After being harangued by conservatives and mathematicians, liberal news outlets — the Washington Post, Time, Slate, The Daily Beast, a few others — began admitting that the claim that women earn 77 cents on the dollar is a lie. Let the haranguing resume: There is no basis in fact for saying that 97 percent of scientists believe that climate change is real, man-made, and dangerous.

Those were the words tweeted by President Obama: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: Climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” “Read more,” he added, with a link to a Reuters piece that announced the 97 percent finding by the University of Queensland’s John Cook, et al. But Cook’s result is deeply flawed.

For starters, though, Reuters and the president are wrong about what Cook’s study claims. It does not claim that 97 percent of scientists believe that climate change is real, man-made, and dangerous. What it claims is that 97.1 percent of the relevant scientific literature agrees with the much more conservative claim that humans are contributing to global warming in an unspecified amount.

Read the article “A Consensus on Climate Change? A Closer Look at The 97% Claim” on nationalreview.com.