There’s a magic number the news media likes to cite whenever the United Nations releases a new report on Global Warming. The public is constantly told that 97 percent of scientific experts agree that human activity is responsible for dangerous levels of global warming. Therefore, the U.S., and other western nations, must dramatically reshape public policy with an eye toward reducing fossil fuels. But it doesn’t take a lot of investigation to take down that 97 percent figure and expose the gamesmanship and duplicity advanced under the cover of “science.”
Lawrence Solomon, executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers, carefully explains how dishonest researchers cooked the books:
“The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois,” he wrote in a 2010 article. “The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers – in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97 percent figure that pundits now tout.”
This rejoinder to the 97 percent figure concerning the so-called “scientific consensus” is not typically reported as it would complicate the political agenda attached to global warming alarmism. But there is a new 97 percent number concerning the latest U.N. report that goes unmentioned. John Droz, a physicist and mathematician, who heads up the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED), has just released an independent study that shows 97 percent of the computer models attached to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) overestimate the amount of carbon dioxide induced warming. Droz’s study probes into the draft version of the U.N.’s Fifth Assessment, which was released in September.
“How come we don’t see the media publicizing this 97 percent consensus?” he asks. “In light of these realities, for the IPCC to claim that they now have an even higher confidence in their conclusions, is simply political posturing to justify their existence. The bottom line is that there is an extraordinarily large amount of understanding of this issue that we simply do not have. To spend tens of trillions of dollars to ‘fix’ something we don't understand is insanity.”
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