Once again, every Scientific Society, every National Academy of Science, and every National Academy of Science, and every major University states that AGW is real, and a clear and present danger. But, of course, we are to believe an anonymous poster that all the scientists are wrong, and he knows so much more than the people that have spent decades learning their discipline. I don't think so.
Once again, that's an appeal to authority, a logical fallacy. The so-called "authorities" you list are all boot-lickers sucking on the government tit.
From what I read, the number of so-called "authorities" is overstated.
The following is the kind of crapp that really takes away from the discussion:
Global warming the 97 fallacy Environment Free speech spiked
Let’s examine how Cook
et al reached this very precise figure.
First, they searched the abstracts of 11,944 articles in peer-reviewed journals from the years 1991 to 2011 which included the terms ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’. At the very least, then, their conclusion is three or four years out of date.
Second, they sorted the abstracts into four piles: no position on anthropogenic global warming, endorsement, rejection and uncertainty.
The biggest pile (66.4 per cent) was no position. Of the smaller piles which did express an opinion, 97.1 per cent ‘endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming’.
This already sounds a bit odd. This is not what the public understands by a consensus. Mr and Mrs Average are entitled to imagine that 97.1 per cent agreement means that 97.1 per cent of scientists voted on a ballot proposal. But no one ever voted. Instead, volunteers recruited from the
Skeptical Science website winnowed the articles and interpreted the often arcane language of scientific abstracts. Since the slogan of this website is ‘rebutting global warming misinformation’, the volunteers’ interpretations were bound to be skewed in favour of the ‘consensus’.
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2/3's of the abstracts had no position.
That really changes things.
Next:
Aware of this problem, Cook
et al sought the opinions of the authors themselves. This could be construed as a kind of ballot measure. There were 29,083 authors listed on the 11,944 papers. Of these, only 8,547 were sent an email asking for their opinion. Of these, only 1,189 responded. Using this method, Cook and his team found that an even higher proportion of them agreed that climate change was real and man-caused – 97.2 per cent. But notice that only four per cent of the authors ‘voted’. A ballot measure with a four per cent turnout is not what Mr and Mrs Average mean by a ‘consensus’.
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Simply stated....WOW.
I agree with the authors final statements:
Scientists and politicians do themselves no favours when they use shoddy statistics and public relations flim-flam to sell scientific hypotheses to the public. Sooner or later Mr and Mrs Average will wake up to the fact that they have been manipulated. The backlash could be quite nasty.
Of course, the shenanigans of spinmeisters do not disprove the reality of global warming. It may be happening. It may be dangerous. It may be the greatest moral challenge of our generation. But it remains to be proved that there is a scientific consensus on any of those propositions.