The author of a new Columbia University Press book on scientific revolutions used an online database to compile a mountain of global warming papers published in the last two years. He also tried a different approach than the earlier studies.
Rather than search for explicit acceptance of anthropomorphic global warming, Powell searched for explicit rejection. The results include work from nearly the entire population of working climate scientists — close to 70, scientists, often sharing their byline with three or four other authors.
They also include a dwindling opposition: Powell could find only four solitary authors who challenged the evidence for human-caused global warming. For me, as a historian of science, it really feels like overkill.
One starts to think, how many more times do we need to say this before we really get it and start to act on it? One reason for inaction of course is politics.
The view is especially prevalent among the current crop of Republican presidential candidates. Obviously, I have broken my own rule here, but only to make this vital point once and for all. The science is clear, the severity understood at the highest levels everywhere, and serious debates about what to do are turning into action. The deniers have nothing to contribute to this.
However infuriating they are, arguing with them or debunking their theories is likely only to generate publicity or money for them. It also helps to generate a fake air of controversy over climate action that provides cover for the vested interests seeking to delay the end of the fossil fuel age.
But the deniers are not all the same. They tend to fit into one of four different categories: the shill, the grifter, the egomaniac and the ideological fool. The shill is the easiest to understand. He, and it almost always is he, is paid by vested interests to emit clouds of confusion about the science or economics of climate action. This uncertainty creates a smokescreen behind which polluters can lobby against measures that cut their profits.
A sadder case is that of the grifters. They have found themselves earning a living by grinding out contrarian articles for rightwing media outlets. Do they actually believe the guff they write? The egomaniacs are also tragic figures. They are desperate for recognition, and, when it stubbornly refuses to arrive, they are drawn to make increasingly extreme pronouncements, in the hope of finally being proved a dogma-busting, 21st-century Galileo.
Creationists have the same problem overturning evolutionary theory. This they have not done. A study published in Environmental Research Letters by Australian researchers John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli and their colleagues examined 11, climate paper abstracts published between and Of those papers that stated a position on AGW, about 97 percent concluded that climate change is real and that it is caused by human activity.
What about the remaining 3 percent or so of studies? And what if they are right? The one thing they seem to have in common is methodological flaws like cherry picking, curve fitting, ignoring inconvenient data, and disregarding known physics. Such practices are deceptive and fail to further climate science when exposed by skeptical scrutiny, an integral element to the scientific process.
This article was originally published with the title "Consilience and Consensus" in Scientific American , 6, 81 December Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic magazine www. Already a subscriber? Sign in.
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