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See the 50 failed predictions here.

Image from here.

One of those big bad energy companies has been found guilty of killing 150 rare eagles. You might have missed the story because it wasn’t headline news around the world, which may have something to do with the company being a darling of the renewables movement rather than an oil company and it was wind turbines, not a pipeline rupture or tanker leak, that did the damage. But wind turbines are, indeed, making bird salad. The US government has finally noticed that putting giant spinning blades in bird migratory routes is causing slaughter, especially of large raptors. Not that the wrist slap is likely to put a stop to it.

The impact to bird populations is very serious, as a new study has pointed out.

“Of California’s 23 vulnerable bird species studied (barn owls, golden eagles, road runners, yellow-billed cuckoos...), scientists have found 11 are now experiencing at least a 20% decline in their population growth rates because wind turbines and solar panels are killing them and/or destroying their limited-range habitat.”

Great Golden Eagles, Batman. Can these energy sources, that use so many resources to deliver so little power in such an unreliable way with such a hideous waste-disposal issue at the end of their rather fleeting lives, also be an environmental catastrophe while operating? Are the greens’ favourites the worst imaginable choice in virtually every way? And in California?

Yes, yes and yes. And while you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, there are some species whose eggs you cannot legally break for good reason. As the study in question says,

“We assessed the vulnerability of populations for 23 priority bird species killed at wind and solar facilities in California, USA. Bayesian hierarchical models suggested that 48% of these species were vulnerable to population-level effects from added fatalities caused by renewables and other sources.”

And yes, it’s enough to put you to sleep but then shake you violently awake again. Especially that business about “population-level effects”.

“Effects of renewables extended far beyond the location of energy production to impact bird populations in distant regions across continental migration networks. Populations of species associated with grasslands where turbines were located were most vulnerable to wind. Populations of nocturnal migrant species were most vulnerable to solar, despite not typically being associated with deserts where the solar facilities we evaluated were located.”

You mess with nature and bad things happen, apparently. And suddenly the remarkable features of hydrocarbon fuels, namely their energy density, ease of transportation, small footprint, safe storage and so on require a second look...don’t they?

Probably not. As we’ve indicated before, support for nuclear power is something of a sanity test for those who absolutely loathe fossil fuels, and so is awareness that this sort of ecological carnage is a disaster in real as well as PR terms. But it’s a test notable for its high failure rate among climate alarmists.

We mentioned golden eagles above because, as Robert Bradley wrote on Master Resource,

“For decades, the American Wind Energy Association (now part of the American Clean Power Association) has dismissed the ‘avian mortality problem’ as little different than everyday deaths of birds from cats and windows. The Sierra Club echoes this argument in ground-zero wind growth states such as Michigan.”

And while, as he says, it was always a feeble response given how poorly wind power performs, it’s especially so because “It is an open secret was that golden eagles are the particular victims of industrial wind, which inspired a Sierra Club official to dub the technology the ‘Cuisinarts of the Air.’’” Ouch. As Bradley adds, “thus the joke: ‘When is an environmentalist not an environmentalist? ... When it comes to windpower.’”

The firm that recently fessed up to killing eagles is called ESI, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources which touts itself in the predictable modern way. “Fessed up” is a term here meaning pled guilty in court and accepted fines and restitution exceeding $8 million after it was shown to have ignored warnings from the US Fish and Wildlife Service not to build turbines in high-risk locations. But why would they heed the warnings since the federal government paid them to do it; Bradley quotes a U.S. Department of Justice press release that includes:

“According to the information filed in this case… ESI and its affiliates began commercial operations at new facilities on a schedule intended to meet, among other things, power purchase agreement commitments and qualifying deadlines for particular tax credit rates for renewable energy, and with production amounts not impacted by avoidance and minimization measures that might have been required under an eagle take permit. ESI and its affiliates received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal tax credits for generating electricity from wind power at facilities that it operated, knowing that multiple eagles would be killed and wounded without legal authorization, and without, in most instances, paying restitution or compensatory mitigation...”

Still, $8 million is a stiff fine, right? Well, not really.  As Gregory Wrightstone observed over at CO2Coalition.org, ESI took steps that did, predictably, kill at least 150 bald and golden eagles at 50 facilities without getting the necessary permits. And “Why would ESI simply fail to do the paperwork that is regularly a part of the process for permitting wind facilities? The answer: money, and a lot of it… This $8 million settlement appears to be the cost of doing business for ESI in order for them to cash in on the Big Wind green energy scam.” Seems incentives matter after all. And what sort of incentives are these?

“The legalized slaughter of eagles and other large birds of prey was legitimized under the Obama administration and continues today. At the time, it was estimated that nearly 600,000 birds of all types were killed by the much smaller wind footprint at that time, including 83,000 hunting birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles. Unknown to most citizens is the fact that the FWS [the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] has established a “take limit” for wind energy companies to kill bald eagles. This would be similar to a bag limit for a hunter. However, hunters dare not as they are not of the protected class and would be subject to a maximum fine of $250,000 or two years of imprisonment for a felony conviction. FWS regularly imposes fines on oil companies and electric transmission firms for inadvertent deaths of bald eagles, all the while giving its seal of approval to green-induced eagle carnage of a grand scale from turbines.”

See the joke about an environmentalist above. But as Wrightstone concludes his piece, “Those promoting the flawed idea that a complete transition from fossil fuels to an economy driven solely by wind and solar need to ask themselves, ‘At what cost?’” And what other cause would they say legitimizes this mass killing of such birds?

It is perfectly reasonable to work to ensure clean air and water and towards conservation of our resources. I have always considered myself a conservationist and environmentalist. In the post war boom, we had problems with air pollution from factories, coal plants, cars, inefficient home heating systems and incinerators in apartments. We had air quality issues with pollutants like soot, SO2, ozone, hydrocarbons, NOx, and lead, We set standards that had to be met by industry and automakers. We have the cleanest air in my lifetime and in the world today.

The term “carbon pollution” is a deliberate, ambiguous, disingenuous term, designed to mislead people into thinking carbon dioxide is pollution. It is used by the environmentalists to confuse the environmental impacts of CO2 emissions with the impact of the emissions of unwanted waste products of combustion. The burning of carbon-based fuels (fossil fuels - coal, oil, natural gas - and biofuels and biomass) converts the carbon in the fuels to carbon dioxide (CO2), which is an odorless invisible gas that is plant food and it is essential to life on the planet.

Because the burning of the fuel is never 100% efficient, trace amounts of pollutants including unburnt carbon are produced in the form of fine particulates (soot), hydrocarbon gases and carbon monoxide.  In addition, trace amounts of sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides and other pollutant constituents can be produced.  In the US, all mobile and industrial stationary combustion sources must have emission control systems that remove the particulates and gaseous pollutants so that the emissions are in compliance with EPA’s emission standards.  The ambient air pollutant concentrations have been decreasing for decades and are going to keep decreasing for the foreseeable future because of existing non-GHG-related regulations.

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To ensure that the air is safe to breathe, the Clean Air Act (CAA) requires the EPA to set National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for the most harmful ubiquitous air pollutants. The NAAQS are set at levels requisite to protect human health and welfare with an adequate margin of safety. These ubiquitous pollutants are called the Criteria Air Pollutants and include: fine particulates (PM2.5), larger particulates (PM10), carbon monoxide, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, lead, and ozone (O3).  The CAA also required States to develop plans to manage the emissions and concentrations of these pollutants so that the NAAQS are attained in every part of the US. 

As a result, most areas of the US attain the NAAQS for all the pollutants most of the time.  The ambient concentrations have been decreasing for decades (see charts below) and are going to keep decreasing for the foreseeable future because of existing regulations.  For the few areas of the US that are in violation of a NAAQS, the States have (or are in the process of) developed plans to attain them in the near future.
It needs to be noted that the current healthy air quality in the US has been achieved with existing regulations that have nothing to do with climate or CO2 regulations.

The EPA and the environmentalists have claimed that the co-benefits of CO2 reductions justify the enactment of CO2-reduction regulations.  These co-benefits assume that deaths and other health effects due to exposures of PM2.5 and O3 will be avoided.  This assumption is erroneous because the relationships that EPA uses to calculate the purported health effects are based on epidemiology studies that used flawed statistical methods.  When the proper methods are used, no causal relationship is found between either PM2.5 or O3 and premature mortality or other serious health effects at levels currently measured in the US.
The environmentalists also claim that rising temperatures caused by increasing CO2 levels will exacerbate PM2.5 and O3 air pollution.  This claim is flawed for a number of reasons.

First, as detailed elsewhere, there is no convincing evidence that increasing CO2 levels has caused global temperatures to rise. Second, there is no consistency in EPA model predictions that increasing temperatures will actually cause PM2.5, which is purported to cause most of the health effects and mortality, to increase. In fact, the country by country PM2.5 from NASA and the WHO shows the U.S. with reliance on clean natural gas shows the lowest small particulate count along with Scandinavia and Australia in the world.

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Although there is general agreement that higher temperatures will cause increased O3 formation, that only occurs if emissions of O3 precursors remain unchanged.  The reality in the US is that O3 precursors have been and will continue to decrease for the foreseeable future. EPA has shown ozone has actually decreased decreased 33% since 1980 and PM2.5 decreased 41% since 2000.
In addition, if for any reason, concentrations of any Criteria Pollutant ever went up so as to exceed its NAAQS anywhere in the Country, the CAA provides mechanisms that are already in place requiring the States to revise their plans to offset any increases.

Finally, as discussed above, the basic premise that PM2.5 and O3 are causing serious health effects in the US at their current levels is simply false

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Sulfur dioxide was a few decades ago in the news for its implication in acid rain. When sulfur dioxide reacts with rain or fog, sulfuric acid forms and becomes acid rain or mist (smog). Smog event in Donora PA in 1948 - 7,000 of the 14,000 population experienced damaged lungs, 20 died. The incident led to a series of clean air regulations and culminated in the US Clean Air Act of 1970.  Acid rain continued to be a concern into the 1980s before measures were invoked that reduced SO2 by 94%., an environmental success story.

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Significant improvements with other pollutants were observed with a 64% reduction for nitrogen oxides, 86% for lead and 81% for carbon monoxide.


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CARBON DIOXIDE THE GAS OF LIFE

Note that carbon dioxide is not listed as a criteria pollutant.  It is essential for all plant life. We breathe in 400ppm CO2 and breathe out 40,000 ppm. It is pumped into greenhouses.  A greening of the planet has occurred as a result of the increases the last century. The Sahara desert has shrunk by 8%!

This image shows the change in leaf area across the globe from 1982-2015.

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Credits: Boston University/R. Myneni

Carbon Dioxide has blessed the world with increased food.

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Dr. Craig Idso in Master Resource writes ”Perhaps the most well-known and significant biological benefit of Earth’s rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration is enhanced plant production. Over the past five decades literally thousands of laboratory and field-based studies have been conducted to examine growth-related responses of plants at higher levels of atmospheric CO2. These CO2-enrichment studies, as they are called, are near unanimous in what they have found - increased levels of CO2 significantly enhance plant photosynthesis and stimulate growth.”

The use of fossil fuels to help regulate heat and cold, has led to greater prosperity and reduced poverty. Deaths from weather extremes have declined since 1920.

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By the way, perversely, when families can’t afford to pay for the energy (heating oil, gas or electricity) to heat their homes in winter as will be the case with the forced change to unreliable wind and solar, they revert to burning wood. This introduces the particulate matter and other ‘pollutants’ we have worked so hard to remove at the source. Some use kerosene heaters and some deadly fires result.

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming...would fit the bill...It does not matter if this common enemy is “a real one or....one invented for the purpose.” Quote by the Club of Rome “First Global Revolution” 1991.

“We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” Timothy Wirth, U.S. Senator, president of the United Nation’s Foundation.

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Chris Morrison

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Satellite data show that global warming started to run out of steam two decades ago, but the U.K. Met Office’s record of surface temperature from 1975 was boosted by 14% at the end of 2020. At the same time, the period between 1880-1975 was cooled. The move accentuates the rise in the global temperature recorded in the 1980s and 1990s that forms the basis of much of the current hysteria about the so-called climate emergency.

The disclosure of the apparent warming and cooling is contained in the latest State of the Climate report from Emeritus Professor Ole Humlum of the University of Oslo, and published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Professor Humlum says the post-1975 warming is about +0.1C and the pre-1975 cooling about -0.1C. The version-change to the fifth HadCRUT Met Office database “conveys the impression of a somewhat more rapid global temperature increase following the relatively cold period terminating around 1975”. When the Met Office first announced the change in December 2020, it admitted to 0.16C extra warming, although it didn’t give specifics about cooling and warming either side of the 1975 mark.

Professor Humlum also draws attention to significant retrospective changes in the American GISS surface temperature record. The graph below shows the effect of the changes made since May 2008 on the monthly temperature record, with increases in red and decreases in blue. As with HadCRUT, the changes warm the early part of the record, cool the period from 1900 to 1970, and heat up the later recordings.

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Humlum notes that the changes in annual values are often quite substantial, ranging from about +0.15C to -0.15C. He goes on to note that the temperature difference between 1915 and 2000 increased from 0.45C to 0.67C. “This represents an increase of about 49% over this period, meaning that about half of the apparent global temperature increase from January 1910 to January 2000 is due to administrative adjustments to the original data made since May 2008” he writes.

Recent boosts to global temperatures databases are of course very helpful to activists in the media and politics keen to report ‘record’ warm years at a time when accurate satellite data reveal a pause of 88 months (and counting). In addition, work continues across a number of fronts to promote the climate emergency agenda, including extreme weather events.

Last week, the BBC reported that southern African storms were fuelled by climate change. According to the BBC, the results of a study from the World Weather Attribution group show that damage inflicted by storms in the region was exacerbated by global warming. According to the press release, the group used “computer simulations” to arrive at its findings. The BBC ran the scare story, without a byline, despite noting that “the precise contribution of climate change to the event could not be quantified, due to the absence of comprehensive historical records of rainfall in the region”.

In fact, attributing single episodes of bad weather to long-term changes in the climate is highly unscientific, since it is just an opinion. In 2014, Associate Professor Jennifer Fitchett from the University of the Witwatersrand published a paper in which she said she found “no statistically significant trends in the frequency of tropical cyclone landfalls over Madagascar and Mozambique over the past six decades”. Furthermore, much of the perceived changes in storm numbers could be attributed to recent improvements in storm detection methods.

Professor Humlum’s excellent and measured climate report provides further context in which to evaluate the constant media scare stories about hurricane and cyclones.

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The above graphs plot accumulated cyclone energy (ACE), as used by the U.S.-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Humlum notes that ACE gives a measure of the damage potential of an individual storm or a season. If climate change is affecting the southern hemisphere, and causing more severe problems in southern Africa, the trend does not yet appear to have shown up in the actual data. Overall, Humlum notes, “existing records do not suggest any abnormal cyclone activity in recent years”.

Another fashionable scare story is the loss of snow, particularly in the Alps, a favoured winter holiday destination of many Guardian, BBC and Extinction Rebellion supporters. In 2017, the Guardian reported that according to “experts” Alpine ski resorts could lose up to 70% of their snow cover by 2100. Last year, Justin Rowlatt reported on Panorama that snowy U.K. winters could become a thing of the past.

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Back on Planet Reality, the thin blue lines above, show weekly northern hemisphere snow data, while the thicker blue line shows a 53 week average. There is practically no change going back 50 years

Humlum concluded: “A year ago, I warned that there was great risk in using computer modelling and immature science to make extraordinary claims. The empirical observations I have reviewed show very gentle warming and no evidence of a climate crisis.”

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor

A real rock from outer space (not manmade climate change) is causing perceived rising seas

Paul Driessen, CFACT

In the Netflix movie, Washington politicians “Don’t Look Up” because they prefer to remain oblivious to a special effects meteor that’s about to obliterate Planet Earth. Not surprisingly, the film is really about our refusal to recognize the “existential threat” of “manmade climate change.”

Director Adam McKay recently tweeted, “We’ve got 6-8 years before the climate is so chaotic we [will] live in a permanent state of biblical catastrophe.”

Not to be outdone, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called the latest UN climate report “a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track toward an unlivable world.” Drilling for more oil and gas is “moral and economic madness,” he insisted. If humanity doesn’t stop using fossil fuels, we will be overwhelmed by devastating floods, heat waves, droughts, fires and crop failures.

Global sea levels have already risen “a shocking nine inches,” the PurpleOrange PR Agency proclaimed, promoting a client’s Climate Neutral Certified label, which is designed to channel more money to “authentic, immediate climate action.”

Back on the non-parallel-universe Planet Earth, a truly unlivable world would be one without fossil fuels. Not just to generate electricity, cook food, heat homes and water, and power cars, boats, trains and planes - but for fertilizers and insecticides to grow more food on less land, and for plastics, pharmaceuticals, paints, cosmetics, clothing and other essential products. For us today; for billions more tomorrow.

Fossil fuels to extract and process trillions of tons of raw materials, too, and manufacture the millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of battery modules and millions of transmission line towers that would blanket our croplands, scenic areas and wildlife habitats if we didn’t have fossil fuels.

In fact, far worse than a warmer planet with more airborne plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide would be a colder planet with less CO2. That would mean less arable land, shorter growing seasons and much lower crop yields, on top of losses from a devastated Ukraine and sanctioned Russian wheat crops.

(Why is it that Twitter twits never cancel, suppress or even fact-check climate fear porn? Why is it never just climate change, but always climate cataclysms? Why always manmade climate change, as though past natural climate changes never happened? Why do Guterres, Gore, Kerry, Biden and AOC always have to top his, her, hir, ver, zir fellow alarmists in hysteria? Why is the fear-mongering always based on computer models, never on actual data and evidence? Why does it always ignore China’s massive fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions?)

One of the prevalent climate alarm themes is sea level rise.

Back on real Earth, if the DC Swamp inhabitants of 35 million years ago had looked up, they’d have been transfixed in their last moments by a non-special-effects meteor hurtling into what is now Cape Charles, Virginia on the Chesapeake Bay. The 2-mile-wide meteor obliterated and pulverized sediments and bedrock, vaporized plants and animals, sent rock fragments hundreds of miles in every direction, and launched tsunamis into West Virginia’s eastern mountain slopes.

Shattered rock settled back into a crater 4,300 feet deep and 53 miles in diameter. Over the ensuing millennia, river and ocean sediments poured into the crater - and mile-high glaciers pulled 10-million cubic miles of water out of the oceans, burying half of North America, Europe and Asia under trillions of tons of ice. Land under the ice was pressed down, while land outside the glacial zones was lifted up. Then, some 12,000 years ago, the last Pleistocene glaciers began melting.

Oceans slowly rose - some 400 feet! Land masses underwent “isostatic rebound.” Areas that had been under the ice began rising; those that had bulged upward began sinking. In much of the Chesapeake Bay region, post-glacial subsidence is compounded by continued compression of pulverized crater rock - and by the ongoing withdrawal of groundwater from sedimentary aquifers beneath urban and agricultural areas that depend on groundwater.

The aquifers include layers of porous sandstone (with water between sand grains) interspersed among layers of impermeable but water-soaked shale and clay. As water is pumped out of the sandy layers, the shale-clay layers get squeezed by hundreds of feet of overlying rock and sediment, and their water is forced into the sandstones, and then into pumps. The overlying land steadily subsides.

In the Chesapeake Bay area, subsidence averages nearly 3 mm/year; 11.5 inches per century. That’s in addition to almost 4.5 inches per century in isostatic subsidence, plus 7 to 9 inches per century in actual sea level rise. The total perceived sea level rise can be 24 inches per century - although two-thirds of that total has nothing to do with actual sea level rise. Indeed, the Norfolk Naval Station tide gauge at Sewell’s Point shows that the rate of actual sea level rise has not changed since the gauge was installed in 1927.

The situation in Houston-Galveston, Texas, Santa Clara Valley, California, and other places around the globe is similarly complicated, even without post-glaciation issues. To single out actual sea level rise and blame the rise on humans and fossil fuels -is simply disingenuous.

However, salt-water intrusion and coastal flooding are serious, recurrent, growing problems, especially during hurricanes and as more expensive homes are built along coasts. Some communities have slowed subsidence by relocating groundwater pumping stations away from the coast, reducing withdrawal rates, increasing aquifer recharge, or substitut­ing surface water for groundwater. Others have installed sea walls, improved drainage systems, and pipelines to bring water from nearby lakes and rivers. Other options include desalination plants to create more fresh water, recycling household “gray water” to agricultural use, and switching to less water-intensive irrigation methods, as Israel does.

These approaches are far more practical and cost-effective than trying to stop seas from rising any further, like a modern King Canute, by banning fossil fuels, especially if it’s done only in some Western nations.

Meanwhile, inhabitants of Tuvalu, the Maldives and other Pacific islands and coral atolls worry about rising seas due to fossil fuels. However, most of them are increasing in land area, not decreasing ‘ as corals grow, sediments are laid down off their coasts, and volcanic lava flows expand land masses.

Moreover, few of these islands and coral reefs even existed 12,000 years ago, when the Wisconsin Glaciation extracted 400 feet of seawater from the world’s oceans. The islands and atolls began growing as the seas rose. They’ve continued growing with every additional foot of sea level rise since the last Ice Age and the Little Ice Age (1350-1850) - and show no signs of stopping.

Cosquer Cave’s Paleolithic paintings near Marseille, France (the entrance is 115 feet below current sea level) and a Mel Fisher dive team’s discovery of charred tree branches and pine cones from a forest fire 8,400 years ago in 40 feet of water off the Florida coast further attest to steadily rising seas.

Yet, experts tell us. (1) “Snows are less frequent and less deep. The rivers scarcely ever freeze over now. There is an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold in the spring, which is very fatal to fruits.” (2) “We were astonished by the total absence of ice in Barrow Strait. I was here at this time [six years ago] still frozen up - and doubts were entertained as to the possibility of escape.” (3) “The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer, and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot.”

It behooves to take action. Or perhaps not. Quotation (1) is from Thomas Jefferson’s diary, 1799; (2) from Sir Francis McClintock’s ship’s log, 1860; (3) from a Washington Post article, November 2, 1922. 

Instead of parroting scare stories - and demanding that fossil fuels be replaced by pseudo-clean, pseudo-renewable energy - it really behooves us to think, analyze, ponder the many ways fossil fuels improve our lives, and demand real evidence instead of GIGO computer models for any supposed climate crisis.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and articles on energy, climate and other issues.

Americans’ beliefs about climate change were recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center, and the results were made public a few days ago.  Pew pollsters found that a combined 51% of Americans agree that (a) there is no clear evidence the Earth is warming, or (b) natural factors are the main cause of climate changes.  Therefore, just 48% of Americans believe the Earth is getting warmer, and this warming is mostly caused by humans.  This belief percentage has essentially remained unchanged for the last 10 years, or since the survey was first conducted in 2006.

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One key question in the survey pertained to American’ perception of the scientific “consensus”.  The Pew Research Center found that just 27% of Americans believe that “almost all” climate scientists maintain the belief that changes in climate are mostly caused by humans.

Of course, the presupposition underpinning this opinion question is the claim that upwards of 97% climate scientists - translated into “almost all” for the Pew survey - believe that climate changes since the mid-20th century have been mostly (i.e., more than 50%) caused by humans.  This oft-cited 97% figure was derived from a subjective abstract-counting exercise conducted by “SKeptical Science” blogger John Cook and colleagues (Cook et al., 2013, “Quantifying the Consensus...").  Selected abstracts from 11,944 scientific papers published between 1991 and 2011 were used for the sample size, and of those papers just 65 (0.5% of the 11,944) were classified by Cook and his fellow raters as endorsing the specified Category 1 position that “Explicitly states that humans are the primary cause of recent global warming” (Legates et al., 2013).  This wouldn’t do, of course.  So, to ultimately reach the 97% endorsement percentage the Cook team had set out to obtain in the first place, they intentionally combined the (65) Category 1 quantified “consensus” statement papers with the (934) Category 2 and (2,933) Category 3 endorsement papers that only needed to state (2) or just imply (3) that humans are a cause of climate changes.  These Category 2 and 3 papers did not quantify the contribution or indicate humans are a primary (>50%) cause of climate change, but they were nonetheless combined with Category 1 papers anyway.

Of course, nearly all scientists would agree that a human contribution greater than 0% exists, or that humans can be a cause - however modest - of some degree of climate change.  So by combining the very high endorsement rates from Categories 2 and 3 (that even most skeptics acknowledge, as they agree humans contribute to climate change to some degree) with the negligibly small endorsement rates for Category 1 (just 65 papers), and by excluding many hundreds of papers from consideration that were published by scientists questioning the theory, Cook et al. (2013) were ultimately able to get away with proclaiming that 97% of scientists believe that climate changes since 1950 have mostly been caused by humans.

But as the evidence from the Pew survey indicates, despite their best efforts, John Cook and cohorts have not been able to convince the general public that subjective abstract-counting exercises are a sound or scientific means to gauge “consensus.” As mentioned, only 27% of Americans believe that “almost all” (i.e., 97%) climate scientists maintain the belief that humans are the primary cause of changes in the climate system.  Not only that, just 28% Americans agree that climate scientists even understand ("very well") what factors cause climate changes.

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And Americans may be right.  According to analysis found in the peer-reviewed scientific literature (Prokopy et al., 2015, Lefsrud and Meyer, 2012, Stenhouse et al., 2016), surveys of professional climatologists, engineers, geologists, and agronomists indicate that the percentage of these scientists who believe that changes in the climate system are primarily caused by humans falls abysmally short of the claimed 97%.  In fact, these studies reveal that only 53% of climatologists and meteorologists, 36% of professional engineers and geoscientists, and 19% of agronomists believe that changes in the climate system are mostly human-caused.

53% Of Climatologists Believe, 19% Of Agronomists Believe
In a survey of Midwest-based climatologists and agronomists (here called “extension educators” who have “at least a Masters degree” in agronomic sciences), just 53% of climatologists and 19.2% of agronomists believe that changes in the climate system are primarily caused by humans.

Prokopy et al., 2015

“In 2012, a total of 22 state and extension climatologists were selected through a purposive sample to represent main outlets of publicly available and location-specific climate information in the region. About 53% attributed climate change primarily to human activities.”

“Extension educators are a unique set of agricultural advisors who serve to connect and translate research from universities to farmers in order to decrease risk to the farm enterprise and increase productive capacity and resilience. Typically, Extension educators have at least a Masters degree and are trained in agronomic sciences, which may not include climate sciences. [O]ver 19% attribut[e] climate change primarily to human activities.”

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36% Of Engineers, Geoscientists Believe

Among professional engineers and geoscientists trained in the physical sciences, only 36% are believers in the “consensus” position that humans are the “main or central” cause of changes in the climate system.
Lefsrud and Meyer, 2012 ”The largest group of APEGA respondents (36%) ,,, express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.”

53% Of Professional Meteorologists Believe

Stenhouse et al., 2016

Conflict about Climate Change at the American Meteorological Society: Meteorologists’ Views on a Scientific and Organizational Controversy

“A web-based survey was sent to all professional (i.e. non-student) members of the AMS in December 2011.  Members who said the global warming of the last 150 years was mostly caused by human activity (53% of full sample). Members who are convinced of largely human-caused climate change expressed that debate over global warming sends an unclear message to the public.  Conversely, members who are unconvinced of human-caused climate change often felt that their peers were closed-minded, and were suppressing unpopular views.”

Ninety-Seven Percent Bunk

To summarize, the American public is about as likely to believe that climate changes are mostly caused by humans as are meteorologists and climatologists (48% vs. 53%, respectively).  And Americans in general are much more likely to believe that humans are the primary cause of climate changes as professionals trained in the physical sciences: 48% of U.S. citizens are believers, whereas ~20-35% of professionals with physical science degrees (engineers, Earth scientists, agronomists) are believers.

To put it non-delicately, the claim that “almost all” scientists (i.e., 97%) believe that most changes in the climate system are caused by humans is… bunk.

And most Americans already knew that.