported the fires were so severe that the bush might never recover. How horrible (note the fear) but diametrically opposed to the reality of how our sclerophyll forests have evolved to be dependent on fire for rejuvenation (note the ignorance).

The disingenuous rhetoric is designed to marshal the masses behind radical climate change policies. Those making rational arguments such as managing fuel, the only fire input we can control, are either ridiculed or given short shrift.

Former climate commissioner Tim Flannery segued from climate alarmism to pandemic pandemonium this week. “But the coronavirus also travels unseen through the great aerial ocean,” he wrote in The Guardian Australia in a testing metaphor, “insinuating itself in lung after lung, killing person after person, until it threatens our health system, economy and society.” Well, the dams are full, so I guess he had to find another angle.

The catastrophists are having one of their best years, even though nothing is ever bad enough for them. They love to predict Armageddon and, if we listen to them, that is exactly what we will get.

The climate change issue has become a political battle ground instead of a scientific inquiry. This has lead to haphazard scientific studies where the proponents are heroes and the opponents derided and scorned. Scientific inquiries shouldn't be as polarizing and it should be open to debate and sharing of data. Instead we have a political movement using this issue to force their broad agenda which extends far beyond just the climate issue. Those against the politics, even those against their social changes, are put down as deniers - evil skeptics who want to kill the earth. We need to have a true scientific discussion to this and shut down the politics surrounding this issue. It won't happen, but that is what it needs.

The real Inconvenient Truth

Inaccuracies in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth - A Ruling of the British High Court

The decision by the British Government to distribute Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" has been the subject of a legal action by New Party member Stewart Dimmock. The Court found that the film was misleading in nine respects and that the Guidance Notes drafted by the Education Secretary’s advisors served only to exacerbate the political propaganda in the film.

In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Nine inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.
The inaccuracies are:

1. The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.

2. The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.

3. The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.

4. The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.

5. The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.

6. The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.

7. The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.

8. The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7 m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40 cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.

9. The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government was unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

Also, the Court's interim ruling included the following:

1. The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.

2. The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.

CLIMATEGATE...

The Climategate emails expose to our view a world that was previously hidden from virtually everyone.This formerly hidden world was made up of a very few players. But they controlled those critical Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) processes involv-ing the temperature records from the past, and the official interpretation of cur-rent temperature data. They exerted previously unrecognized influence on the “peer review” process for papers seeking publication in the officially recognised climate science literature from which the IPCC was supposed to rely exclusively in order to draw its conclusions.The Climategate emails demonstrate that these people had no regard for the tradi-tions and assumptions which had developed over centuries and which provided the foundations of Western science. At the very core of this tradition is respect for truth and honesty in reporting data and results; and a recognition that all the data, and all the steps required to reach a result, had to be available to the scientific world at large.

[thegwpf.org]

[aei.org]

Friends of Science, a Canada-based “non-profit organization run by dedicated volunteers comprised mainly of active and retired earth and atmospheric scientists, engineers, and other professionals.” On the same day last week that Greta Thunberg made an impassioned speech to the United Nations about her fears of a climate emergency, a group of 500 prominent scientists and professionals, led by the CLINTEL co-founder Guus Berkhout, sent this registered letter to the United Nations Secretary-General stating that there is no climate emergency and climate policies should be designed to benefit the lives of people. Here’s the press release, here’ the list of 500 signees, and here’s the opening of the letter:

A global network of more than 500 knowledgeable and experienced scientists and professionals in climate and related fields have the honor to address to Your Excellencies the attached European Climate Declaration, for which the signatories to this letter are the national ambassadors. The general-circulation models of climate on which international policy is at present founded are unfit for their purpose.

Therefore, it is cruel as well as imprudent to advocate the squandering of trillions of dollars on the basis of results from such immature models. Current climate policies pointlessly and grievously undermine the economic system, putting lives at risk in countries denied access to affordable, reliable electrical energy. We urge you to follow a climate policy based on sound science, realistic economics and genuine concern for those harmed by costly but unnecessary attempts at mitigation

Here are the specific points about climate change highlighted in the letter:

1 Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming.
2. Warming is far slower than predicted.
3. Climate policy relies on inadequate models.
4. CO2 is not a pollutant. It is a plant food that is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing.
More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.
5. Global warming has not increased natural disasters.
6. Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities.
7. There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims to represent more than 2,500 scientists who agree that man-made global warming is a serious problem. But this is misleading. While a total of 2,500 (or some similar number) scientists participate in some way in the writing or review of its reports, the IPCC’s working group responsible for assessing the causes of climate change and its future trajectory consists of only about 600 scientists, and many of those are activists working for environmental interest groups. For the Fourth Assessment Report, only 62 were responsible for reviewing the chapter that attributed climate change to man-made greenhouse gas emissions, with 55 of those being known advocates of the theory of man-made global warming. Of the seven impartial reviewers, two disagreed with the statement, leaving only five credible scientific reviewers who unequivocally endorse the IPCC’s conclusion, a far cry from 2,500.

[judithcurry.com]

Climate change: no consensus on consensus

by Judith Curry

The manufactured consensus of the IPCC has had the unintended consequences of distorting the science, elevating the voices of scientists that dispute the consensus, and motivating actions by the consensus scientists and their supporters that have diminished the public’s trust in the IPCC.

Our paper has just been accepted for publication. A link to the final manuscript is provided here [consensus paper revised final]. Below is a ‘reader’s digest’ version of the main arguments made in this paper

Introduction

The United Nations initiated a scientific consensus building process with the objective of providing a robust scientific basis for climate policy, under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC). The key IPCC consensus finding from its latest assessment report is this statement:

“Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”

The IPCC consensus findings on attribution have been echoed in position statements made by many scientific organizations. The IPCC consensus is portrayed as nearly total among scientists with expertise and prominence in the field of climate science. The idea of a scientific consensus surrounding climate change attribution has been questioned by a number of people, including scientists and politicians. Much effort has been undertaken by those that support the IPCC consensus to discredit skeptical voices, essentially dismissing them as cranks or at best rebels, or even politically motivated ‘deniers’.

Students of science are taught to reject ad populam or ‘bandwagon’ appeals, a sentiment is articulated by the motto of the UK Royal Society: ‘nullius in verba’, which is roughly translated as ‘take nobody’s word for it’. How then, and why, have climate scientists come to a scientific consensus about a very complex scientific problem that the consensus-supporting scientists themselves acknowledge has substantial and fundamental uncertainties?

Consensus and dissent

The debate surrounding the consensus on climate change is complicated by the complexity of both the scientific and the associated sociopolitical issues. Underlying this debate is a fundamental tension between two competing conceptions of scientific inquiry: the consensual view of science versus the dissension view. Under the consensual approach, the goal of science is a consensus of rational opinion over the widest possible field. The opposing view of science is that of dissension, whereby scientific progress occurs via subversion of consensus in favor of new experiments, ideas and theories.

When is it reasonable for a person to conform to a consensus and when is it reasonable to dissent?

With genuinely well-established scientific theories, ‘consensus’ is not discussed and the concept of consensus is arguably irrelevant. For example, there is no point to discussing a consensus that the Earth orbits the sun, or that the hydrogen molecule has less mass than the nitrogen molecule. While a consensus may arise surrounding a specific scientific hypothesis or theory, the existence of a consensus is not itself the evidence.

The issue of challenges to the IPCC consensus statement on attribution is not analogous to Galileo-like revolutionaries. Rather these challenges are associated with a concern about the oversimplification by the IPCC of a complex issue in the interests of policy making. How to reason about uncertainties in the complex climate system and its computer simulations is neither simple nor obvious. Scientific debates involve controversies over the value and importance of particular classes of evidence as well as disagreement about the appropriate logical framework for linking and assessing the evidence. The IPCC faces a daunting challenge with regards to characterizing and reasoning about uncertainty, assessing the quality of evidence, linking the evidence into arguments, identifying areas of ignorance and assessing confidence levels. An overarching concern is how the issue of climate change is framed scientifically and how judgments about confidence in complex scientific arguments are made in view of the cascade of uncertainties.

Given the complexity of the climate problem, ‘expert judgments’ about uncertainty and confidence levels are made by the IPCC on issues that are dominated by unquantifiable uncertainties. It is difficult to avoid concluding that the IPCC consensus is manufactured and that the existence of this consensus does not lend intellectual substance to their conclusions.

Consensus and bias

If the objective of scientific research is to obtain truth and avoid error, how might a consensus seeking process introduce bias into the science and increase the chances for error? ‘Confirmation bias’ is a well-known psychological principle that connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or an existing hypothesis. Confirmation bias usually refers to unwitting selectivity in the acquisition and interpretation of evidence.

Princeton philosopher Thomas Kelly provides some insight into confirmation bias, arguing that a prior belief can skew the total evidence that is available subsequently in a direction that is favorable to itself. Kelly also finds that individuals tend to be significantly better at detecting fallacies when the fallacy occurs in an argument for a conclusion which they disbelieve, rather than for a conclusion in which they believe. Kelly identifies a further source of confirmation bias in the consensus building process, whereby as more and more peers weigh in on the issue, the higher order psychological evidence of what others believe can eventually swamp the first order evidence into virtual insignificance.

With regards to the IPCC, cognitive biases in the context of an institutionalized consensus building process have arguably resulted in the consensus becoming increasingly confirmed in a self-reinforcing way, to the detriment of the scientific process.

Role of scientific consensus in decision making

The mandate of the IPCC is to provide policy‐relevant information to policy makers involved in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Based upon the precautionary principle, the UNFCCC established a qualitative climate goal for the long term: avoiding dangerous climate change by stabilization of the concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases. The IPCC scientific assessments play a primary role in legitimizing national and international policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The main practical objective of the IPCC has been to assess whether there is sufficient certainty in the science so as to trigger political action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This objective has led to the IPCC assessments being framed around identifying anthropogenic influences on climate, environmental and socio-economic impacts of climate change, and stabilization of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

This relationship between expertise and policy is described as the linear model of expertise, or ‘speaking truth to power’, whereby first science has to ‘get it right’ and then policy comes into play. The influence of science on policy is assumed to be deterministic: if the scientific facts are ‘sound,’ then they have a direct impact on policy. In the linear model, the key question is whether existing scientific knowledge is certain enough, or there is a consensus of experts, to compel action.

Dutch social scientist Jeroen Van der Sluijs argues that the IPCC has adopted a ‘speaking consensus to power’ approach that sees uncertainty and dissent as problematic, and attempts to mediate these into a consensus. The ‘speaking consensus to power’ strategy acknowledges that available knowledge is inconclusive, and uses consensus as a proxy for truth through a negotiated interpretation of the inconclusive body of scientific evidence. The ‘consensus to power’ strategy reflects a specific vision of how politics deals with scientific uncertainties and endeavors to create a knowledge base for decision making following the linear model of expertise.

The linear model of expertise works well for ‘tame’ problems, where everyone essentially agrees on both the problem and the solution. Successes in managing tame problems are evident in the domains of engineering and regulatory science. Climate change has been framed by the UNFCCC/IPCC as a relatively ‘tame’ problem that requires a straightforward solution, namely the top-down creation of a global carbon market. However, climate change is arguably characterized better as a ‘wicked problem’ or a ‘mess’. ‘Messes’ and ‘wicked problems’ are characterized by multiple problem definitions, methods that are open to contention and solutions that are variable and disputed, and ‘unknown unknowns’ that suggest chronic conditions of ignorance and lack of capacity to imagine future eventualities of both the problem and the proposed solutions.

Unintended consequences of the IPCC consensus

The consensus approach used by the IPCC has received a number of criticisms. Concerns have been raised about the need to guard against overconfidence and overemphasize expected outcomes. The consensus approach being used by the IPCC has failed to produce a thorough portrayal of the complexities of the problem and the associated uncertainties in our understanding, in favor of spuriously constructed expert opinion. Further, concerns are being raised that the IPCC’s consensus claim is distorting the science itself, as scientists involved in the IPCC process consider the impact of their statements on the ability of the IPCC to defend its previous claims of consensus.

While the IPCC’s consensus approach acknowledges uncertainties, defenders of the IPCC consensus have expended considerable efforts in the ‘boundary work’ of distinguishing those qualified to contribute to the climate change consensus from those who are not. These efforts have characterized skeptics as small in number, extreme, and scientifically suspect. These efforts create temptations to make illegitimate attacks on scientists whose views do not align with the consensus, and to dismiss any disagreement as politically motivated ‘denialism’. The use of ‘denier’ to label anyone who disagrees with the IPCC consensus on attribution leads to concerns being raised about the IPCC being enforced as dogma, which is tied to how dissent is dealt with.

The linear model of expertise places science at the center of political debate. Scientific controversies surrounding evidence of climate change have thus become a proxy for political battles over whether and how to react to climate change. Therefore, winning a scientific debate results in a privileged position in political battle, hence providing motivation for defending the consensus. As a result, it has become difficult to disentangle political arguments about climate policies from scientific arguments about the evidence for human-induced climate change. The quality of both political debate and scientific practice can suffer as a consequence.

The linear model of expertise ‘speaking consensus to power’ tends to stifle discussion of alternative policy approaches. The IPCC has framed its assessment around the UNFCCC policy of stabilizing greenhouse emissions, focusing its scientific assessment on the attribution of climate change and the sensitivity of climate change to greenhouse gases. The narrow focus on issues of attribution masks major political implications, marginalizes issues around adaptation and development, and fails to engage with alternative approaches and to generate ideas to inform its ‘solutions’

While the public may not understand the complexity of the science or be predisposed culturally to accept the consensus, they can certainly understand the vociferous debates over the science portrayed by the media. Further, they can judge the social facts surrounding the consensus building process, including those revealed by the so-called “Climategate” episode, and decide whether to trust the experts whose opinion comprises the consensus.

In summary, the manufactured consensus of the IPCC has arguably had the unintended consequences of distorting the science, elevating the voices of scientists that dispute the consensus, and motivating actions by the consensus scientists and their supporters that have diminished the public’s trust in the IPCC.

Ways forward

The linear model of climate science expertise conceals uncertainties, ambiguities, dissent and ignorance behind a scientific consensus. The most important actions that are needed with regards to climate science – particularly in context of the IPCC assessment reports – are explicit reflection on uncertainties, ambiguities and areas of ignorance (both known and unknown unknowns) and more openness for dissent in the IPCC processes. Greater openness about scientific uncertainties and ignorance, and more transparency about dissent and disagreement, would provide policymakers with a more complete picture of climate science and its limitations. In the context of iterative risk management, policy makers need insight into the rate of learning, as well as what is known and unknown.

Moving forward requires a reassessment of the ‘consensus to power’ approach for the science-policy interface that has evolved in the context of the IPCC and UNFCCC. The challenge is to open up the decision making processes in a way that renders their primary nature more honestly political and economic, while giving proper weight to scientific reason and evidence.

There are frameworks for decision making under deep uncertainty and ignorance that accept uncertainty and dissent as key elements of the decision making process. Rather than choosing an optimal policy based on a scientific consensus, decision makers can design robust and flexible policy strategies that account for uncertainty, ignorance and dissent. Robust strategies formally consider uncertainty, whereby decision makers seek to reduce the range of possible scenarios over which the strategy performs poorly. Flexible strategies are adaptive, and can be quickly adjusted to advancing scientific insights.

**Conclusions

The climate community has worked for more than 20 years to establish a scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. Perspectives from multiple disciplines support the inference that the scientific consensus seeking process used by the IPCC has had the unintended consequence of introducing biases into the both the science and related decision making processes. The IPCC scientific consensus has become convoluted with consensus decision making through a ‘speaking consensus to power’ approach. The growing implications of the messy wickedness of the climate change problem are becoming increasingly apparent, highlighting the inadequacies of the ‘consensus to power’ approach for decision making on the complex issues associated with climate change. Further, research from the field of science and technology studies are finding that manufacturing a consensus in the context of the IPCC has acted to hyper-politicize the scientific and policy debates, to the detriment of both. Arguments are increasingly being made to abandon the scientific consensus seeking approach in favor of open debate of the arguments themselves and discussion of a broad range of policy options that stimulate local and regional solutions to the multifaceted and interrelated issues of climate change, land use, resource management, cost effective clean energy solutions, and developing technologies to expand energy access efficiently.**

31,000 scientists say there is "no convincing evidence" that humans can or will cause "catastrophic" heating of the atmosphere.

This claim originates from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which has an online petition (petitionproject.org) that states:

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

[wsj.com]

No one knows what percentage of scientists believe that humans are causing catastrophic warming of the planet. No comprehensive survey has ever been done. But one thing is certain. It isn’t 97 percent. It may not even be a majority.

A study (the one cited by President Obama) by psychology P.h.D. student John Cook found that 97.1 percent of relevant published scientific articles agreed that humans contribute to global warming. This is not the same as saying that humans are a major contributor to global warming or that the effects of warming will be serious. When we look closer at Cook’s article, we find that two-thirds of the authors did not take a position on anthropogenic global warming. Of the one-third of scientific papers that took a position on the issue, 97 percent agreed that human activity was at least one cause of warming, but not necessarily a major cause.

In September of 2019, a group of 500 scientists and professionals in related fields, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology climate scientist professor Richard Lindzen, wrote a letter to the general secretary of the United Nations. The letter states in part: “There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050.”

In 2015 over 30,000 scientists, including over 9,000 P.h.Ds, signed a petition expressing doubt about the dangers of human-produced greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to petitionproject.org. I quote from the petition: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

The Canadian government has the unenviable task of defending the interest of the energy producers and consumers of a cold, thinly-populated country, in the face of furious, deafening global warming alarmism. Some of the worst of it is now emanating from the highest places. Barack Obama’s website (barackobama.com) says “97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and man-made … Find the deniers near you - and call them out today.” How nice. But what we really need to call out is the use of false propaganda and demagogy to derail factual debate and careful consideration of all facets of the most complex scientific and policy issue of our time.

What can we take away from all this? First, lots of people get called “climate experts” and contribute to the appearance of consensus, without necessarily being knowledgeable about core issues. A consensus among the misinformed is not worth much.

Second, it is obvious that the “97%” mantra is untrue. The underlying issues are so complex it is ludicrous to expect unanimity. The near 50/50 split among AMS members on the role of greenhouse gases is a much more accurate picture of the situation. The phoney claim of 97% consensus is mere political rhetoric aimed at stifling debate and intimidating people into silence.

In 2012 the American Meteorological Society (AMS) surveyed its 7,000 members, receiving 1,862 responses. Of those, only 52% said they think global warming over the 20th century has happened and is mostly man-made (the IPCC position). The remaining 48% either think it happened but natural causes explain at least half of it, or it didn’t happen, or they don’t know. Furthermore, 53% agree that there is conflict among AMS members on the question.

So no sign of a 97% consensus. Not only do about half reject the IPCC conclusion, more than half acknowledge that their profession is split on the issue.

Surely the most suspicious “97 percent” study was conducted in 2013 by Australian scientist John Cook — author of the 2011 book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand and creator of the blog Skeptical Science (subtitle: “Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism.&rdquo. In an analysis of 12,000 abstracts, he found “a 97% consensus among papers taking a position on the cause of global warming in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are responsible.” “Among papers taking a position” is a significant qualifier: Only 34 percent of the papers Cook examined expressed any opinion about anthropogenic climate change at all. Since 33 percent appeared to endorse anthropogenic climate change, he divided 33 by 34 and — voilà — 97 percent! When David Legates, a University of Delaware professor who formerly headed the university’s Center for Climatic Research, recreated Cook’s study, he found that “only 41 papers — 0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent,” endorsed what Cook claimed. Several scientists whose papers were included in Cook’s initial sample also protested that they had been misinterpreted. “Significant questions about anthropogenic influences on climate remain,” Legates concluded.

A year later, William R. Love Anderegg, a student at Stanford University, used Google Scholar to determine that “97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here support the tenets of ACC [anthropogenic climate change] outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” The sample size did not much improve on Zimmerman and Doran’s: Anderegg surveyed about 200 scientists.