Leading cause of global warming discovered: Heat generated by cooking statistics

Consensus is such a pleasant word. It brings up visions of different races, creeds and nationalities sitting around the campfire in big circle, holding hands and singing Kumbaya.

Well, that and outright fraud.

The FinancialPost UK describes how consensus is now achieved among the global warming crowd:

The punditry looked for and found an alternative number to tout: “97% of the world’s climate scientists” accept the consensus, articles in the Washington Post, the U.K.’s Guardian, CNN and other news outlets now claim…

This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2008 master’s thesis by student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman at the University of Illinois, under the guidance of Peter Doran, an associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences. The two researchers obtained their results by conducting a survey of 10,257 Earth scientists. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers — in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout.

The two researchers started by altogether excluding from their survey the thousands of scientists most likely to think that the Sun, or planetary movements, might have something to do with climate on Earth — out were the solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, astronomers and meteorologists.

All together now, “Kumbaya, my lord, kumbaya, kumbaya, my lord, kumbaya….”

Source: Financial Post