From Pete's article.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-determine-the-scientific-consensus-on-global-warming/
"And yet, the chain of events Cook mentioned, where people hear of the scientific consensus and call their lawmakers, has not happened. In fact, consensus messaging over the past decade has not convinced any more or any fewer Americans to believe in global warming.
Cook thinks the failure is partly because the consensus studies were not publicized enough. Another reason, he believes, is that American minds have been poisoned by climate contrarians like Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist under President George W. Bush, who advised skeptics to create an illusion of scientific discord and challenge established climate scientists. Such messaging has made people think the scientific consensus is much lower than it is in reality, Cook said. He calls this phenomenon the "consensus gap."
Ho hum!


And did you even read the article?
By
Gayathri Vaidyanathan,
ClimateWire on July 24, 2014
The point of contention is a peer-reviewed study published last year by Green, a chemistry professor at Michigan Technological University; John Cook, a research fellow at the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in Australia; and 10 other scientists who blog under the collective name of
Skeptical Science. The scientists examined 4,014 abstracts on climate change and found 97.2 percent of the papers
assumed humans play a role in global warming (
ClimateWire, May 16, 2013).
That statement quickly got boiled down in the popular media to a much simpler message: that 97 percent of scientists believe climate change is caused by humans. President Obama tweeted the 97 percent consensus. Comedian John Oliver did a
segment on it that went viral on the Internet.
Predictably, climate change skeptics challenged the study. The Skeptical Science group fended off their attacks. Then fame beckoned. The paper has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, making it among the most popular scientific studies of 2013.
Lately, the Skeptical Science researchers have been battling a rear guard attack from within the climate science community itself. Some social scientists, political scientists, climate change communicators—and Tol—question whether informing people of a scientific consensus serves any purpose.
To them, climate change is no longer a debate over science. The latest surveys show that 89 percent of Democrats, 79 percent of independents and 70 percent of Republicans already believe global warming is happening and is at least partly caused by human actions.
Rather, the climate debate is now ethical and political; it comes down to what Americans are willing to do today to address a problem that will largely affect their grandchildren. In this realm of moral choice, the 97 percent consensus can be polarizing, said Dan Kahan, a professor of psychology at Yale University.
He brandishes as proof a
video by the group Organizing for Action (OFA), which was once Obama's re-election campaign. The implicit message is that the people who disagree with 97 percent of scientists must be very stupid, Kahan said.
"We live in a world where the people who make the videos like the OFA one have attached a meaning to this argument—97 percent of scientists [believe in human-caused global warming]," he said. "It's a bumper sticker, ...."
A road paved with good intentions and footnotes
Cook thinks that politicians are not acting because the public is not pressuring them enough. If people realize that the majority of scientists agree on human-caused climate change, they
will absorb that knowledge like empty vessels and become more convinced of the threat, he said. They will then be more amenable to picking up their phones and calling their legislators.
"If the public think that climate scientists agree about what is causing global warming, then the public thinks we need to act on it," he said.
"If the public thinks scientists disagree, then we might as well wait until the scientists work it out before we do anything about it."
The idea is not new; several studies over the past 10 years have found a scientific consensus on climate change. Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, in 2004 found that 75 percent of published studies supported anthropogenic global warming. Since then, six other studies have been published with widespread media attention.
And yet, the chain of events Cook mentioned, where people hear of the scientific consensus and call their lawmakers, has not happened. In fact, consensus messaging over the past decade has not convinced any more or any fewer Americans to believe in global warming.
Once results were in, Cook put together a publicity strategy.
"There's no point in doing scientific research if you are not looking to publicize it," he said. "A part of what we were doing was closing that consensus gap, and the consensus gap is delaying climate action. We wanted it to have a tangible impact."
Tol dislikes, in principle, the idea of a consensus. After all, the point of science is to challenge accepted wisdom and refine it, a process that runs somewhat counter to the idea of a consensus.
"I'm a hopeless romantic for the Enlightenment: I'd rather convince people with arguments than with an appeal to authority or consensus," Tol said via email.
One of the problems with Cook's appeal to authority is this: So far, no one has quantified the consensus among natural scientists on global warming. In fact, it cannot be done easily, said Jon Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford University who has been studying communication strategies for decades.
"I expected the criticism from climate deniers because they've been attacking the consensus for 20 years," Cook said. "I'm a bit disappointed that scientists who accept the consensus and who are trying to work towards climate action are criticizing this method of communication
because the reason why we did it was based on a lot of social science research."
It's all science when you can get people to believe it.
Problem is, it's social science, not human induced climate change science.
Sheeple steering.