To deal with the minor inaccuracies first… its John, not Peter Cook, and he is Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland.* His day job is a web and database programmer and running the excellent Skeptical Science website.
This is demonstrably the case. I posted links to similar surveys and reviews before and after Cook et al and the reference on the NASA page links Cook et al amongst several other surveys showing the same thing.
I agree, however the consensus is strong because the evidence is strong.
You're constructing a Straw Man, the post you linked to ….'Skeptical Science Study Finds 97% Consensus on Human-Caused Global Warming in the Peer-Reviewed Literature
Says this "A new survey*of over 12,000 peer-reviewed*climate*science papers by our citizen science team at Skeptical Science has found a 97% consensus among papers taking a position on the cause of global warming in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are responsible."
Nothing about the 'primary driver'. The point of the research was an attempt to quantify the level of agreement that AGW is a reality. Try reading the abstract.
That is such a breathtakingly bad analogy I'm tempted not to even bother, a marginally better one would be to survey a range of doctors on cardio vasuclar issues and drawing a conclusion from only those that explicitly mentioned a link between smoking and lung cancer. AGW is just a 'given' to most climate scientists. Read the other surveys.
As one of the SkS team pointed out
Excuse me? The abstract mentions global warming as a problem and reducing energy usage and emissions as part of the solution.
And, as WTFH points out, looks like you may have confused the 'endorsement level' and 'category' columns.
Are you 'Gumbo'?
"Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals1 show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities."
The idea of science being settled by consensus is absurd, but that's not the point.*
While skepticalscience.com (and everyone parroting their sophistry) ostensibly aims to convince that human beings are the primary driver of global warming ("Global warming is happening - and we are the cause."), their methodology in no way aims to actually make this point.*
Says this "A new survey*of over 12,000 peer-reviewed*climate*science papers by our citizen science team at Skeptical Science has found a 97% consensus among papers taking a position on the cause of global warming in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are responsible."
Nothing about the 'primary driver'. The point of the research was an attempt to quantify the level of agreement that AGW is a reality. Try reading the abstract.
That is equivalent to performing a survey on whether motorcycles are cool or not where your sample of 400 people consists of 100 in an ice-cream parlour, another 100 at a horse race, and then 200 at a motorcycle shop - and then dismissing 2 thirds of those at the horse race and ice-cream parlour because they didn't care enough to comment, and then concluding that 85% of the population think that motorcycles are cool.*
As one of the SkS team pointed out
We didn't expect scientists to go into nitty gritty detail about settled science in the valuable real estate of the abstract (the short summary at the start of the paper). However, we did expect to see it more often in the full paper, and that's exactly what we observed. When scientists were asked to rate the level of endorsement of their own papers, in the 237 papers that actually specified the proportion of human-caused global warming, over 96% agreed that humans have caused more than half of the recent global warming.
"Rising energy prices, global warming, and more stringent environmental regulations have resulted in an interest in warm mix asphalt (WMA) technologies as a means to decrease the energy consumption and emissions associated with conventional hot mix asphalt production"
"Clearly this in no way implies that the paper endorses the idea of any man-made warming at all"
And, as WTFH points out, looks like you may have confused the 'endorsement level' and 'category' columns.
Are you 'Gumbo'?
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