It’s been almost 2 years since Cook et al. (2013) Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature was published. If you’re like me, you’ve lost track of the paper’s flaws, there were just so many, and how it is misrepresented, which is most of the time. Richard Tol has published an excellent summary of Cook et al. (2013) in his blog post Global warming consensus claim does not stand up (author’s cut). An edited version appeared in the Australian on March 24, 2015.
Richard’s post begins:
Now almost two years old, John Cook’s 97% consensus paper has been a runaway success. Downloaded over 300,000 times, voted the best 2013 paper in Environmental Research Letters, frequently cited by peers and politicians from around the world, with a dedicated column in the Guardian, the paper seems to be the definitive proof that the science of climate change is settled.
It isn’t.
And it concludes:
If you want to believe that climate researchers are incompetent, biased and secretive, Cook’s paper is an excellent case in point.
The rest of Richard Tol’s post is here. It’s well worth the time. Also see Andrew Montford’s comments about it in his post The Institute of Physics is Corrupt at BishopHill.
UPDATE: Jo Nova has included parts of Richard’s article in her post The 97% Cook Consensus – when will Environ Res Letters retract it?
Bob Tisdale - Climate Observations 
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Thanks, Bob. Richard Tol got some 97% of the flaws.
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Reblogged this on Canadian Climate Guy.
oh for fuck’s sake will you guys just quit? Scientists all over the world agree about this. It would have to be a conspiracy on the most ridiculous scale for this all to be a scam. There would have to have been doctorate and master’s students on 5 continents consistently producing flawed research for the last 50 years for the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis to be wrong. There isn’t even a motive for it – it is in the interests of the most powerful interests in the world to keep selling us oil, so why the hell would they invent a fairytale to try to STOP us from buying it?
You don’t even need to know about the 97% to know that we are causing global warming. It’s obvious we are. A simple fact – plants (as well as other life forms) affect concentrations of gas in the atmosphere. Humans have cut down half or more of the world’s trees. Result: different concentrations of gases emitted/absorbed by plants. Now do you doubt that different elements have different properties when it comes to absorbing/reflecting heat? Are you really naive enough to think that no matter how much we change the amount of different gases in the atmosphere it will have no impact? And that’s only the trees.
Another simple fact: When a depressed father fills his car with exhaust fumes, killing himself and his children inside after their mother left him for another man, those inside the car die because it is a finite volume of space that becomes filled with poisonous shit. If the doors are opened before they die, concentrations of the poisonous shit become less harmful and they might survive. But if the doors and windows remain closed, they’re goners. The earth’s atmosphere is like the car with all the doors closed. Although there is no physical wall around the earth, nevertheless our atmosphere is a finite volume of space, and we have been filling it with poisonous shit for a few hundred years now, and especially in the last twenty or thirty. This really isn’t difficult to understand. Finite volume of space + endless pollution = eventual disaster.
The reason you have not been able to make enough money and as a result had to stop full time blogging is because your work is total bullshit. There are so many of you out there, so offended at the changes that were necessary to ensure our survival that you set about discrediting them, reblogging each other’s equally flawed bullshit and presenting it as evidence, cherry picking the work of the handful of doubtful scientists out there, all contributing to the inertia that has plagued humanity this last twenty years as we have done nothing about this and are now faced with a shocking sudden rise in temperatures that threatens our survival in the very short term. So ignorant and ego driven are you that you think you know better than the laws of chemistry – that carbon molecules absorb heat more than oxygen. You are one of the luckiest people ever to have walked this earth. A pensioner now, you will probably perish before the sudden ecological collapse that awaits us, happy on your deathbed that you were right even though you couldn’t have been more wrong. I and others younger than you have to inherit this ruined earth. People like you have done your utmost to ensure it’s destruction continues for my generation and beyond. I hope you live to see the carnage that awaits. Fuck you asshole.
oh for fucks sake will you guys just quit? Scientists all over the world agree about this. It would have to be a conspiracy on the most ridiculous scale for this all to be a scam. There would have to have been doctorate and master’s students on 5 continents consistently producing flawed research for the last 50 years for the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis to be wrong. There isn’t even a motive for it – it is in the interests of the most powerful interests in the world to keep selling us oil, so why the hell would they invent a fairytale to try to STOP us from buying it?
You don’t even need to know about the 97% to know that we are causing global warming. It’s obvious we are. A simple fact – plants (as well as other life forms) affect concentrations of gas in the atmosphere. Humans have cut down half or more of the world’s trees. Result: different concentrations of gases emitted/absorbed by plants. Now do you doubt that different elements have different properties when it comes to absorbing/reflecting heat? Are you really naive enough to think that no matter how much we change the amount of different gases in the atmosphere it will have no impact? And that’s only the trees.
Another simple fact: When a depressed father fills his car with exhaust fumes, killing himself and his children inside after their mother left him for another man, those inside the car die because it is a finite volume of space that becomes filled with poisonous shit. If the doors are opened before they die, concentrations of the poisonous shit become less harmful and they might survive. But if the doors and windows remain closed, they’re goners. The earth’s atmosphere is like the car with all the doors closed. Although there is no physical wall around the earth, nevertheless our atmosphere is a finite volume of space, and we have been filling it with poisonous shit for a few hundred years now, and especially in the last twenty or thirty. This really isn’t difficult to understand. Finite volume of space + endless pollution = eventual disaster.
The reason you have not been able to make enough money and as a result had to stop full time blogging is because your work is total bullshit. There are so many of you out there, so offended at the changes that were necessary to ensure our survival that you set about discrediting them, reblogging each other’s equally flawed bullshit and presenting it as evidence, cherry picking the work of the handful of doubtful scientists out there, all contributing to the inertia that has plagued humanity this last twenty years as we have done nothing about this and are now faced with a shocking sudden rise in temperatures that threatens our survival in the very short term. So ignorant and ego driven are you that you think you know better than the laws of chemistry – that carbon molecules absorb heat more than oxygen. You are one of the luckiest people ever to have walked this earth. A pensioner now, you will probably perish before the sudden ecological collapse that awaits us, happy on your deathbed that you were right even though you couldn’t have been more wrong. I and others younger than you have to inherit this ruined earth. People like you have done your utmost to ensure it’s destruction continues for my generation and beyond. I hope you live to see the carnage that awaits. Fuck you asshole.
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Hi there Skinnybutt, Enjoyed you thoughtful, informative post on Bob’s article. Do you have some information on the persistence of CO2 in the atmosphere? Seems that the atmospheric concentration rate of increase is relatively constant while the rate of emissions is rising. US emissions have decreased significantly but others not so much. Just an interesting point. Mostly because of use of natural gas from fracking. Evil gas. Took a gander at your Facebook page and saw a reference to Jeremy Corbyn. His brother Piers is a friend of mine and a well known sceptic as well as a gifted long range forecaster of weather based on the Sun and the Moon. His seasonal forecasts for Britain have been right on 100% of the time for the past several years whereas the Met office has been 100% WRONG using global warming forecasting methods. As Einstein said, slightly paraphrased, ” No matter how eloquent your theory, it only takes one to disprove it.” Science is not an electoral process. Pray tell, see if you can find one paper that shows that the CO2 caused by man has caused any severe storms, generalities don’t count. Or any other catastrophic events. Been looking for 10 years and have yet to find such a piece. With your vast knowledge perhaps you will be more successful. Bob, thanks for sharing this.