’97 per cent of climate scientists look shifty’

‘..The Cook paper is remarkable for its quality, though. Cook and colleagues studied 12,000 papers, but did not check whether their sample is representative for the scientific literature. It isn’t. Their conclusions are about the papers they happened to look at, rather than about the literature. Attempts to replicate their sample failed: a number of papers that should have been analysed were not, for no apparent reason.
The sample was padded with irrelevant papers. An article about TV coverage on global warming was taken as evidence for global warming. In fact, about three-quarters of the papers counted as endorsements had nothing to say about the subject matter…
……Cook’s hand-picked raters disagreed on what a paper was about 33 per cent of the time. In 63 per cent of cases, they disagreed about the message of a paper with the authors of that paper… Cook’s employer argued that releasing rater identities would violate a confidentiality agreement. That agreement does not exist… Time stamps reveal that … one of Cook’s raters inspected 675 abstracts within 72 hours, a superhuman ­effort…’
via Andrew Bolt