Scientific Consensus on Climate Change


I was discussing global warming with a friend and he continued to insist that there was no scientific consensus. I went looking for evidence and found this essay in the December, 2004, issue of Science: Naomi Oreskes, "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," Science (3 December 2004), Vol. 306, no. 5702, p. 1686.

The author, Naomi Oreskes, is an historian of science at the University of California at San Diego. She did a keyword search of a database of published science articles, using the keywords "climate change". The search returned 928 papers and she categorized them based on their abstracts to learn whether they agreed or disagreed with the scientific consensus on global climate change expressed in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) studies. She reports that 75% either explicitly or implicitly accepted the consensus view, while 25% were neutral. She said that none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

She also reports that the IPCC is not alone in its conclusion about global warming. She says that all major scientific bodies in the U.S. have issued statements agreeing with the IPCC. She mentions in particular the National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

She concludes: "Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen."

If you look at her essay on the web, you will also find a link at the end to a letter that was written in response, and her response to that letter. In her response she says: "Pielke suggests that I claimed that there are no papers in the climate literature that disagree with the consensus. Not so. I simply presented the research result that a sample based on the keywords 'global climate change' did not reveal any, suggesting that the existing scientific dissent has been greatly exaggerated and confirming that the statements and reports of leading scientific organizations--including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences--accurately reflect the evidence presented in the scientific literature."

She concludes: "Proxy debates about scientific uncertainty are a distraction from the real issue, which is how best to respond to the range of likely outcomes of global warming and how to maximize our ability to learn about the world we live in so as to be able to respond efficaciously. Denying science advances neither of those goals."

Posted: Saturday - March 24, 2007 at 01:38 PM          

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