The “97 Percent” Straw Man Revisited

This past week was the Heartland Institute’s 9th International Conference on Climate Change in Las Vegas.  As I was teaching my summer school graduate course at the Ashbrook Center in Ohio last week I wasn’t able to attend, but you can take in videos of most the sessions here.

Lord Monckton

Lord Monckton

We’ve commented here before about the climatistas’ dishonest, bad faith argument that “97 percent of scientists ‘believe’ in climate change,” as though that settled the entire matter—hand over your car keys!  You may recall that my conclusion was that the number should have been 100 percent.  Lord Monckton of Brenchly, one of the more colorful critics of climate mania over in the UK (he calls them “Thermageddonites,” which I like and may borrow), made the same point in his presentation at the Heartland conference, which he has kindly posted up over on WattsUpWithThat:

The climate consensus is not 97% – it’s 100%

Shock news from the Heartland Institute’s Ninth International Climate Change Conference: among the 600 delegates, the consensus that Man contributes to global warming was not 97%. It was 100%.

During my valedictorian keynote at the conference, I appointed the lovely Diane Bast as my independent adjudicatrix. She read out six successive questions to the audience, one by one. I invited anyone who would answer “No” to that question to raise a hand. According to the adjudicatrix, not a single hand was raised in response to any of the questions.

These were the six questions.

1. Does climate change?

2. Has the atmospheric concentration of CO2 increased since the late 1950s?

3. Is Man likely to have contributed to the measured increase in CO2 concentration since the late 1950s?

4. Other things being equal, is it likely that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will cause some global warming?

5. Is it likely that there has been some global warming since the late 1950s?

6. Is it likely that Man’s emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases have contributed to the measured global warming since 1950?

At a conference of 600 “climate change deniers”, then, not one delegate denied that climate changes. Likewise, not one denied that we have contributed to global warming since 1950.

One of the many fundamental dishonesties in the climate debate is the false impression created by the Thermageddonites and their hosts of allies in the Main Stream Media (MSM) that climate skeptics would answer “No” to most – if not all – of the six questions.

From here Monckton goes on to deliver a very thorough beat down of the Cook paper that the 97 percent canard is based on.  Worth a complete reading if you have time.  I can hear the newsroom crickets chirping already.

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