The meme that 97% of climate scientists believe global warming is, well, apparently whatever you want them to believe, is getting really annoying. John Kerry is so clueless about this issue it’s downright embarrassing. Does he really think we can do something that will measurably affect global temperatures without killing millions of poor people in the process? Really?

Or maybe that’s the ultimate goal?

As a published climate scientist myself, I would wager that 97% of climate scientists can’t agree on anything.

Except maybe it’s warmer now than 100 years ago (so what? I’ll agree to that).

Or, that humans are at least partly responsible for some of that warming (so what? I’ll agree to that, too).

But I think a more significant statistic — one that doesn’t rely on opinions, but on facts — is that 100% of climate scientists don’t know how much of the warming in the last 50-100 years is natural versus human-caused.

They dance around this issue with weasel words and qualitative language. Because they don’t know. They can say “most” warming is human caused…but how do they know that? They don’t.

You see, we have no idea how much natural climate variations figure into the climate change equation.

For example, this proxy reconstruction of past temperatures suggests climate change is the rule, not the exception:

And this is the stumbling block that will be in everyone’s way until we understand and quantify the causes of natural climate change.

A majority of climate scientists (60%, 80%, or even 97%) might “believe” this or that, but until they figure out just how much of climate change is naturally-induced, we will never know how much is due to humans. All that statistic measures is how inbred the climate research community has become.

And since there is no fingerprint of human- versus natural-caused warming, we might never know the answer to this central question. We might have to just sit back and watch where global temperature go from now on.

And if the climate models are ever going to be proved correct, dramatic warming is going to have to get started pretty darn soon.