"100% Democrat" scientist comes out publicly against Obama on climate change

[StrongBad]

43. More manipulation of statistics

In both cases, the self rated papers and the abstract ratings, papers were counted as endorsing that humans are causing global warming if they fell in the first three categories of the following seven that were used:

“Explicitly states that humans are the primary cause of global warming”
“Explicit endorsement without quantification”
“Implicit endorsement”
“No opinion or uncertain”
“Implicit rejection”
“Explicit rejection without quantification”
“Explicit rejection with quantification”

All these comparisons made to lower the scientific consensus percentage are meaningless. You can’t compare papers that state no position on global warming with those that do. It’s nonsensical as the papers that don’t state a position often are researching an entirely different question/subject in climatology. It's merely a trick used to keep the percentage of "skeptics" low.

Take for example a literature search on HIV to answer the question if HIV causes AIDS. When you do this you won’t only get papers that talk about this link, the majority will talk about something entirely different. For example how HIV is being tested as a possible carrier of genetic material in gene therapy (don’t worry, it doesn’t contain the RNA of HIV so it can’t cause AIDS). A very interesting topic and very promising for helping people with genetic disorders, but it doesn’t tell you if HIV causes AIDS. This simple analogy shows how asinine the reasoning is.