Cook’s 97% Climate Consensus Paper Doesn’t Crumble Upon Examination

Several months ago Cook et al released a paper in which they analysed the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

What they did in that study is examine 11,944 abstracts from 1991 to 2011 that included the words “global climate change” or “global warming” in their abstract. What they found after analysing these abstracts is that among those that expressed a position on global warming, 97% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.

When they asked the authors of those papers to rate their own papers they again found that 97% stated that humans are causing global warming. They also contacted 8,547 authors to ask if they could rate their own papers and got 1,200 responses. The results for this again found that 97% of the selected papers stated that humans are causing global warming. They did this to determine that there wasn’t any sort of inherent problem in their rating system and this seems to indicate that.

For anyone who is aware of other studies that did something similar these results weren’t a surprise. As studies like Oreskes 2004, Doran 2009 and Anderegg 2010 showed similar results. It’s the very reason I just shrugged at these results and mostly watched everything play out from a distance. To me they just didn’t seem that interesting, or that they would generate a lot of controversy.