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97% of Climate Science Papers Agree Global Warming Is Man-made
An anonymous reader writes "A meta-study published yesterday looked at over 12,000 peer-reviewed papers on climate science that appeared in journals between 1991 and 2011. The papers were evaluated and categorized by how they implicitly or explicitly endorsed humans as a contributing cause of global warming. The meta-study found that an overwhelming 97.1% of the papers that took a stance endorsed human-cause global warming. They also asked the 1,200 of the scientists involved in the research to self-evaluate their own studies, with nearly identical results. In the interest of transparency, the meta-study results were published in an open access journal, and the researchers set up a website so that anybody can check their results. From the article: '... a memo from communications strategist Frank Luntz leaked in 2002 advised Republicans, "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate." This campaign has been successful. A 2012 poll from U.S. Pew Research Center found less than half of Americans thought scientists agreed humans were causing global warming. The media has assisted in this public misconception, with most climate stories "balanced" with a "skeptic" perspective. However, this results in making the 2–3% seem like 50%. In trying to achieve "balance," the media has actually created a very unbalanced perception of reality. As a result, people believe scientists are still split about what's causing global warming, and therefore there is not nearly enough public support or motivation to solve the problem.'"
Too bad the scientific method is no match for the stick-your-fingers-in-your-ears-and-yell-la-la-la-la-la method.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Without regard to whether or not anthropogenic climate change is real: Which papers get published are largely a function of who's on the editorial board of each publication. If those boards are stacked with people holding a particular position, they tend to publish only papers which agree with that position.
What you say is definitively true. But that is not the point of the article, the point is to verify that the vast majority of experts believes (base don their study) that global warming is man made. Yet everybody you talk to tends to say to "experts are still debating". Well, with these numbers they are not still debating, they are pretty much convinced.
Yet, they might be wrong. But policies have to be made based on experts opinion. And that opinion is not properly represented in the media.
Right, you can never validate a hypothesis in science. You can only fail to falsify it. In other words, no one can seem to come up with another good explanation for the warming we've observed, so we've failed to falsify the idea that it's due to carbon dioxide emissions, a hypothesis first proposed in 1896. That doesn't mean it's the truth, but I sure know which way I'd bet!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Secondly, they don't all believe in the same god.
Thirdly, they don't have any evidence of their god being real.
Indeed in all ways noted, the deniers (such as yourself) are more like the priests.
97% of deniers believe AGW is a fraud.
They don't believe in the same reason for that being true. And they have no evidence of their personal belief in their stated reason for it being a fraud.
In other news, only a minority of physics papers agree that conservation of energy is real. The rest don't even mention it.
I find your lack of understanding of the philosophy and method of science disturbing.
In science, one can very rarely, if ever, "prove it irrefutably". One makes hypotheses to explain observations. The hypotheses must make testable predictions. The longer an hypothesis stands against scrutiny, and the more its predictions are verified, and the more new evidence is discovered which fits into the hypothesis, the more accepted it is considered.
Also, you say "else the first scientist to come along with better proof than yours will knock the whole house of cards down". My ignorant friend, this is exactly what science is. Exactly. If this were not the case it would not be science. At some point an accepted hypothesis becomes Theory, which is to say that if some contradictory observation were to be verified, it would necessitate a world-view-changing paradigm shift. Think, for example, of the revolution from Newtonian physics to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics; an important thing to note is that the previous Theory was not even disproved - only its boundaries of accurate description of reality more rigorously defined.
That 97% of the body of published climate science finds in favour of the man-made global warming hypothesis, but none of the 3% against has yet managed to present verified disproof means it is only those ignorant of science that would disagree simply on the grounds of personal comfort.