Dutch Member of Parliament Thierry Baudet has decided to take the conservative battle for reason and common sense international. The reason he has done so is, of course, that the internationalist globalists are also fighting a worldwide war. If you want to beat them, you’ve got to do the same. You can’t fight a provincial war while they’re fighting everywhere, in every single country.
Forum for Democracy International — the international arm of his domestic party Forum voor Democratie — is using video-sharing platforms to spread the conservative message from the Netherlands. The show is called The Movement and it’s presented by Baudet himself.
In the first episode, Baudet talked about what he calls “Oikophobia,” which means “for oneself,” or for that which is of oneself. It refers to the strange fact that so many, especially in Europe, fear everything their own country stands for. Their own history, their culture, their religion. Everything that’s imported is great, but everything that’s “one’s own” is suspect. Automatically.
In the second episode, Baudet talks about climate change, and it’s what I’d like to draw some attention to. Because in a short seven minutes, Baudet truly destroys the talking point repeated time and again by leftist goons: that 97% of scientists supposedly agree that a) the climate is heating up and b) that this is (largely) due to mankind.
The big lie
“How often do we hear,” Baudet says, “that 97% of scientists agree that humans are the cause of climate change; that this climate change is severe, posing a major threat to the planet; and that we need a drastic reduction in our carbon dioxide emissions.”
“All of this, and I do mean all of it, is false. It’s a blatant lie that 97% of scientists agree with it. In reality, only 1.6% agree with [those] statements,” he goes on, after which he explains that there are major disagreements on this among climatologists, geologists, chemists, physicians, and so on.
“This myth” about the 97% was famously propagated by former U.S. President Barack Obama. “On May 16, 2013, he posted, and I quote,” Baudet explains, “’97 percent of scientists agree, climate change is real, manmade and dangerous.’ With this tweet, Obama referred to a paper published the same year by a man named John Cook.”
And that’s where it goes wrong. Because Cook is a “controversial” climate activist who even runs a ridiculous alarmist website called scepticalscience.com. “In this paper, he aims to demonstrate an overwhelming scientific consensus with the obvious intention of strengthening the environmentalist cause. To do so he analyzed 12,000 articles published in learned journals containing the words ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change.’ He then subdivided these articles into seven different categories.”
Fun with categories
This is where it becomes interesting. The first category is focused on articles that proclaim that global warming is indeed happening and that at least 50% of it is caused by human activity. “The second category contains articles that simply stated that ‘man has a role,’ but did not in any way quantify that role.” Next, the third category contains articles that say that an increase in CO2 in general has a warming effect. “The fourth category were papers that did not mention the role of mankind at all or which maintained that it’s unclear that man has a role in climate change.”
Then there was the fifth category, of course. In that one, Cook placed papers that argued that mankind plays a minimal role in global warming. The sixth category contained papers arguing that mankind plays no role whatsoever in climate change. And then, lastly, there was the seventh category with articles that explicitly said that mankind’s role is 50% or less.
“Cook took the results from the first, second, and third category and brought them all together in one group, the pro group. This amounted to 33% of all papers. But the vast majority of all papers — 67% — belonged to category four: papers that did not comment” on mankind’s role. At all.
“To this group, Cook applied a statistical trick. Or rather, he left these papers out of the equation altogether.” He actually ended up using only 3% of those. By doing so, Baudet explains, the share of papers in categories one, two, and three increased (d’oh!)…from the original 33% to a whopping 97%.
There’s more where that came from
Obviously, this is pathetic. “But it gets worse,” Baudet continues. “In John Cook’s study, the separate percentages of the different categories are structurally omitted.” Originally, only 1.7% of the papers in the pro-group said that mankind caused 50% or more of global warming, 21% of mankind play some role, and 75% argued that an increase of CO2 in general has a warming effect. Cook erased those numbers, however, making it look as if most if not all of the papers in that pro group were originally category one papers (50% or more caused by mankind).
That’s right. In fact, only 1.6% of papers stated that mankind plays a significant role in global warming.
Cook made that 1.6% look like 97%, however, and he did so by using some handy statistical tricks. As they say: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Conclusion
As a result, Baudet concludes, you can only say that a majority of scientists believe that there has been “a slow, marginal warming trend since the 1850s. But the end result that 97% of scientists would agree that man is mainly responsible for this is utter nonsense.
“And this is completely logical too, because the climate has, as we all know, always changed,” Baudet rightly points out. “In the early Middle Ages, it was a lot colder than it is now. This period was followed by the era of Medieval warmth, in which vineyards were cultivated in Scotland, and lively settlements existed in places that are now buried by hundreds of meters of ice. A small Ice Age followed with its heydays in the 16th and 17th centuries when an elephant could walk on the Thames.”
“Since 1850, then, global temperatures have slowly started to rise again. Very gradually. The huge increase in global temperature of which activists have warned simply does not exist. There has been no increase in hurricanes, floods, or other forms of extreme weather.” And no, those polar bears aren’t going anywhere either.
So, Baudet ends this episode of The Movement, “there is no reason to panic. And fortunately, most scientists agree.”
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