“So how did Cook and his team come up with the 97 percent number? They added up the first three categories (3,896 papers), compared them to the last three categories (78 papers) and the papers expressing uncertainty (40 papers), and completely ignored the nearly 8,000 papers that did not state a position.”
So a “paper” is a “scientist”? Among other things, that would seem to bias the results severely toward a select group who manage to get a lot of papers published.
In many cases the “warmies” dominated the editorial boards of climate publications and even set up their own journals. All of this guaranteed that papers would be published without serious review. The also set on each others students graduate committees so there would be a steady stream of those graduating spouting the party line. There was a congressional committee investigating a ways back (right after the GOP first took the House! - 1996 maybe?), where it was pointed out by several academicians that in many cases the publishing standards were a completely closed circle. For example something that was built almost entirely off statistical arguments often excluded independent statisticians from the review. They often excluded independent geoscientists too!