Consensus in the Age of Agnotology

When 97% agree, seek out the 3% before forming an opinion

97% of climate scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming. I could probably end this article right here to avoid any silly questions. Yet, I thought you’d be interested in the origin of this number. A more obvious question is what is wrong with the 3%?

We are dealing with real science here so it is not surprising to see The Conversation step in to adjust the number upwards. This is a publication that has never seen a vaccine it didn’t like. Its climate science is built on the same high level of care and funding.

Adjunct Professor of Environmental Science and Management at Central Queensland University, Steve Turton corrected this figure upward. He referenced another article that put the figure at 99.999%

Despite the meritable efforts of those seeking to ban doubt, I have chosen to stick with the conservative 97%. This is the number most widely found in media. It is even popular with my local Blue Mountains City Councillors.

Imagine my excitement when I realised this figure came out of a study led by an Australian. Meet John Cook, who was a Research Fellow at Queensland University’s Global Change Institute for 6 years but shifted in February 2022 to the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change. ¹

In this brief video you will meet a number of clever people who agree with John’s 97% and some very stupid people who don’t. Among the clever are renowned climate experts Barack Obama, John Oliver and Bernie Sanders.

Below is the Cook study that first organised this widely reported consensus.

This was the third in a series of publications exchanged between John Cook et al and a troublesome fellow by the name of David Legates. It is also 1 of 5 papers I have read as background for this article. ²³⁴⁵⁶

Meet David Legates

So who is David Legates. On the surface he seems to be a climate denier but it will be hard to make that label stick. He is the co-author and co-editor of these books, is a professor of climatology and was appointed to a top position at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is typical of how such appointments are presented in our media.

What triggered war between the Cooks and Legates was the latter’s response to an article by Daniel Bedford, a Cook colleague, from 2010 titled:

“Agnotology as Teaching Tool: Learning Climate Science by Studying Misinformation”
(see footnotes). The Bedford article states:

”Within the scientific community, the reality of anthropogenic global warming is not seriously contested”.

Bedford also spent a good part of the article debunking observations on climate change and references made by novelist Michael Crichton in his book: “State of Fear”. Aside from picking an easy mark, it is unclear why Bedford chose to debunk someone without credentials in his field.

Another notable observation from his paper was that “education tends to increase skepticism among Republicans but decrease it among Democrats”⁷ This has me wondering what these two groups were studying and how their subjects relate to what is going on in the real world.

Central to Bedford’s article was that there were disagreements at the margins but on key points the climate science was settled. An important piece of the coming battle was to be found in the title of the Bedford article and use of the term Agnotology.

A few definitions float around these papers but one I latched onto years ago that explains it well:

AGNOTOLOGY: ”The study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt”.

Bedford proposed using agnotology to help students uncover misinformation.

Legates obviously saw some dangers in this. He may even have feared that agnotology could be used to entrench agnotology. He held fire for 3 years until March 2013 when he replied with his:

”Learning and Teaching Climate Science: The Perils of Consensus Knowledge Using Agnotology” (see footnotes).

Whether he resented being told his views sat “outside the scientific community” or that they were not serious, his response was direct. He didn’t think much of Bedford’s ideas. Cook subsequently described Legates’ paper as “an aggressive critique of Bedford’s proposals”.

In his opening paragraphs, Legates described people under an agnotological spell as being in one of three states:

• Unwittingly ignorant of what is going on;

• Willingly ignorant and not wanting to know better;

• Those who are culturally induced into ignorance or doubt.

Mass media and government have been particularly active in this last area.

I urge you to read the two papers and form your own judgment. What we need to do is to move on to John Cook’s construction of the 97% consensus. This was contained in “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature” referred to above and in the footnotes.

This was a courageous article by Cook published in May 2013 which was followed in June by a Cook and Bedford work attempting to debunk Legates’ debunking of Bedford.
”Agnotology, Scientific Consensus and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change: A Response to Legates”.

Legates subsequently took on both of these works in his August 2013:
“Climate Consensus and “Misinformation”: A Rejoinder in Agnotology, Scientific Consensus and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change”.

The Origins of the 97%

Are you still with me? Now, where did that 97% come from? This abstract from the first Cook article will help us to understand.

So the authors scanned abstracts for two terms: “global climate change” and “global warming” which gave them 11,994 publications . I’d have thought the search criteria had a good chance of skewing the result right from the start.

Legates pointed to the under-representation of papers published himself and many of his colleagues that might reasonably have been included under a search that included apt terms such as “climate change”. He also pointed to the inclusion of other papers which were purported to support global warming but misrepresented the authors’ positions.

Further, we learn that 66.4% of 11,994 selected papers offered no position on global warming and so were rejected from the findings. This left 33.6% of papers and of these it is claimed 32.6% endorsed anthropogenic global warming (AGW). This gives us 97.02 but seems the official result has this rounded up to 97.1%.

Of these 3,896 (32.6 %) were marked as explicitly or implicitly as endorsing at least the unquantified definition that humans cause some warming. This is clearly not arguing humans cause most warming but some. And it is some distance from coming catastrophe. There has to be room for considerable doubt based on these shaky definitions.

The definitions on which this 32.6% is based are laid out on this page 3 table from Cook 2013 p3:

And how this 32.6% is broken up according to Legates:

These definitions are taken from (Cook 2013):
The unquantified definition: ‘‘The consensus position that humans are causing global warming’’ (p. 1);
The standard definition: As stated in their introduction, that ‘‘human activity is very likely causing most of the current warming (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW)’’ (p. 2), and
The catastrophist definition: That our enhancement of the greenhouse effect will be dangerous enough to be ‘catastrophic’ (i.e., ‘‘explicit rejection’’ of the consensus view ‘‘provides little support for the catastrophic view of the greenhouse effect’’ p. 3).

From Legates:
”Note that in the unquantified definition, it is asserted that humans cause global warming, whereas in the standard definition, the level of agreement is only ‘‘very likely.’’ Moreover, the catastrophist definition extends the warming to catastrophic consequences not encompassed in the unquantified or standard definitions; the catastrophist definition is also implicit in the Introduction of Bedford and Cook (2013", p. 1)”.

The killer for Cook’s position is found on pages 8 and 10 of Legates (August 2013) :
”The unquantified and catastrophist definitions do not specify what fraction of warming is considered anthropogenic” and further he states quite reasonably “Any head-count survey that is unclear about which definition is under test is scientifically valueless”.

A reformulation of Cook’s results based on Legates reassessment of his classifications may reasonably be presented this way:

The above table is attributed to David Lgates but I have been unable to confirm the source and have written to him for confirmation. This first appeared on the Council Watch Colchester Youtube Channel one month ago.⁸

Supporters of human caused greenhouse gas increases often start with this modest claim. Having taken this ground then make substantial leaps to where humans are the main cause of climate change and then hugely impressive vaults that have us causing certain catastrophe. That exaggeration is clearly evident in Cook’s work and appears to me to be agnotology in action.

Much of this is evident without too much of Legates’ assistance but he has a lot more to say about Cook and his team’s work. For a start, he sees an over-emphasis on teaching climate change in schools rather than climate.

As he explains, understanding climate requires knowledge of:

• Physical climatology (mass or energy exchanges at the earth’s surface);

• Dynamic and syoptic climatology (atmospheric motion and its concomitant thermodynamics);

• Regional climatology (why climate varies over space);

• Applied climatology (use of science to solve agricultural, transportation and design issues).

When and where do you find these broader issues being discussed?

He reminds us that correlation does not equate to causation. We have constantly been reminded of this during the Covid period as a startlingly obvious cause is pushed in the background to make space for one hundred unlikely excuses for vaccine injury and death.

Legates also points to:
“extensive empirical evidence from paleoclimatic and geologic perspectives [casts] doubt on whether atmospheric carbon dioxide has a predominant role as the driver of weather and climate”. ⁹ A recent report in the Washington Post makes a current contribution to this debate. ¹⁰

And he points to the limits of climate models designed to capture carbon dioxide fluctuations but which are unable to factor in oceanic and atmospheric influences.

Legates offers Popper (1934):
“that formalised the scientific method as an iterative algorithm by which scientists advance new tentative theories to address a general problem which is modified to the extent that these new hypotheses survive error elimination by other scientists. The most likely outcome, especially, in the physical sciences, is that error elimination will fail either to demonstrate or to disprove the hypothesis in which case it gains credibility and a consensus supports it but because it has not (yet) been demonstrated to be false”. ¹¹

Science is not a belief system

In short, science is NOT a belief system.

He then turns to challenge Cook’s favoured line of argument: consensus. This is described as a post-normal science where an extended peer community carries the argument and is not to be challenged. We saw something similar during Covid with experts dictating contradictory policy positions and to challenge them was considered the height of hubris and impertinence.

In emphasising this point Legates calls in Aristotle:
”the philosophy of science allows no role for headcount statistics. Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations, (circa 350 B.C.), codified the argument from consensus, later labeled by the medieval schoolmen as the argumentum ad populum or head-count fallacy, as one of the dozen commonest logical fallacies in human discourse”.

One last point before I move on to my main complaint against John Cook. He was recently referenced in the Federal Government’s “Strengthening Australian Democracy” report by Larry Diamond, Ngaire Woods and Social Impact girl, Jeni Whelan of the Strengthening Democracy Taskforce. ¹²

The report highlighted what John considers his brilliant invention: The Cranky Uncle. This is my main gripe. He thinks he is funny.

The Cranky Uncle aims to inoculate people, especially the young, against what fits John Cook’s notion of mis and disinformation. Yet, after reading David Legates’ work, I am having real doubts as to whether John knows what these terms mean.

In this 8minute 14 second clip, I have had a look at the key arguments being promoted by The Cranky Uncle and have attempted to summarise them in this video:

The material is this is taken from a video presentation to on Canadian Association for the Club of Rome Youtube page.¹³

Having spent much of the last four years in bewilderment, a few things have become clear. Firstly, we have to refine, sharpen and then trust our own judgment. To do anything else is simply dangerous.

It is like we are in one of those Solomon Asch Conformity line experiments where an easily proven falsehood becomes a test of our character. Do you know the test? This was where participants in the 1950s were asked to identify which line in the left box matched the line in the right one most closely.

This was carried out in groups of 8 to 10 where all bar one was an actor. The actors were asked to offer their opinion first and were told to choose the wrong match. This placed social pressure on the one uninitiate which often saw them fold to this pressure, follow the herd and distrust their own judgment.

We have been pressured to disobey our own sanity on key issues like Covid vaccination, climate change, transgender madness and even which wars we condemn. How did the left find itself so firmly on one side of the Ukraine struggle?

In legislating its “Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation” bill, the Australian Government is seeking to return to the tight media controls that were in place at the height of Covid and make them permanent.

I can’t help thinking that the role of many of these social behaviour experts is to put us to the Solomon Asch test at every moment of our lives until the social pressure breaks us. You will conform. This will be made easier if we are unaware of an alternative.

As Bruce Petty explained, the aim is to keep the children away from the grandparents. It interferes with their conditioning.

1. Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change
within Melbourne University

2. Agnotology as a Teaching Tool: Learning Climate Science by Studying Misinformation
by Daniel Bedford (2010)

3. Learning and Teaching Climate Science: The Perils of Consensus Knowledge Using Agnotology
by David R. Legates, Willie Soon, William M. Briggs (2013)

4. Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature
John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A Green, Mark Richardson, Barbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs and Andrew Skuce (2013)

5. Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change: A Response to Legates, Soon and Briggs
by Daniel Bedford & John Cook (2013)

6. Legates 2013 August - Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change
David R. Legates, Willie Soon, William M. Briggs & Christopher Monckton of Brenchley (August 2013)

7. Education increases skepticism in Republicans and reduces it in Democrats
Pew Research Center 24/01/2009

8. Council Watch Colchester

9. Reconstructing climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years
Soon, W., Baliunas, S., Idso, C., Idso, S., & Legates, D. R. (2003).

10. Media’s Climate Hoax Unravels: Study Reveals Earth’s Temps Coldest In 485 Million Years
by Anthony Watts Climate Change Dispatch

11. The Logic of Scientific Discovery
Popper, K. R London: Hutchinson & Co., (1934) p. 480

12. Strengthening Australian Demagoguery
A discussion of report Strengthening Australian Democracy

13. Understanding the Misleading Techniques Used in Misinformation about Climate Change - presentation by Dr John Cook to the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome