We human beings have an amazing ability to believe what is patently false. One of the more stubborn falsehoods is the idea that scientists don’t agree on climate change. It’s often argued that either the very fact of climate change is disputed by scientists and/or that scientists agree climate change is happening but are divided as to whether it is being caused by human action.
The way to tell what scientists believe is to look at peer-reviewed publications. Last year the journal Environmental Research Letters published an article titled “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature“. Not a sexy title by any means. But the results are clear. The authors searched the ISI Web of Science database for peer reviewed articles in which the abstracts used the words “global warming”or “global climate change”. The search yielded 11,944 papers written by 29,083 authors and published in 1980 journals. Of these, 66% simply didn’t address the question of whether humans were causing climate change. They simply talked about things like climate change trends, mitigation of climate change or adaptation to climate change. Of the 34% that did address the question of whether humans are causing climate change a whopping 97.1% argued it was caused by humans, 1.9% argued that it wasn’t, and 1% were undecided. By any measure that represents an overwhelming consensus that climate change is caused by humans.
So let’s have no more of the nonsense that there is a scientific debate to be had. There isn’t.
And amongst the 1.9% of papers that rejected the mainstream understanding, there was little agreement on an alternative. That is, there were about a dozen alternatives, none of which was persuasive even to other sceptics.
The moral question for Church leaders. Thanks to Fossil Fuels Deaths from Drought have dropped by 99.98% in the past 80 years. This is fantastic news Scott.
Indeed, what Gibson really did not want to discuss were the destructive, even lethal effects of Greenpeace policies and campaigns. Some 2.5 billion people still do not have electricity or get it only sporadically, and so must burn wood and dung for heating and cooking, which results in widespread lung diseases that kill two to four million people every year. No electricity also means no refrigeration, safe water or decent hospitals, which means virulent intestinal diseases kill another two million annually.
http://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2014/07/15/greenpeace-showcases-its-antihuman-side-n1862066
Hi Terry,
Agree that the decline in deaths and illness amongst the world’s poorest is wonderful news. I’m not suggesting that we need to stop using electricity or that the world’s poor should not have access to it. I have spent the last decade of my life advocating for increased assistance to developing countries to help them gain access to critical infrastructure. So I’m all for spreading electricity to poor communities. What I am suggesting is that as a global community we need to shift over to cleaner ways of producing electricity.
Scott, I suggest to you that not only is coal a cheap Energy to help those in poor nations but it is a clean green Energy.
1. New coal power stations today have scrubbers to capture SO2
2. CO2 is not pollution and does not cause Global Warming, in fact it is plant food. The burning of coal has been fantastic for Greening the Earth through CO2 Fertilization. (Hansen et al, Dr Idso, CSIRO).
3. Also Coal is a Renewable Energy.
4. More CO2 = More Trees, More CO2 = Food. Fantastic.