Behind the Lie That 97% of Scientists Back Global Warming Hoax

A strategy useful for duping fools is to create a statistic out of thin air and repeat it until it is accepted as fact. After all, as a Founding Father of modern liberalism said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” One such lie is the preposterous but incessantly repeated assertion that 97% of the scientists of the world agree with the Obama Regime’s radical position on man-made global warming — or as they have been calling it since it stopped getting warmer, “climate change.”

An actual scientist, Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, teamed up with Joseph Bast of the Heartland Institute to get to the bottom of where this 97% figure comes from. Apparently it is loosely based on various ideologically driven studies that made not even a token effort to achieve scientific vigor, but simply cherry-picked sympathetic scientists, many of whom had likely been pressured or bribed with government funding into backing the hoax. The view that human carbon emissions might conceivably contribute to warmer temperatures although this is not necessarily a bad thing is stretched into endorsement of the Regime’s apocalyptic hysteria, while dissenters are simply ignored.

It would be easier to invent a statistic proving that most scientists say global warming is a lie. As Bast and Spencer observe,

Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus. Only 39.5% of 1,854 American Meteorological Society members who responded to a survey in 2012 said man-made global warming is dangerous. …

Of the various petitions on global warming circulated for signatures by scientists, the one by the Petition Project, a group of physicists and physical chemists based in La Jolla, Calif., has by far the most signatures–more than 31,000 (more than 9,000 with a Ph.D.). It was most recently published in 2009, and most signers were added or reaffirmed since 2007. The petition states that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of . . . carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

We could go on, but the larger point is plain. There is no basis for the claim that 97% of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem.

But maybe if Obama, Kerry, the political flunkies who have replaced the great scientists who used to staff NASA, and the Democrat apparatchiks who run the media just repeat the lie a few thousand more times, it will magically become true, just like Lenin promised.

A more certain result is that all but the most obstinately clueless will figure out that nothing Obama et al. have to say should be believed.

On a tip from Varla. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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