Balance is not bias — Fox News critics mislead public on climate change
Marlo Lewis: Balance is not bias ■ The Cook study does not really prove what it claims to prove. The authors examined 11,944 abstracts of climate papers published between 1991-2011. They found that nearly two-thirds of the abstracts expressed no opinion on the supposed “consensus” position. So their headline – 97% of scientists agree – is inaccurate and misleading. IN 1984-speak, they are claiming Silence is Affirmation. Is the 97% figure made up out of whole cloth? Not quite. It turns out that 97% of about one-third of the abstracts affirms or implies that humans are responsible for some portion of global warming since 1951. And guess what? Just about every prominent skeptic agrees with that as well. As an attempt to discredit contrarians, the Cook study is a bust. The key science question for climate researchers today is not whether greenhouse gas emissions warm the planet but whether state-of-the-art computer models are accurate enough to forecast climate change and inform policy decisions.