No climate consensus
TONY Tsimbas ( TB, August 20), the “97 per cent of scientists believe” advertising campaign has been the most successful in history, particularly since it is fundamentally and demonstrably wrong.
Forty years of scary predictions; so why have none come true? “Consensus” has no role in science; only in religion and government. As Einstein noted in response to the book Hundred Authors Against Einstein; “Why 100? If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”
The origin story of the “97 per cent campaign” is well known: 10,257 Earth scientists were surveyed; 7111 were “eliminated”; the remaining 3146 were asked two questions; 3069 of them were “eliminated”; 75 of the 77 left became the “97 per cent”.
The “Oregon Petition” rejecting the idea of a “consensus” was signed by
31,487 scientists, including 9029 Phds. That smashes the “97 per cent” but there’s no well-heeled ideologues to drive it into the media spotlight, so most people have never heard of it.
The “NASA Letter” is from 49 veteran NASA scientists and astronauts and it admonishes the NASA Administrator for his belief that man-made CO2 causes climate change while neglecting empirical evidence that refutes that hypothesis.
So how big an organisation and how much money is needed to keep pushing the “97 per cent” lie to the point where gullible governments buy into it? Would the United Nations and several left-wing billionaires be enough?
The UN’S IPCC gets endless media space for its doomsaying releases, despite none of them ever eventuating. But the Heartland Institute’s NIPCC, which doesn’t hoover money out of taxpayers and left-wing billionaires but whose predictions do eventuate, gets no media. Then there’s our own Professor Andy Pitman of UNSW, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science and Lead
Author for the IPCC, who recently said, “… as far as the climate scientists know there is no link between climate change and drought” and “… there is no reason a priori why climate change should make the landscape more arid.”
Even the IPCC’S own authors can’t agree on any “consensus”. There is no “97 per cent consensus” except in the minds of extreme-left ideologues and their ad men.
PETER CAMPION, Tolga.