Roy Spencer just published an excellent article bursting the “97% consensus” balloon. Here’s an excerpt:

The 97 percent number comes from a 2013 paper that was published by John Cook in Environmental Research Letters and that claimed to review about 12,000 published scientific papers on global warming and climate change. Now, for those of us who work in climate change research, it is well known that “climate change” is widely assumed to be mostly human-caused, despite the fact that very few published studies have actually attempted to demonstrate this to be the case.

Again, it is simply assumed.

And that is one of the (many) problems with the Cook literature review study. It only established that there is widespread consensus that humans contribute to(not even dominate) global warming, a position that the vast majority of climate “skeptics” agree with – including myself. I do not know of any climate skeptic researchers who claim that humans have no influence on the climate system.  The existence of trees has an influence on the climate system, and it is entirely reasonable to assume that humans do as well.

The most pertinent questions really are: just how much warming is occurring? (not as much as predicted); how much of that warming is being caused by humans? (we don’t really know); is modest warming a bad thing? (maybe not); and is there anything we can do about it anyway? (not without a new energy technology).

Also, while the scientific consensus on climate change is a mile wide, it is only inches deep. Very few climate researchers can tell you what evidence points to (say) 50 percent of recent global warming being human-caused. There might be a few dozen scientists in the world [Roy’s too humble to say it, but he’s one of them] who are familiar enough with the science to defend it. Instead, the vast majority of scientists simply repeat what they have heard, or are familiar with in only a cursory manner. Climate change research involves so many specialties and sub-disciplines that few scientists have a knowledge base sufficiently holistic to make an informed judgment.

Click to read the rest. It’s worth it!