Scientist Slams Climate Change Deniers In Brilliant Viral Post.

The overwhelming consensus on climate change in the scientific community is that it's real, and it's man-made. The most commonly-cited figure is that 97.1 percent of scientific studies support the view that climate change is caused by humans. 

Even though this is an overwhelming consensus, it has still left room for climate-change deniers to claim that maybe the 2.9 percent are right. 

"Today, the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers," Ted Cruz famously said a few years ago. "It used to be [that] it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier."

However, a study has already looked at the 3 percent of studies denying climate change is man-made and has found that every single one of them was flawed.

Now, one of its authors, atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, has taken to Facebook to slam climate change deniers in a strongly-worded viral post.

Hayhoe specifically targetted people who claim that data had been suppressed.

"It's a lot easier for someone to claim they've been suppressed than to admit that maybe they can't find the scientific evidence to support their political ideology..." she wrote on Facebook.

"But over the last 10 years, at least 38 papers were published in peer-reviewed journals, each claiming various reasons why climate wasn't changing, or if it was, it wasn't humans, or it wasn't bad. They weren't suppressed. They're out there, where anyone can find them."

She explained that she and her colleague decided to try and recreate the results from theses studies, which was published in Theoretical and Applied Climatology. Surprise, surprise: "Every single one of those analyses had an error – in their assumptions, methodology, or analysis – that, when corrected, brought their results into line with the scientific consensus."

"The idea is that accurate scientific research should be replicable," Dana Nuccitelli, one of the paper's authors, wrote in the Guardian. "The study also seeks to answer the question, why do these contrarian papers come to a different conclusion than 97 percent of the climate science literature?"

The study found that scientists were cherry-picking data and using flawed methodology in order to reach their flawed conclusion that climate change isn't man-made. The most common flaw was that researchers were ignoring data that didn't fit their conclusions, but they also found that some papers "display a clear lack of plausible physics".

Of particular note was one study which tried to "blame global warming on the orbital cycles of Jupiter and Saturn".

Hayhoe's post slamming climate-change deniers has gone viral on Facebook, with people praising her for her work. However, two years on from the publication of the study, Hayhoe is pessimistic on changing the minds of climate change deniers.

14 January 2020

IFLSCIENCE