The famous Mark Twain quote, “There are lies, damned lies and statistics,” applies to the infamous claim that 97 per cent of scientists agree that our globe’s warming and climate change is directly attributed to human-caused carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.
This claim has been kicking around for decades, in spite of Intergovernmental panel reports from recent UN climate conferences verifying that there has been no discernible global warming for the last 20 years.
Recent use of the statistic can be traced to a 2013 report by Australian researcher John Cook. Rigorous investigation by real climate scientists the likes of Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT, not those who design computer models and then fudge the data to align with their predictions, have shown Cook’s survey to be fantastically flawed and misleading.
A paper by five leading climatologists published in the journal Science and Education found only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate studies examined in Cook’s study explicitly stated mankind has caused most of the warming since 1950 — meaning the actual consensus is 0.3 per cent.
Our earth’s climate certainly changes, as it has done for millenia, but in fact the overwhelming evidence reveals these cyclical patterns to be a galactic issue.
Carbon dioxide is a colourless, odourless gas — it is not a pollutant. Certainly humankind’s reliance on carbon-based fuels is a major cause of pollution; oxides of sulfur and nitrogen, fly ash and heavy metals from coal, volatile organics from gasoline; which is exactly why it is way past time to advance to the safe, clean and higher energy flux-density applications of nuclear technologies and eventually nuclear fusion.
The so-called renewable “green” technologies of solar, wind, geothermal, etc. will not support human civilization. more at: www.cfact.org/2016/02/17/propaganda-top-mit-climate-scientist-trashes-97-consensus-claim/.
Brian Gray
Penticton