You may have heard o…

You may have heard of the “herd mentality” among journalists, especially reporting in Washington, where everybody winds up reporting on the same stories the same way. Did you know that it’s even worse among climate scientists?

On Monday, Benny Peiser, a United Kingdom social anthropologist, called the Dec. 3 essay, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” a “disturbing” study.

“A one-hundred-percent record of ‘scientific consensus’ on anthropogenic climate change would be a sensational finding indeed. In fact, such a total result would be even more remarkable than any ‘consensus’ ever achieved in Soviet-style elections,” Peiser noted sarcastically.

The Science Magazine essay analyzed 928 abstracts containing the keyword “climate change,” all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003. The essay found that not a single one of the studies showed climate change to be naturally occurring.

A magazine that would seem to want to foster creative and independent thinking seems to have eschewed it when considering global warming. The Soviets had an agenda in getting that “consensus” to fall in line with the party. What’s the agenda here, hmm?

“Whatever happened to the countless research papers published in the last ten years in peer-reviewed journals that show that temperatures were generally higher during the Medieval Warm Period than today, that solar variability is most likely to be the key driver of any significant climate change and that the methods used in climate modeling are highly questionable?” Peiser asked.

“Given the countless papers published in the peer-reviewed literature over the last ten years that implicitly or explicitly disagree with the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, one can only conclude that all of these were simply excluded from the [Science Magazine] review. That’s how it arrived at a 100 percent consensus!” he added.

According to Peiser, Oreskes’ assertion that there is a 100 percent consensus about the issue is not backed by science.

“Even [former Soviet dictator Joseph] Stalin himself did not take consensus politics to such extremes,” Peiser explained. “In the Soviet Union the official ‘participation rate’ was never higher than 98-99 percent.

They do exist, it’s just that Science Magazine and the article’s author have put blinders on. I really don’t think they’re alone.

Iain Murray, a senior fellow in International Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wrote a letter to the editor of Science Magazine questioning why the study was even published.

“I was surprised to see Science publish an article crowing over the existence of a scientific consensus on global warming and then advancing the non-sequitur that political action is therefore needed. Neither is a point worthy of consideration in an objective, scientific journal,” Murray wrote in his letter to the editor, dated Dec. 6.

“…the message of the article — that politicians must act on the basis of the science — is clearly a political point rather than a scientific one,” Murray continued.

“…the argument advanced by the author that ‘our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it’ is barely economically literate and has no place in a scientific journal,” he added.

Ah, there’s your agenda.

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