We have been hearing a lot about the alleged consensus on global warming, namely that 97% of climate scientists believe that human emitted greenhouse gasses are the main cause. Economist and legal scholar David Friedman examines the study that has given rise to this claim and discovers that this is not what it shows. And furthermore, the study’s own author is lying about it’s results. After close examination of the paper’s results Friedman concludes that:
The closest it came to defining the consensus is as the “position that humans are causing global warming,” which leaves it unclear whether “causing” means “are one cause of,” “are the chief cause of,” or “are the sole cause of.” To discover that it meant only the former, a reader had to pay sufficiently careful attention to the details of the paper to notice “contribute to” in the example of category 2 in Table 2, which few readers would do. The fact that Cook chose, in a second paper, to misrepresent the result of the first is pretty good evidence that the presentation of his results was deliberately designed to mislead.
