“100% OF CLIMATE SCIENTISTS BELIEVE CARBON DIOXIDE IS THE CAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE.”

Where Did This Come From? The original claim of 97% was published in a 2013 IOPScience article stating “scientists overwhelmingly agree that the earth is warming due to human activity”. A 2021 revision of the article upgraded the claim to 100% while modifying the wording slightly to “mostly because of human activity”.

The Factual Basis The original article claimed to have found 11,944 articles in the Web of Science data base which had been published between 1991 and 2011; keywords ‘global warming’ or ‘global climate change’. The authors were referred to as climate experts, not climate scientists but then failed to provide the qualifications of their so-called “experts”. Why? And why include the views of anyone who was not a climate scientist?

The Authors At the time of publication the lead author was Dr. Cook, a behavioural science professor - not a climate scientist, along with six other academics none of whom were climate scientists either. It’s interesting to note that Dr. Cook has a website called Skeptical Science. The name suggests it questions the importance of carbon dioxide in climate change - but no, it’s a full on sales pitch for human generated carbon dioxide causing global warming.

Curiously, Dr. Cook chose to submit the article for publication to IOPScience, a journal for physicists, rather than any of the major publications for climate scientists. Was he avoiding the climate science community - if so why?

Carbon dioxide advocates found the article and hyped the 97% claim to the media. The Obama administration saw votes and jumped aboard labelling those who disagreed “deniers”. That chilled potential opposition from American climate science researchers effectively achieving an end run of public acceptance around the climate scientist community.

Flaw No. 1

In addition to the articles which explicitly said humanity’s carbon dioxide was causing climate change, Dr. Cook and associates added the articles which did not state a specific position but in which they decided agreement was implied. Science is not about what someone thinks someone else implied. That’s guessing. Science is about proof that provides certainty. Anything less is not science. When a publication is attempting to influence public opinion, it’s called propaganda.

Dr. Cook’s 2021 supplemental article said: “We sent 10 929 invitations to participate in our survey to a verified email list of geosciences faculty at reporting academic and research institutions and received 2780 responses.”‍ Significantly 8,149 climate scientists (75%) chose not to respond. This was a highly unusual for climate scientists who welcome sharing and exchanging information. Their silent message to Dr. Cook is unmistakable.

Flaw No. 2

Worse than guess work, it turns out that some authors had only written one article while other authors had written as many as twenty articles. Therefore it was not 97% of the authors, it was 97% of the articles published. That was a statistical slight of hand like dealing from the bottom of the deck in a card game. Was this an innocent mistake? The Dr. Cook is a behavioural scientist and is therefore an expert in statistics. This could not have been a mistake. How did this misrepresentation get past the publisher’s peer review process?

The Financial Post‍ and ‍Forbes Magazine called out the 97% Claim in detail.