The Reduction Of Climate Science

Alarmists have sunk so low, that the best talking point they can come up with is :

There is no way that 97% of scientists would say global warming is an imminent threat, if it weren’t true.

It is difficult to imagine that any human being could pack so much stupid into one sentence, yet that is the standard talking point of Congressional Democrats.


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47 Responses to The Reduction Of Climate Science

  1. dmmcmah says:

    99% of physicists thought that theoretical physics was over as a science in 1897.

  2. 1957chev says:

    100% of intelligent people, know the “scientists”, (not anywhere near 97%), that spew such nonsense, have a “political agenda” behind their reason for doing so. The alarmists might have more credibility, if they would move on, and stop flogging this dead horse.

  3. au1corsair says:

    Back around 2003 the Global Warming movement switched to Anthropogenic Climate Change because Mother Earth failed to cooperate. “Temperatures are rapidly rising”–except on Planet Earth. “Drought” became floods, “Extreme weather” turned up mild. Predictions were wrong because the models suffered from the Garbage In–Garbage Out syndrome.

    And of course, those relying on real-world evidence were “unscientific.” If you look at the climate change record and disagree with the artificial world of the “computer models” because the data doesn’t line up with predictions, you are a “denier.”

    Ain’t it grand how a bunch of politicians (without scientific backgrounds) and a handful of administrators become “97% of all scientists?”

    • Tom Bakert says:

      Sorry, it is not a case of GIGO. The algorithms used by the models are seriously inadequate and fatally flawed.

    • rw says:

      The “movement” may well have changed, but the term “climate change” was current among scientists by the turn of the century. Look through issues of Science for the years 2000 and 2001, and you’ll see this.

      • Gail Combs says:

        It was a lot earlier than that. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was ratified by the USA 21/03/94 (signed 12/06/92)
        Here’s the official definition:


        That’s from the official UN Framework Convention on Climate Change ( The term specifically excludes all natural climate change, and even excludes any caused by humans due to, for example, land clearance or city building, considering only atmospheric changes.

        The IPCC mandate is similar:


        The IPCC’s ROLE


        It never was about understanding the climate. It was really about ‘options for mitigation and adaptation. ‘ This is the ‘change’ in Western Civilization wanted by the Globalists like the UN, the World Bank, the WTO, and Obummer.

  4. Tom Moran says:

    Under Mussolini, the trains ran on time 97% of the time. 97% of Germans were in the Nazi party and Sex Panther cologne is 97% effective 62% of the time! We know that science is not based on consensus and people that use that line do not respect or understand the scientific method.

  5. omanuel says:

    Such statements are attractive to those who spend their days watching the “idiot box” and consuming drugs to relief their discomfort with life.

  6. philjourdan says:

    Except 97% do not say that. The actual questions to arrive at 97% is: Is man causing SOME (the percent is never quantified) Global Warming. The threat part never enters the survey.

    • Gail Combs says:

      If you scratch beneath the surface you find snake oil as usual
      Doran-Zimmerman poll:
      10,257 Earth Scientists at academic and government institutions were surveyed. 3146 of them responded of that 3146 all but 79 of the respondents were excluded.
      July 18, 2012 About that overwhelming 97-98% number of scientists that say there is a climate consensus…

      An oopsie in the Doran/Zimmerman 97% consensus claim

      …My nagging question was, why did different numbers of people (79 vs. 77) answer the two questions? What happened to the other two respondents?….

      The answer to that question is not in the Doran article.

      But it is in the Zimmerman report,…
      [image of questionaire]
      Do you see it? If a respondent answered “remained relatively constant” to the first question, then he wasn’t asked the second question!


      That means only 75 of 79 (94.9%) of their “most specialized and knowledgeable respondents” actually gave them the answers they wanted to both of their questions.

      So, despite asking “dumb questions” that even most skeptics would answer “correctly,” and despite excluding over 97% of the responses after they were received, they still did not find 97% agreement. They actually found only 94.9% agreement!

      What else did the ‘97% of scientists’ say?
      Has some bitting comments from the scientist surveyed such as:




      The 97% consensus myth – busted by a real survey
      “Here’s the kicker:

      Just 52 percent of survey respondents answered Yes: Mostly human.

      The other 48 percent either questioned whether global warming is happening or would not ascribe human activity as the primary cause….”

      A recent real survey conducted of American Meteorological Society members has blown Cook’s propaganda paper right out of the water.

      The survey is titled:

      Meteorologists’ views about global warming: A survey of American Meteorological Society professional members¹


      Meteorologists and other atmospheric science experts are playing important roles in helping society respond to climate change. However, members of this professional community are not unanimous in their views of climate change, and there has been tension among members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) who hold different views on the topic. In response, AMS created the Committee to Improve Climate Change Communication to explore and, to the extent possible, resolve these tensions. To support this committee, in January 2012 we surveyed all AMS members with known email addresses, achieving a 26.3% response rate (n=1,854). In this paper we tested four hypotheses: (1) perceived conflict about global warming will be negatively associated–and (2) climate expertise, (3) liberal political ideology, and (4) perceived scientific consensus will be positively associated–with (a) higher personal certainty that global warming is happening, (b) viewing the global warming observed over the past 150 years as mostly human-caused, and (c) perception of global warming as harmful. All four hypotheses were confirmed. Expertise, ideology, perceived consensus and perceived conflict were all independently related to respondents’ views on climate, with perceived consensus and political ideology being most strongly related. We suggest that AMS should: attempt to convey the widespread scientific agreement about climate change; acknowledge and explore the uncomfortable fact that political ideology influences the climate change views of meteorology professionals; refute the idea that those who do hold non-majority views just need to be “educated” about climate change; continue to deal with the conflict among members of the meteorology community.

      From the abstract, it is clear the authors didn’t expect to find this result, as they were likely expecting something close to the fabled 97%. T

      And that is not even getting into the shoddy Cook Survey that has been torn to shreds by several people.

  7. Jason Calley says:

    97% of CAGW cult members are so ignorant of both science and statistics that they believe fraudulent studies to be accurate.

  8. Tom Bakert says:

    Obama is slightly more emphatic: “There is no way that 97% of scientists would say global warming is an imminent threat, if it weren’t true. Period.”

  9. SMS says:

    Just to emphasize what Phil Jordan mentions; the issue is not whether there is some AGW, the issue is how much. There are some spectral bands for CO2 that do contribute to AGW; just not many. So the argument has to move away from the 97% of scientists say humans are causing warming. It should be 100%.

    The question for the scientists has to be “how many of you believe that we are headed for Catastrophic warming?” And the answer will be damned few. That’s because Mann’s hockey stick is a fraud. If our planet has ever been warmer in the past then positive feedbacks will not kick in.

    The argument has to be better defined in the press and in public. We, as skeptics of CAGW, have to do a better job of defining the argument to stay away from the 97% misdirection.

    • Tom Bakert says:


    • Gail Combs says:

      Here is a couple of explanations of what is really going on that kilsl the idea of ‘Run away global warming’ dead. The Trenberth energy cartoon is murdered AGAIN. The first time John Kehr, a chem engineer showed the climastrologists IGNORE the difference between energy transfers and radiative flux.

      (It really is snake oil all the way down!)

      gallopingcamel says:
      …While I am a physicist, I am not a climate scientist. My field is quantum electro-optics; I have been building lasers since 1970 for fun and profit, starting with dye lasers and finishing with the HIGS (High Intensity Gamma Source)….

      ….The main absorption lines for CO2 that relate to the capture of thermal IR from the Earth’s surface are in the 4 and 15 micron bands. The corresponding frequencies are 75 and 20 Tera-Hertz. The periods are 0.013 and 0.050 femto-seconds.

      As you correctly point out, these periods are shorter than the mean time between molecular collisions by at least seven orders of magnitude. However, a molecule cannot emit a photon unless it has first been raised to an “excited state”. The lifetime of these excited states is typically measured in micro-seconds or milli-seconds.

      If left undisturbed, excited atoms or molecules will eventually give up their excess energy via radiative transitions to lower energy states or via collisions with other molecules. When total pressure is low, radiative transfer dominates so the outgoing radiation is absorbed by CO2 (or water vapor) is re-radiated isotropically. This means that half of the outgoing radiation is returned to the surface exactly as claimed by Trenberth & Co.

      In the troposphere the mean time between collisions is quite short (~200 pico-seconds) so most of the outgoing IR radiation absorbed by complex molecules will be lost in collisions before a photon can be radiated. This means that in the lower atmosphere it makes no difference whether the energy is transfered by radiation or by convection. In either case the energy is retained in the troposphere….

      More at

      Dr. Robert Brown of Duke wrote, a for me, more understandable comment over at WUWT:

      rgbatduke says:
      May 28, 2014 at 10:21 am

      ….This isn’t the right question. The question is, “What is the absorption cross-section for a 15 micron photon”. That’s the effective surface area intercepted by each CO_2 molecule. It is large enough that the mean free path of LWIR photons in the pressure-broadened absorption bands of CO_2 in the lower atmosphere is order of a meter. That means that LWIR photons — whatever their “size” — with frequencies in the band go no more than a meter or few before they are absorbed by a CO_2 molecule.

      The lifetime of the excited state(s) is much longer than the mean free time between molecular collisions between the CO_2 molecule and the (usually nitrogen or oxygen or argon) other molecules in the surrounding gas. That means that the radiative energy absorbed by the molecule is almost never resonantly re-emitted, it is transferred to the surrounding gas, warming not just the CO_2 but the oxygen, nitrogen, water vapor, argon as well as the other CO_2 molecules around. Periodically CO_2 is thermally excited in-band by just such a collision and radiates energy away, but it is not like an elastic scattering process such as occurs in specular reflection within clouds. In band/thermal radiative energy gradually diffuses upwards, with the mean free path of the photons increasing the higher one goes, until it starts to equal the remaining depth of the atmosphere and photons emitted “up” have a good chance of escaping, cooling the molecules (on average) that emit them. It takes order of 100s of absorptions and emissions for radiation to diffuse upward to escape, and there is an almost equal probability that radiation will diffuse downward (especially from the lower levels) where we observe it as back-radiation/greenhouse radiative forcing of the surface.

      Even this is oversimplified. Because of pressure broadening, molecules close to the ground emit photons “in the wings” at frequencies that less broadened molecules at higher altitudes/lower pressures are nearly transparent to. That means that there is a steady CO_2-mediated “leakage” even from lower altitudes directly to space from the edges of the monotonically decreasing-with-height absorptive bandwidth. It also means that there is a MAJOR change in atmospheric absorptivity/emissivity with simple high and low pressure centers as they move around, as well as a modulation of the size of the emission-wing “hole”.

      Grant Petty’s book can walk you through much of the physics.

      If I read this correctly, CO2 WILL absorb the IR photons in the correct wavebands but the overwhelming ‘reaction’** is for the energy to be transfered to the rest of the atmospheric molecules warming them. At that point, since hot air rises the energy is carried up. Of the small number of CO2 molecules that do emit a photon instead of transferring energy via a collision, a second ‘reaction’ is for the excited CO2 to emit at frequencies “in the wings” half of that energy escapes through the emission-wing “hole”. Therefore the “Downwelling radiation” from CO2 is a tiny fraction of the amount the Climastrologists are claiming AND since “LWIR photons — whatever their “size” — with frequencies in the band go no more than a meter or few before they are absorbed by a CO_2 molecule,” additional CO2 in the atmosphere means diddly squat.

      ‘reaction’** I am a chemist and that is the only term close to what I mean that I can think of.

      • cdquarles says:

        If you get Grant Petty’s book, you will see a plot showing the SB *intensity* form as well as the flux form and the misleading equal area forms. While the relative percentage of the sun’s power in the far IR is small, the intensity compared to a 300K emitter is not. Thus, ‘greenhouse’ gases clip the peak skin temperatures and the trough skin temperatures, relative to a body lacking an atmosphere, period, with or without ‘greenhouse’ gases.

        It should not be forgotten that the SB equation is a limit and applies to the case where the only way energy transfer takes place is via radiation. For the Earth as a whole, all energy transfer out in the end is radiative. Within the Earth system, though, there are other paths for energy transfer.

        Worse, in my mind, is the improper averaging of intensive properties. If they were doing this with extensive properties, and doing it correctly, I’d be more willing to accept what’s been said. Since they aren’t, I can’t. It is a form of making vast conclusions from half-vast data. You simply can’t do that scientifically, if you’re honest.

        I still think that using area averaged power inputs and improper forms of the SB equation are not only bad science, they’re pure propaganda in the hands of power-mad politicians.

        • Gail Combs says:

          I always preferred this chart of solar vs earth energy compared to this chart which I consider very misleading.
          “…Worse, in my mind, is the improper averaging of intensive properties….”
          That is a practice that makes most [honest] physics savvy people run screaming.

          I am by no means physics savvy and it has ME grinding my teeth.

          Temperature (intensive property) is only half the story. You have to add in the latent heat of water vapor to get a decent estimate of the energy content of a chunk of air.

        • mjc says:

          And since the amount of water vapor in the air is NOT constant, nor very uniform…you need to do a lot of calculating to do that (add the latent heat). They probably assume it would ‘average out’ or ‘doesn’t make that big a difference’ or something equally stupid in orfer to ignore it.

        • Gail Combs says:

          mjc says:

          That is why I say they are using a sample size of ONE and therefore can not use the statistics of large samples.

          Krigging is fraud.

          And a Global ‘temperature’ is good to about 5C at best…. since many of the US stations are only good to 5C link and the US stations are the best fo the liter supposedly.

        • cdquarles says:

          One other thing about water. It is strongly hydrogen bonded. When you first melt ice, it gets denser because the water molecules can pack closer together at first. Later, as you add energy, the clusters become more mobile and decrease in size, accompanied by thermal expansion.

          For most substances, sublimation, deposition, condensation, and evaporation happen at the surface and involve single atoms or molecules. The highly hydrogen bonded water does not necessarily work that way. This increases the energy required to sublime or evaporate water (effectively dimers or even higher clusters of water molecules) and when you get deposition or condensation, you get that extra energy, relative to single molecule phase changes, back. Dimers and higher clusters of water will have different properties for quantum interactions such as IR absorption, compared to single molecules. Water’s complicated and then add surface effects when adsorbed onto dust grains, even when the full water cloud aerosol hasn’t been made yet. Then add to that the effects of solvation in the water cloud. Until these kinds of basic research questions have been done and thorough analysis has been done, hand-waving this away saying that it is noise and averages out to zero is akin to argument from ignorance.

  10. jigawatt says:

    And in 20 years the same people will be saying “It wasn’t science but the overzealous media that made it seem like there was this big scientific consensus on AGW. Very few, if any, scientists actually bought into the politics and the hype and the doomsday scenarios.”

  11. NotAGolfer says:

    Does “Lysenkoism” ever cross their minds?

  12. RCM says:

    The problem is obvious of course – most scientists simply accept what has been published as fact, and then build assumptions from there.

    An easy example of a similar situation in the past is that 97 percent scientists believed that humans had 48 chromosomes, and this belief lasted for more than 25 years. It was widely published and fully accepted as fact. Anyone who said otherwise was simply a fool

  13. I have long argued that back-radiation from the atmosphere to the surface is very small, that the Khiel-Trenberth Earth Energy Budgets and various NASA versions as well violated Energy Conservation, that the Stefan-Boltzmann equation provides a maximum radiating limit for a surface in vacuum, that the loss of energy in the atmospheric window is more important than usually stated, that the short mean free path for CO2 and water vapor IR emissions is critical, yet rarely discussed, and that there is a general neglect of the ways the IR-active gases in the lower troposphere contribute to cooling by absorption of solar insolation in the atmosphere above the surface and by slightly speeding up the transfer of heat emitted by the surface through the lower atmosphere in an upward direction. The effects of CO2 are very small and it may well be that the net effect is not a warming effect. The net effect of water vapor is a cooling effect on the surface temperature. That of CO2 is less clear as yet, but it is so small that doubling its concentration in the atmosphere is certainly no catastrophe.

    • tom0mason says:

      Khiel-Trenberth Earth Energy Budgets and the use of Stefan-Boltzmann equation are for modeled hypothetical BS. At no time do they allow for the FACT that nature on this planet acts to try and retain, for as long as possible, all energy that enters the planet’s system. Thus the idea that overly simplistic energy in=energy out is total, and absolute, BullHockey from the demented grant-maintained-parasites, with low intelligence and no imagination.
      If nature in all it’s ways did act this way then there would never have been fossils, oil, coal, peat, methane clathrate, (radiant sunlight/thermal energy to chemical energy), etc., etc. No ocean cyclic currents (thermal to kenetic energy), no jet stream (thermal to kenetic energy), no forest, crops, or erosion (thermal to chemical energy) as these all TAKE energy and lock energy away for some time. Energy that’s ultimately from where?
      How does the Khiel-Trenberth Earth Energy Budgets and Stefan-Boltzmann equation account for a non-black body that delays it’s return of energy by multi-level, variable delay time? Answer it doesn’t and so far the IPCC does not, so its CO2 hypothesis is ALL BS.

    • geran says:

      Well stated, Charles!

  14. John McLachlan says:

    There is no way that 97% of scientists would say global warming is an imminent threat, if it weren’t true, unless doing this increased their funding.

  15. mellyrn says:

    97% of doctors once believed that washing one’s hands between patients was so wrong, they blackballed the guy (Semmelweiss) who proposed it. 97% of doctors also believed that pellagra was contagious, the result of germ transfer from victim to victim.

  16. mjc says:

    A used car sales convention has more truth and validity than the 97% consensus paper…

  17. David A says:

    If energy transfer from collisions is far more common, is it not just as likely for a non GHG to conduct to a GHG molecule, at altitude, thus accelerating energy loss to space? (cooling)

  18. Gail Combs says:

    cdquarles says: …“One other thing about water….”
    Thanks my chemistry and physics is over 4 decades old and some is rather out dated.

  19. Back in time, “scientists” determined that Man would never break the 4 minute mile or exceed 7 feet in the high jump. Also at one time, Congress tried to pass a bill that would have abolished the U.S. Patent office because it was thought that everything worth inventing was already invented, thereby making the patent office obsolete.

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