Oren Cass defends at National Review Online his earlier assertion that global warming alarmists overstate the degree to which science supports their claims.
Crying “consensus” to defend absolutist assertions, climate activists are charging well beyond the threshold of what mainstream science can support. When they turn back toward the ledge to shout “denial” at anyone who has not leapt with them, the word no longer means what they think it does.
This was my argument in “Who’s The Denier Now?,” published in National Review last month. John Cook, lead author of the “97 percent consensus” studies, has responded to that piece by overstating a consensus in defense of an absolutist assertion and then accusing me of “denial.” …
… Cook also misses the larger point, which is that Sanders (among others) has a habit of overstating scientific consensus. Besides the example above, I quote Sanders claiming that 97 percent of scientists conclude that climate change “is already causing devastating problems” and claiming that “the vast majority of scientists” say “there is a real question as to the quality of the planet that we are going to be leaving our children and our grandchildren.” I also quote former President Obama tweeting that 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is “dangerous.” The documented consensus extends to none of these claims.
If Cook anywhere criticized those obvious mischaracterizations of his work as strongly as he now takes issue with my precise citation, I apologize for having missed it. He did comment approvingly on the inaccurate Obama tweet, which he said “raises the awareness of consensus” and “really helps in getting that information out into the general public.” …
… Cook, on the other hand, rejects the IPCC statement as inadequate, insisting instead that “there is a consensus of evidence that human activity is causing all of recent global warming. Not some of it. Not even most of it. All of it.” None of the consensus studies in his survey even tested a statement as strong as that. Still, he concludes: “When the evidence converges on a single coherent conclusion, affirmed by a scientific consensus, we can accept the science or we can deny it.” Refusal to acknowledge this unsubstantiated “consensus” for “all of it” apparently constitutes “science denial.”