Excellent letter in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News:
Some insight into Cook’s 97 percent
The Moscow-Pullman Daily News has printed an overheated deluge of climate debate letters. So many cite Cook’s (2016) conclusion that 97 percent of scientists find that humans cause global warming. I read deeper and found that his inferences are based on categorizations of 11,984 scientific paper abstracts.
Using his own categories, 0.3 percent conclude that man causes all warming, 8.3 percent that man causes over 50 percent, up to a total of 32.6 percent includes the less than 50 percent category. He totally ignores the 66.4 percent (7,930 papers) that were uncertain and expressed no concrete opinion.
Where does the reported and cited ad nauseum 97 percent come from? It appears to be a ratio of only the extreme tails of the inference distribution.
There are 97 percent more extreme believers than there are extreme deniers if you completely ignore the majority who say that evidence is still inconclusive. Endless regurgitation of the 97 percent sound bite is an example of perception management bias at its best.
Mark Twain (1883) opined: “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment in fact.”
Charley McKetta
Moscow