> This opinion has been bought and paid for by fossil fuel companies who paid PR companies to smear these guys. The science stands up very well, but you've bought in and it doesn't matter if 10 or 10,000 studies confirm their findings you will dismiss it as a conspiracy.

If dang were made aware of that comment of yours, I wonder if he would sanction you for it. Readers (as if there are any) will note that I've made no such ad hominem comments about you, but have only commented on the facts and the logic of the issue.

Now, since I claimed that Cook, et al was a farce, you've said:

> Not only was cook right that there is a consensus, but there is even now a consensus on the consensus and the consensus has grown from 97% to >99%. Cook hasn't been discredited. He's been confirmed over and over by independent groups using completely different methodologies.

Again, this claim of yours is false. In fact, the claims of Cook, et al have been repeatedly proven to be misleading, false, and intentionally so:[0]

Two-thirds of the papers that Cook and his colleagues examined expressed no view at all on the consensus. Of the remaining 34%, the authors claimed that 33% endorsed the consensus. Divide 33 by 34 and you get 97%. But this result is essentially meaningless, because they set the bar so low.

The survey authors didn’t ask if climate change was dangerous or “manmade”. They only asked if a given paper accepted that humans have some effect on the climate, which as already noted is uncontroversial. It could mean as little as accepting the “urban heat island” effect.

So a far better question would be: How many of the studies claimed that humans have caused most of the observed global warming? And oddly, we do know. Because buried in the authors’ data was the answer: A mere 64 out of nearly 12,000 papers! That’s not 97%, it’s one half of one percent. It’s one in 200.

And it gets worse. In a follow-up study[1], climatologist David Legates read those 64 papers and found that a third of them didn’t even say what Cook and his team claimed. Only 41 actually endorsed the view that global warming is mostly manmade. And we still haven’t got to it being “dangerous”. That part of the survey results was simply invented, by politicians and activists.

Other researchers have condemned the Cook study on other grounds too. For instance economist Richard Tol showed[2] that over three-quarters of the papers counted as endorsing even the weak consensus actually said nothing at all on the subject. And evidence later emerged[3] that the authors of the paper were drafting press releases about their findings before they even started doing the research, which indicates an alarming level not of warming or of consensus but of bias.

Now, rather than assail you with accusations of conspiracy and partisanship, as you have repeatedly done to me, I'll leave speculation about your motives to the reader (as if there are any left here). But we can all see which kind of comment gets upvoted here, and which kind gets downvoted to death. "Science," indeed.

0: https://climatediscussionnexus.com/videos/the-97-consensus-s...

1: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9

2: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

3: https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2014/09/Warming-cons...