Are you one of the millions of young Americans genuinely worried about the fate of this planet because of climate change? Have you been stirred by fresh-faced idealist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her demands for the United States to stop producing carbon dioxide? Do you believe that if drastic measures are not taken, mankind will destroy Mother Earth? If so, this article is for you. Because even though climate change may seem like a gargantuan problem, we believe there is a real and surprisingly simple solution. Let’s start by taking a look at some common beliefs.

Belief #1:

Most scientists agree that humans are causing catastrophic global warming.

You have probably heard talking heads on the news mentioning a “97-percent consensus” among scientists that human activity causes global warming. Plenty of movie stars and politicians agree. Anyone who doesn’t believe is basically a Neanderthal who shops at Walmart. “The science is settled,” they say.

But did you ever wonder where they get the number 97? The answer may surprise you.

At least six studies supposedly document the 97-percent consensus. We’ll use the two most referenced as examples. The first was in 2009, when Peter Doran and Maggie Zimmerman from the University of Illinois at Chicago sent a survey about global warming to more than 10,000 earth scientists from many backgrounds — geology, geochemistry, etc. Doran and Zimmerman heard back from only 3,146 of them. Out of the respondents, 77 identified themselves specifically as “climate scientists.” Seventy-five of those agreed humans are causing catastrophic global warming. Ask Siri what 75 divided by 77 is, and she’ll tell you 97.4 percent. And that, my friends, is where our “97-percent consensus” was born.

Feeling cheated? You’re not alone. But wait — there’s more!

Dr. John Cook of Australia’s University of Queensland led another review of nearly 12,000 scientific papers on climate change written between 1991 and 2011. Since that’s a lot of papers to review, Dr. Cook asked for help. He used his outrageously biased blog, Skeptical Scientist, to recruit what he called “citizen science volunteers,” who inspected the papers for him even though they were politically motivated activists who were not required to provide proof of scientific credentials. Cook actually wrote before the research began, “It’s essential that the public understands that there’s a scientific consensus on AGW [anthropogenic (man-made) global warming],” proving that he wasn’t out to discover truth but to promote a skewed agenda. Not surprisingly, the volunteer analysis found a 97.1-percent consensus that humans have caused at least half Earth’s warming since 1950.

After Cook published those findings, real scientists stepped up. They examined the same 11,944 papers and found only 41 of them explicitly blaming humans. Quite a jump from 97.1 to 0.3 percent! Not even one paper subscribed to an idea of man-made global-warming catastrophe. The researchers, led by Dr. David Legates, wrote in Science and Education, “It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% consensus when … the true consensus was well below 1%.”

Similar stories of deceit can be told of the other so-called research arriving at a 97-percent consensus. But if that isn’t the magic number sorting believers from unbelievers, is there anything more realistic?

Delegates at the 2014 American Meteorological Society convention (weathermen and climatologists) voted on the question “Is global warming caused mostly by human activity?” Fifty-two percent agreed it was — barely more than half and a far cry from 97 percent. And even that vote likely suffered from bias, considering most of the voters work for organizations that receive climate-change funding from government and media. Regardless, there were only 1,821 votes cast — hardly a representative sample of all scientists in the world.

A better sample is online at www.petitionproject.org, hosted by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. More than 31,000 scientists and engineers have signed on to this petition to Congress:

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

Possibly the best point to remember about any scientific consensus was made by the late doctor, scientist, and best-selling author Michael Crichton: “Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is settled.”

Belief #2:

Earth is getting warmer at a dangerous rate that is accelerating out of control.

The tough thing about figuring out how warm Earth is getting is: Where do you stick the thermometer? The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) maintains a temperature record that goes back to 1880, the year Thomas Edison founded his electric company and five years before the world’s first skyscraper — a 10-story building in Chicago — was completed. Just as we have bigger and better skyscrapers now, and electricity even in the developing world, today we have better and more widespread methods of collecting temperature data. Orbiting satellites, technologically advanced ocean buoys, and highly sophisticated land-based monitoring stations weren’t around until our modern age. Monitoring in Asia and the Southern Hemisphere was virtually non-existent until recent years. And in 1880, you also would not have experienced the urban heat island effect (modern cities are always warmer than rural areas because the buildings and pavement radiate heat). But for the sake of argument, let’s just assume the NASA data is an apples-to-apples comparison of each of the past 140 years.

Photo credit: jcrosemann/Getty Images Plus

This article appears in the April 22, 2019, issue of The New American.