Beware the Phony Climate Talking Point of a Scientific "Consensus"
NeverTrumpers use statistical gamesmanship in sly effort to block deregulation drive
Media reports attacking President Donald Trump's efforts to deregulate the energy sector continuously seize on the false idea of a scientific consensus on climate change. In fact, no such consensus exists.
According to public policy analysts who cite updated research and statistical evidence, leftists have trotted out this rhetorical device for years, but it long ago ceased to hold any meaning.
After Trump's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced "31 Historic Actions" designed to unleash American energy, left-leaning outlets were quick to cite sources claiming that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence in favor of theories linking human carbon dioxide emissions with catastrophic global warming. Some examples include recent pieces in the Associated Press, CBS News, The Guardian , and Politico, all loaded with content aimed at discrediting Trump's regulatory relief efforts.
In a statement to Restoration News, Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), said he views the word "consensus" as a "rhetorical tool" designed to "quash any and all discussion on the human role in causing climate change." In Cohen's view the human role is typically overstated.
One way to muzzle dissent is to manipulate widely cited numbers. Kevin Dayaratna, a data scientist and the chief statistician with the Heritage Foundation, continues to dismantle the 97% figure climate activists frequently cite. The figure supposedly shows that the science is settled on the question of manmade global warming. But as Dayaratna explains, the 97% figure is a subset pulled from a larger sample of academic papers where most scientists did not express a firm opinion on what causes climate change.
Yet, the media spin persists.
"The overwhelming consensus among researchers," Politico asserted in response to Trump's actions, "is that the scientific evidence that greenhouse gases drive climate change and threaten human welfare has only grown stronger in the past decade and a half."
(READ MORE: Big Spending Republicans Out of Step with Trump on Repealing Energy Subsidies)
Overturning the Endangerment Finding
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin's intention to reconsider the 2009 Endangerment Finding that identified CO2 as a pollutant has caused environmental activists and their allies in the press particular heartburn. The finding came about in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v EPA where the high court determined that the agency had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act (CAA). The ruling enabled the Obama and Biden administrations to double down on their climate agenda with the Endangerment Finding serving as the foundation for their regulations.
"There's plenty of compelling evidence that CO2 is not a pollutant," Dayaratna told Restoration News. "It is a naturally occurring gas and it is a fundamental component of photosynthesis. We breathe out CO2 all the time. Revoking the Endangerment Finding is the right thing to do. Our research at The Heritage Foundation shows that carbon capture and carbon reduction policies come with significant economic costs without any environmental impact whatsoever. Our last estimates show these carbon reduction proposals result in a $7 trillion loss in GDP over about an 18-year time horizon."
Dayaratna went into additional detail about the problems with anti-carbon policies during his testimony before the House Committee on Natural Resources last week. The Heritage Foundation statistician told members of Congress that the ability of humanity to flourish comes about largely as a result of how much access populations have to affordable and reliable energy.
Everything from turning on a light to obtaining clean water to operating life-saving medical equipment relies on energy. Sacrificing affordable & reliable energy for so-called green energy forces your society into living with greater poverty & a lower quality of life.@kdd0211 pic.twitter.com/DIefhrXG92
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) April 5, 2025
Dayaratna describes himself as a "lukewarmist"—meaning he sees mostly natural influences at work where warming trends are concerned, but also finds that there are likely some human contributions in the mix.
"There is no consensus that climate change is catastrophic and that the human contribution to climate change is anywhere close to 100%," Dayaratna said. "The bottom line is that yes the climate is changing, and the climate is always changing, but the level of human contribution is grossly exaggerated. Climate models that forecast temperatures tend to be more accurate when assumptions about the human contributions are placed more in the lower range."
From a policymaking perspective, the concept of a consensus is nonsensical, Cohen argues, since it leaves no room for any meaningful debate. He also warns against allowing coercive elements in the climate movement working to impose draconian lifestyle changes on an unwilling public. Here's how Cohen describes the situation:
If a scientific consensus exists, we can move on from a superfluous debate to the important business of imposing regulations, awarding subsidies to government-favored technologies and products, and lavishing taxpayer handouts on political allies who can be relied on to keep the climate scare alive. Science is not now, nor was it ever, based on consensus. What we think we know today will be overtaken by what we learn tomorrow. To compel people to do things they otherwise would not do, often requires a villain. In this case, the villain was determined to be carbon dioxide, a substance absolutely essential to all life on earth. Climate activists have never been able to show how a modest warming of the planet that began around 250 years ago could have been caused by a rise in atmospheric CO2 levels that got underway in the middle of the 20th century. What’s more the rise in CO2 levels has been highly beneficial, boosting agricultural productivity need to feed the world’s 8 billion people. The designated bad guy turns out to be a good guy. This is not to say there isn’t an emerging consensus. There is, but it’s not the one climate activists invented. The real consensus is the growing realization that the forced transition to green energy is doing enormous harm to people the world over who can least afford it. Hence the exodus from the green Utopia.
About that 97%
In his takedown of the 97% figure, Dayaratna, along with several Heritage colleagues, exposed the statistical gamesmanship at work. The figure stems from a 2013 Cook et al. study in Environmental Research Letters that examines the abstracts of about 12,000 academic papers on climate change between 1991–2011.
Of those papers, 66.4 percent expressed no opinion on anthropogenic warming, a clear indication that there no consensus ever emerged. There were 32.6 percent that “endorsed” anthropogenic warming, while 0.7 percent rejected anthropogenic warming, and 0.3 percent were unsure of the cause.
Here's where the statistical games come into play.
Out of the full 33.6 percent expressing an opinion on man-made global warming one way or another, “97.1 percent endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” That's a subset of a subset.
Dayaratna also makes the critical observation that Cook et al. do not attempt to quantify how much global warming is man-made, or even say that man-made emissions contribute to the majority of global warming.
"The 97% statistic is nothing more than a false talking point," Dayaratna said, adding, "No overwhelming consensus exists among climatologists on the magnitude of future warming or on the urgency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
Trump Has a Mandate—And Morality—On His Side
Dayaratna also suggests that Trump has the moral ground in working to unleash American energy while unwinding costly regulations.
"There is no doubt that life expectancies are higher in countries that consume more energy," he said. "There is also no doubt that there's lower rates of child mortality, there's lower rates of maternal mortality, there's lower deaths due to dirty air, there's lower deaths due to dirty water. This has been shown in our research at the Heritage Foundation. And the bottom line is that if we have more access to affordable, reliable energy, these things will continue to improve for everybody."
