Yes, it’s his own response to explain the criticism. More impartially, I’ve checked out the Wikipedia article too on the consensus, which speaks of the Cook study, but really puts into perspective how weak the criticism is in the face of the absolute epic mass of agreement (again, also bearing in mind that Cook’s is not the only report of its type.
Given the overwhelming isolation of disagreement and the clear conflicts of interest from the fossil fuel industry in promoting the overly sponsored-by-fossil-fuel hacks that generally appear in opinion pieces in outlets looks Forbes and Fox, it really is a big stretch to go against the grain.
You can Google and see many other people came to the same conclusion as the Forbes article. You will also see other authors arguing about about how he miss cited their works.
With all due respect, I’ve hunted down rabbit holes and everything I’ve seen so far has been discredited. Taking Richard Tol as an example (since he’s the first on the Forbes article by the philosophy degree guy who gets paid by fossil fuel groups), Cook’s analysis of his criticism sounds completely valid and I haven’t managed to find anything by Tol which contradicts it https://skepticalscience.com/97-percent-consensus-robust.htm.
Googling to try and cherry pick these morsels of criticism from unqualified people just seems like really heavy duty lifting to try and reach the wrong wrong position. Shutting down the absolute masses of evidence which disagree with you in a refusal to align with scientific consensus in a technical field just seems intellectually futile… But here’s a challenge: given that Wikipedia is a community effort, pick the most valid sounding critic you can on the topic and edit the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change article to include it, and people much closer to the topic than I am will follow that chain if it’s missing, with others providing their retorts until eventually the truth is reached. Spoiler alert: there are so many vocal, but ultimately wrong climate sceptics, that this will be routinely attempted, and what’s left is the pages and pages of truth (Tol is indeed included and that chain has been followed).
I guess we could go around in circles, but you’ve got to the point of just telling me to do some Googling to disprove the very strong global scientific consensus, which sounds a little like the “do your research” trope you hear from the antivaxers. I simply haven’t seen a compelling reason to believe that the climate scientists are wrong, and the onus is on the relevant experts who disagree to chip away at that consensus if they feel it’s wrong. The fact they have been failing should draw reasonable people to conclude that climate change is real and is man-made.
