Andrew Montford reviews the Cook et al. survey, which claims a 97% consensus on climate change, and concludes that it is so broad as to be virtually meaningless.
Cook et al. set out to demonstrate the existence of an overwhelming consensus on global warming. While their approach appears to owe more to public relations than the scientific method, there is little doubt that there is a scientific consensus, albeit not the one that the authors of the paper have led people to believe exists. The consensus as described by Cook et al. is virtually meaningless and tells us nothing about the current state of scientific opinion beyond the trivial observation that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet to some unspecified extent.
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