Saturday, August 2, 2014

13,926 out of 13,950 Peer Reviewed Articles Support Climate Change


There is a great article at Slate by Phil Plait called:

The Very, Very Thin Wedge of Denial

that quantifies global climate change peer-reviewed literature.  Below are a couple of paragraphs the references a National Science Board member's analysis:

"In 2012, National Science Board member James Lawrence Powell investigated peer-reviewed literature published about climate change and found that out of 13,950 articles, 13,926 supported the reality of global warming. Despite a lot of sound and fury from the denial machine, deniers have not really been able to come up with a coherent argument against a consensus. The same is true for a somewhat different study that showed a 97 percent consensus among climate scientists supporting both the reality of global warming and the fact that human emissions are behind it.
Powell recently finished another such investigation, this time looking at peer-reviewed articles published between November 2012 and December 2013. Out of 2,258 articles (with 9,136 authors), how many do you think explicitly rejected human-driven global warming? Go on, guess!"

The article by Phil Plait ends with a wake up message for all of us, but especially the Republican anti-science crowd and the talking heads on Fox News:

"The basic science of global warming is independent of party line. It doesn’t care if you’re left, right, black, white, straight, gay, pro-gun, pro-abortion rights, pro-GMO, or pro-vaccine. It’s real, and it affects all of us. Mission No. 1 is to get people to understand this, and then to get them to elect politicians who do as well."