[Cincinatus]

As for why deniers should start believing, Branson keeps his argument simple: "If 97 percent of climate scientists agreeing that climate-warming trends over the past century are due to human activities isn’t compelling data, I don’t know what is."

Before Copernicus, 97 percent of "learned scholars" believed that the Earth revolved around the Sun. I guess that was compelling then too.

[Cincinatus]

Oops! Vice-verse, of course:

Before Copernicus, 97 percent of "learned scholars" believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth. I guess that was compelling then too.

See how easy it is to screw this up?

[a fool in paradise]

As for why deniers should start believing, Branson keeps his argument simple: "If 97 percent of climate scientists agreeing that climate-warming trends over the past century are due to human activities isn’t compelling data, I don’t know what is."

What percent of Soviets believed in Communism? Or at least those who went on record?

There has been a blacklist of thought. Challenges from within the scientific community where silenced. This was in the leaked memos.

[GreenAccord]

"If 97 percent of climate scientists agreeing that climate-warming trends over the past century are due to human activities isn’t compelling data, I don’t know what is."

Oh, the 97% figure again. Just so we're all on the same page, that 97% figure was determined by a pollster who asked 10,000 scientists the question, got 3,000 responses, then included only 77 respondents in the population. The 75 out of 77 who agreed became the 97%.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/17/that-scientific-global-warming-consensus-not/

So where did that famous “consensus” claim that “98% of all scientists believe in global warming” come from? It originated from an endlessly reported 2009 American Geophysical Union (AGU) survey consisting of an intentionally brief two-minute, two question online survey sent to 10,257 earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Of the about 3.000 who responded, 82% answered “yes” to the second question, which like the first, most people I know would also have agreed with.

Then of those, only a small subset, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals, were considered in their survey statistic. That “98% all scientists” referred to a laughably puny number of 75 of those 77 who answered “yes”.

[Mama Shawna]

And those 97% would be right, the earth DOES revolve around the sun. ;)

[Kozy]

Don’t forgot those flat earthers either.

[Go_Raiders]

The most telling part of his statement is that he flat out states that a poll of scholars is compelling data.

Why isn’t the climate data itself compelling, Mr. Branson?