Comment Re:unfair policy (Score 2) 302
97% of research papers on climate change that stated a position on whether AGW is real, took an affirmative stance. But this ignores the many papers that were non-committal, and stated no opinion.
Why, exactly, would you consider the papers that don't talk about a topic when considering whether there is a consensus of support for that topic or not? If you were seeking to see if a dog would make a good pet, how many books about orangutans would you read? Also, the Cook paper also clearly states what percentage of the papers took a position on climate change (32.6%) in the abstract.
According to your logic, we can lower the support level for any topic by simply including more papers that don't take a position on the topic. It doesn't even have to be climate change. Why not gravity, the round-earth hypothesis, or religion. Hey, if we include enough irrelevant papers we can get the consensus level down to 0.0001% for anything.