Why claiming climate scientists are in it for the money is absurd.

If you are reading the comments on basically any climate change related article, it won't take long to get to one (or more!) commenters boldly claiming that "climate scientists are only in it for the money". 

This will often be accompanied by outrageously high $ amounts to really get anybody's hackles up but without any real evidence for their statement.

This article is intended to be a repository listing resources you can use to counter this unsubstantiated claim whenever it crops up somewhere. Some are blog posts, some are videos while others come from social media postings.

Read the Skeptical Science story - “Why claiming climate scientists are in it for the money is absurd.”

Looking back at the Fall meeting of the AGU

This year's Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) has come and gone and quite a lot happened during the week from December 12 to 16.

As mentioned in our earlier post, several Skeptical Science team members were actively involved with giving talks and/or presenting posters while others were there to take it all in, as was the case for at least one from Skeptical Science, who was at the AGU gathering for the first time.

Read the recap here by members of the Skeptical Science team of the Fall meeting of the AGU.

John Cook discusses the 'consensus on consensus'

John Cook - a friend of
Beneath the Wisteria.

Climate activists frequently bump into people who don’t know about climate change, consider it a scientific matter of no import to them, or retreat to refuting it as a myth and something about which the only consensus is among those advocating its existence.

A Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, John Cook, who is also a critical part of the “Skeptical Science” website, has thought deeply about this matter for many years.

On the website he says: “Expert consensus is a powerful thing. People know we don’t have the time or capacity to learn about everything, and so we frequently defer to the conclusions of experts.

“It’s why we visit doctors when we’re ill. The same is true of climate change: most people defer to the expert consensus of climate scientists. Crucially, as we note in our paper:

Public perception of the scientific consensus has been found to be a gateway belief, affecting other climate beliefs and attitudes including policy support.

“That’s why those who oppose taking action to curb climate change have engaged in a misinformation campaign to deny the existence of the expert consensus. They’ve been largely successful, as the public badly underestimate the expert consensus, in what we call the ‘consensus gap.’ Only 16% of Americans realize that the consensus is above 90%,” he says.

Check out what, John Cook has to say on his website, Skeptical Science - “Consensus on Consensus.”

The scientist agee, so why doesn't everyone else?

The Washington Post asks: “Scientists agree on climate change. So why doesn’t everyone else?”

The story says: “Here’s a finding that shouldn’t be all that surprising: Since 1991, roughly 97 percent of all published scientific papers that take a position on the question agree that humans are warming the planet.”

That statistic comes from and extensive new survey by John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli, who run the Australian Skeptical Science website.

Cook and Nuccitelli’s findings build on earlier studies that found the exact same thing.