by D. Craig, Sep 15, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

…

…

The main author of the paper who came up with the figure was John Cook, an Australian former web programmer and blogger who later gained a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Western Australia and founded what could be seen as a climate alarmist website.

He assembled a group of volunteers recruited via the website as part of a ‘citizen science’ project and tasked them with examining the abstracts of 11,944 climate papers from 1991-2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’.

Note that the volunteers didn’t speak to any scientists and didn’t read the scientific papers. They just looked at the abstracts – a summary paragraph or two.

The volunteers classified the abstracts into one of seven categories according to their opinions of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW):

1. Explicit endorsement of AGW with quantification
2. Explicit endorsement of AGW without quantification
3. Implicit endorsement of AGW
4. No position or Uncertain
5. Implicit rejection of AGW
6. Explicit rejection of AGW without quantification
7. Explicit rejection of AGW with quantification

The reviewers then ‘simplified’ results into four main categories as follows:

…