Scientific consensus on climate change | The Jackal

17 May 2013

Scientific consensus on climate change

Yesterday, the Guardian reported:

A survey of thousands of peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals has found 97.1% agreed that climate change is caused by human activity.

Authors of the survey, published on Thursday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, said the finding of near unanimity provided a powerful rebuttal to climate contrarians who insist the science of climate change remains unsettled.

The survey considered the work of some 29,000 scientists published in 11,994 academic papers. Of the 4,000-plus papers that took a position on the causes of climate change only 0.7% or 83 of those thousands of academic articles, disputed the scientific consensus that climate change is the result of human activity, with the view of the remaining 2.2% unclear.

Clearly the protestations that climate change isn't man made are entirely wrong!

The study blamed strenuous lobbying efforts by industry to undermine the science behind climate change for the gap in perception. The resulting confusion has blocked efforts to act on climate change.

It's not just lobbying, it's the huge amount of money polluting industries have available to spend on buying politicians and trying to mislead the public.

In 2004, Naomi Oreskes, an historian at the University of California, San Diego, surveyed published literature, releasing her results in the journal Science. She too came up with a similar finding that 97% of climate scientists agreed on the causes of climate change.

She wrote of the new survey in an email: "It is a nice, independent confirmation, using a somewhat different methodology than I used, that comes to the same result. It also refutes the claim, sometimes made by contrarians, that the consensus has broken down, much less 'shattered'."

We can therefore say with absolute certainty that the scientific consensus that climate change is man made has not changed and any claims to the contrary should simply be dismissed.