Consensus? Poll finds 41% of climate scientists don’t buy ‘climate change’

Last year, Steven Koonin, an under-secretary of science in the Obama administration, published a book titled "Unsettled" that said "the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what our actions will be." — Last year, Steven Koonin, an under-secretary of science in the Obama administration, published a book titled “Unsettled” that said “the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what our actions will be.”

Undermines promoters of ‘settled science’ narrative

Media regularly tells the public that “the science is settled” and there is a nearly 99% “consensus” among scientists that mankind is causing catastrophic global warming through carbon emissions.

However, a new survey found that 41% believed the frequency and severity of extreme weather events had increased significantly in recent years, reported the British website Daily Sceptic.

The survey, conducted in September and October by Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, New Jersey, collected a representative sample of scientists with at least a bachelor’s degree in fields such as meteorology, climatology, physics, geology and hydrology. About 57% were members of the American Meteorology Society.

MIT emeritus professor Richard Lindzen recently called the current climate narrative “absurd,” contending it’s driven by the trillions of dollars diverted to green projects, grant-dependent academics and agenda-driven journalists.

U.S. meteorologist Anthony Watts said the poll results “suggest that the draconian solutions such as Net Zero being pushed by the left, even if they actually worked, are aimed at a non-problem.”

Led by a Nobel Prize laureate, more than 1,100 scientists and scholars have signed a document declaring climate science is based more on personal beliefs and political agendas than sound, rigorous science.

The World Climate Declaration states climate science “should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific.”

“Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures,” the declaration reads.

In August, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which spends $368 billion for “green” energy with the aim of reducing CO2 emissions by 40% by 2030. When Joe Biden was vice president under Barack Obama, the administration subsidized “green” energy with federal grants and tax breaks. Joe Biden himself announced in 2009 a $535 million loan guarantee for the solar panel company Solyndra to go along with $700 million in venture capital funding. Biden said the plant built with that money would power more than half a million homes. But two years later, the company filed for bankruptcy and shut down its operations.

The World Climate Declaration points out that since emerging from the Little Ice Age in the mid-19th century, the world has warmed significantly less than predicted by the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change’s models

“The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change,” the WCD states.

The declaration argues Earth’s climate has varied, with cold and warm periods, for as long as the planet has existed, and it is “no surprise that we are experiencing a period of warming.”

The climate models “are not remotely plausible as global policy tools,” ignoring, for one, the benefits of carbon dioxide, which is “not a pollutant.”

“It is essential to all life on Earth,” the declaration says. “Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth; additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yield of crops worldwide.”

There is no statistical evidence, the signatories say, “that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and such-like natural disasters, or making them more frequent.”

“There is no climate emergency. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050.”

Last year, Steven Koonin, an under-secretary of science in the Obama administration, published a book titled “Unsettled” that said “the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what our actions will be.”

The idea that climate change is settled demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, he contended, “retarding its progress in these important matters.”

In 2020, the long-time green activist Michael Shellenberger wrote a book called “Apocalypse Never” that lamented the conversation about climate change has “spiraled out of control.”