About That Claim 97% of Climatologists Believe in Man-Made Global Warming

Many news media outlets, 'Warmists" and others have cited the 97% consensus number as conclusive proof the science of anthropogenic global warming is settled. Where did this number come from? I thought you would never ask. It came from a non peer reviewed paper about the results of an online survey of 10,257 Earth scientists. A self-selected group of 3146 individuals participated. Out of that group, the paper's author identified 79 individuals as climate scientists based on the claims they made while taking the 2 minute survey. They were asked two questions.

 1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in mean global temperatures?

  According to the paper,

Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2.

Voila!  97% of climate scientists think man-made CO2 is causing global warming climate change.

You can believe these results because we all know how scientific self-selected online polls are. Here is one showing Ron Paul beating President Obama.