This article originally appeared on heartland.org.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry sunk to climate McCarthyism last week, calling scientists at NASA, NOAA, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Columbia, and other prestigious research institutions �??shoddy scientists�?� and members of �??the Flat Earth Society�?� because they don�??t agree with Kerry and President Barack Obama on global warming issues.

Fortunately for science, and unfortunately for Kerry, the Scientific Method encourages rather than blackballs critical inquiry and scientific debate. If that were not the case, people would indeed still believe the Earth is flat. Even so, more than 31,000 scientists have signed a summary of the science explaining why humans are not creating a global warming crisis. A survey of more than 1,800 atmospheric scientists in the American Meteorological Society shows less than half believe humans are the primary cause of recent warming. Comprehensive scientific summaries presented by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change reveal thousands of peer-reviewed studies contradict the alarmist global warming narrative. And scientific organizations such as the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences dispute the notion that humans are causing a global warming crisis, while others such as the American Physical Society point out that scientists are sharply split on the issue.

This leads us to the Biggest Lie of alarmist global warming myths: the assertion that 97 percent of scientists agree humans are causing a global warming crisis. The closest thing to actual evidence supporting such a claim is a couple of �??surveys�?� conducted by global warming alarmists asking a cherry-picked group of their peers whether (1) the Earth has warmed during the past 100 years, since the Little Ice Age ended and (2) whether humans have played a role in the warming. The two questions are meaningless in the global warming debate, as neither of these questions addresses the issues dividing alarmists and skeptics. This is like citing a survey in which 97 percent of doctors agree people should seek professional medical attention for serious ailments, and then making a misleading and unsubstantiated jump in logic to assert that 97 percent of doctors support Obamacare.

But climate McCarthyism isn�??t about analyzing scientific evidence and comparing scientific theories. It is about telling scientific falsehoods and then having political kingpins preemptively denounce and insult honorable scientists at the world�??s most prestigious research institutions by calling them �??shoddy scientists�?� and members �??of the Flat Earth Society�?� simply because the scientists disagree with the politicians.