Cook’s critique on Sanders

Remember one of previous posts about a video explaining the Cook 2016 paper, in which Bernie Sanders extended the consensus position well beyond what was found in the paper? In the meanwhile, I came to know that Cook apparently criticized Sanders because of such overreaching statement(s). That immediately drew my attention. I wondered in what form this “criticizing” was done, so I found myself searching for that critique.

It wasn’t that simple though, but after a long search, I found that Sanders’ statement was criticized in a podcast from the evidencesquared site, more specifically “episode 2”.

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Claim: 97% consensus found for “many decades”

One has to be on one’s guard when John Cook is presenting the result of his findings. Previous post was about Cook illustrating his research with exaggerated claims from three politicians. This post will be about his first sentence in that video, just after the statements of the politicians:

For many decades, study after study have found that 97% of publishing climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming.

That specific claim drew my attention. It seems to suggest that many studies found that 97% result over a long time frame. From what I learned about the consensus papers, that didn’t agree very well with reality.

Let’s take it part by part and see where we get.

Three politicians and a comedian introducing the consensus

Recently, I came across The Consensus Handbook by Cook, van der Linden, Maibach and Lewandowsky. It was already the first text that I encountered (the take-away message on the introduction on page 3) that caught my attention (my emphasis):

Based on the evidence, 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening. This scientific consensus has been a hot topic in recent years. It’s been referenced by presidents, prime ministers, senators, congressmen, and in numerous television shows and newspaper articles.

That last sentence reminded me of a video in which lead author John Cook explained his 2016 paper (Consensus on Consensus). It was the introduction in the video that puzzled me until now:

A simple model: seasonal storage in perspective

In previous posts, I threw around a bunch of numbers and sometimes mentioned that these are insanely high, but never gave an idea how high. I now will try to put them in perspective in this post. I found a sweet spot where solar and wind both could deliver enough power to meet demand. This happened at 8.57 times the current capacity of solar and wind, supported by seasonal storage of 2,421 GWh. I called that an insane amount of storage. How would this compare to actual demand over the year?