Finally some commonsense on this ridiculous topic.

I think the author is splitting hairs!
What does it matter if what 98% of any polled group believe or not!
Always providing it is not accompanied by burning smell emanating from previously unused cerebral circuits!
We need look no further than Alaska for plain as the nose on your face evidence, that runaway climate change must be addressed! No ifs buts or maybes!
And not to the detriment of any economy or quality of life, but just the very opposite!
We can change over to much cheaper onsite Thorium industrial power, and reap huge economic benefits, [less than half what we pay now,] and dare I say, vastly cleaner atmospheres!
Solar thermal arrays can now be rolled out for comparable cost to coal fired power; provide ultra reliable 24/7 power; and on desert land, not useful for much else!
Even if only to power the desert crisscrossing rapid rail, that we now need to speed our export goods to Asia!
Moreover, their fuel source remains forever free, unlike exponentially expanding fossil fuels fees!
We can change over to mass produced onsite boigas, then use it scrubbed, to power all our domestic needs, [plus provide forever free, hot water,] and for a tiny fraction of the cost, now ripped off of us by price gouging, carpet bagging foreigners; a few of who, for all we know, may even have "commissioned" this patently obfuscating, obdurately obtuse article!?
Were we but led by pragmatists, we would now today, be rolling out gas fired, ceramic cell driven electric vehicles, with virtually unlimited range, and an ability to be refueled, with CNG/methane, for a fraction of the current costs; and in the time it takes to take a comfort break!
In every seeming disadvantage there are always the seeds of an inherent advantage.
If management teaches but one thing; it teaches there's always a better way!
Given our quite massive resources and natural advantage, huge economic advantage to us, if were were but pragmatically led!
What's the problem with massively cheaper energy, and a subsequently turbocharged economy, put into virtually permanent overdrive! Well?
Rhrosty.

Rhrosty - you should develop the habit of making comments that are relevant to the actual article you're posting on.

As for your comments this bit..

"Solar thermal arrays can now be rolled out for comparable cost to coal fired power; provide ultra reliable 24/7 power; and on desert land, not useful for much else!"

Where did you get that idea? They unveiled one in Aus somewhere recently, I think, but its rated capacity is just 12 megawatts (test plant), it was very expensive and was emphatically not "ultra reliable".. the one in Spain everyone refers to is NOT a 24/7 generator although very occasionally it reaches 24 hour operation. It is not cheap, and its output is very small..

One aspect of climate lying which confuses the issue arises from the definition of climate change originated by the IPCC whereby climate change is defined as change caused by human activity. Thus, someone expressing belief in climate change, as understood in common English usage, can be taken as believing in human caused climate change. This is a common tactic of the UN, as when they discovered a plague of AIDS in Africa, by mandating the symptoms of malnutrition to be symptoms of AIDS.
This article is a good reminder that the climate change fraud is based completely on dishonesty. There is no science to show any measurable effect of human emissions on climate

AIDS denial too Leo Lane? You could rack up the whole collection.

As to the article, well it is doing a whole bunch of hair splitting. In some ways Doran et al. for all its flaws probably addressed the issue of opinions set out in the title best, by asking people directly about their opinions.

What Doran et al. also identified was that researchers who were more expert in the area were more likely to agree to the proposition that human activity was a significant factor in global temperature increases.

Anderegg et al. worked from a different strategy and started with the public statements of scientists and then worked out how expert they were in climate science by looking at their publication histories. From this they developed the number that 97% of actively publishing climate scientists supported the position of the IPCC.

Cook et al. took a third approach and probably the most difficult one. Cook et al. attempted to identify the position scientists held by what was written in the abstracts of papers. This will be fraught with difficulty as many abstracts will be a bit neither here nor there on the overall issue as the work would be looking at a small area of the whole. When they asked the scientists to rate the papers, they got many fewer no-opinion papers, because the scientists had access to the whole paper rather then the review. This second component indicates that the 'no-opinion' papers were not sorting differently in relation to for or against the position that humans were responsible for global warming compared with those that offered an opinion in the abstract.

So Cook et al. demonstrates that a minuscule component of the scientific literature supports the claims of climate change denialists.

Of course climate change researchers/conmen believe. Well they certainly believe in holding their hand out for their share of the spoils of the gravy train.