Advanced statistics with percent

The alarmists claim that there is a consensus among scientists. Therefore, they always have to agree with each other. Nobody is allowed to have any opinions that diverge from what is commonly believed. Therefore, you never find any interesting discussions or lively and informed arguments among the warmists. They all just adhere to the IPCC dogma. They believe that disagreement is a sign of weakness, or heresy, and need to be suppressed at any cost.
Not so among us climate realists. We know the value of a critical discourse. We know that by criticizing each other and scrutinizing each other’s arguments, we can eventually get closer to the truth (and not surprisingly, we often find it where we thought it was to begin with). If we are proven to be wrong, we are not afraid to admit it, because we have intellectual integrity.
Dennis Ambler from the Science and Public Policy Institute, one of the world's leading centres for blog science, has recently released a report with the witty title Climate "Consensus" Opiate, The 97% Solution which criticizes the infamous and fraudulent paper by Doran and Zimmerman, two infamous ad-hominem activists, which spuriously claimed to prove that there was a consensus about global warming. They did so by a survey sent out to 10,157 scientists and got 3,146 responses. Among those, they arbitrarily classified 77 as “climate science specialists” (e.g. faithful).

The second question in the survey was:

2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

The SPPI comments:

This is the classic closed question, in that it implies mean global temperatures are being changed and someone must be responsible.
The response to this question was 75 specialists out of 77, so here we have our massive 97%.
It is disingenuous to now use the “climate scientists” as a new population sample size. The response figure of 3,146 is the figure against which the 75 out of 77 should be compared and in this case we get not 97% but just 2.38%.
The original number contacted was 10,157 and of those, 69% decided they didn’t want any part of it, but they were the original target population. When the figure of 75 believers is set against that number, we get a mere 0.73% of the scientists they contacted who agreed with their loaded questions. However a headline of “0.73% of climate scientists think that humans are affecting the climate” doesn’t quite have the same ring as 97% does it?

Percentages is one of the most complex parts of statistics, and it is quite easy for a person without proper statistical training to make mistakes. I’m afraid that my friends from SPPI have made one. They should have consulted somebody with expertise in statistics, like myself of Edward Wegman, to check their calculations. This is the problem in their calculations. They say that 75 climate scientists answered yes, and they say that 10,157 scientists were asked. 75 out of 10,157 gives 0.73%. But the climate scientists are not the same as all scientists. We need to know what all the other proper scientists answered as well, before we can calculate what percentage of them answered yes. If we read a bit further in the SPPI report, we find the number 82% for all proper scientists. This would indicate that 2759.72 scientists answered yes. One of them was apparently only 0.72 sure.
Most alarmists are completely mathematically illiterate, so they will not notice this little and innocent blunder. Nor would they understand it if somebody would point it out to them. Nonetheless, they would gleefully revel in this minor mistake if it came to their attention, and they would use it in their propaganda to divert attention from their own grotesque errors and frauds. They may even try to claim that this innocent little mistake constitute fraud (yes, they certainly can sink so low). Therefore, we should always strive to keep the highest possible standards in our blog science, and we should consult the best experts in statistics.
Thanks to blog science, this minor problem was discovered and corrected in a month from the release of the report. Blog science has once more proven its superiority.

Ab amicis honesta petamus.