Nov
15
The Blessing of Fossil Fuels, part 3: The 97 Percent Fabrication
Concluding our impromptu series of citations from Alex Epstein’s book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
Mr. Epstein, if you will…
“This brings us to the oft-cited comment that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that there is global warming and that human beings are the main cause.
First of all, this statement itself, even if it were true, is deliberately manipulative. The reason we care about recent global warming or climate change is not simply that human beings are allegedly the main cause. It’s the allegation that man-made warming will be extremely harmful to human life. The 97 percent claim says nothing whatsoever about magnitude or catastrophe. If we’re the main cause of the mild warming of the last century or so, that does not begin to resemble anything that would justify taking away our machine food.
But note how when I quoted John Kerry earlier, he went from ’97 percent of climate scientists have confirmed that climate change is happening and that human activity is responsible’ to ‘they agree that, if we continue to go down the same path that we are going down today, the world as we know it will change — and it will change dramatically for the worse.’ Even in the 97 percent studies, which we’ll look at in a moment, there is nothing resembling ’97 percent of climate scientists have confirmed that… the world as we know it will change… dramatically for the worse.’ Kerry is pulling a bait and switch — using alleged agreement about a noncatastrophic prediction about climate to gain false authority for his catastrophic prediction about climate — and the anti-fossil fuel policies he wants to pass at home and abroad.
Unfortunately, this is very common. On his Twitter account, President Obama tweeted, ‘Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.’ There was no ‘dangerous’ in the alleged agreement — and it wasn’t ‘scientists,’ it was ‘climate scientists.’ This sloppy use of ‘science’ as an authority, practiced by politicians of all parties, guarantees that we make bad, unscientific decisions.
On top of that, it turns out that the relatively mild ‘agreement’ of the 97 percent is also a complete fabrication — which almost no one knows, because we’re taught to obey authorities rather than have them advise us with clear explanations.
One of the main papers behind the 97 percent claim is authored by John Cook, who runs the popular Web site SkepticalScience.com, a virtual encyclopedia of arguments trying to defend predictions of catastrophic climate change from all challenges.
Here is Cook’s summary of his paper: ‘Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97 percent [of papers he surveyed] endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.’
This is a fairly clear statement — 97 percent of the papers surveyed endorsed the view that man-made greenhouse gases were the main cause — main in common usage meaning more than 50 percent.”
I would note here: Beyond even what Epstein has pointed out, see how “97 percent of papers” became “97 percent of scientists“? This completely ignores the fact that there is likely not a 1:1 relation between papers and scientists, or even just climate scientists. Some scientists get multiple papers published on a particular topic (see below), and often (as with Cook et al.) a paper has multiple authors.
Back to Epstein…
“But even a quick scan of the paper reveals that this is not the case.
Cook is able to demonstrate only that a relative handful endorse ‘the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.’ Cook calls this ‘explicit endorsement with quantification’ (quantification meaning 50 percent or more). The problem is, only a small percentage of the papers fall into this category; Cook does not say what percentage, but when the study was publicly challenged by economist David Friedman, one observer calculated that only 1.6 percent explicitly stated that man-made greenhouse gases caused at least 50 percent of global warming.
Where did most of the 97 percent come from, then? Cook had created a category called ‘explicit endorsement without quantification’ — that is, papers in which the author, by Cook’s admission, did not say whether 1 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent of the warming was caused by man. He had also created a category called ‘implicit endorsement,’ for papers that imply (but don’t say) that there is some man-made global warming and don’t quantify it. In other words, he created two categories that he labeled as endorsing a view that they most certainly didn’t.
The 97 percent claim is a deliberate misrepresentation designed to intimidate the public — and numerous scientists whose papers were classified by cook protested:
o ‘Cook survey included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral.’ — Dr. Richard Tol
o ‘That is not an accurate representation of my paper…’ — Dr. Craig Idso
o ‘Nope… it is not an accurate representation.’ — Dr. Nir Shaviv
o ‘Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument…’ — Dr. Nicola Scafetta
Think about how many times you hear that 97 percent or some similar figure thrown around. It’s based on crude manipulation propagated by people whose ideological agenda it serves. It is a license to intimidate.”
That’s not just aggravating; it’s infuriating!
I hope you enjoyed these posts on fossil fuels, and maybe you learned some useful information, like I did. Epstein’s article and book are definitely worth reading (though I would differ with him on a couple things), as they present some great facts to help present a balanced and positive case for fossil fuel use and to identify false “facts” and narratives from the typical environmental activists.
If you have a favorite book on this or a related topic, let me know in the comments below….
