There is no debate over anthropogenic climate change
by David Atkins
A new study is out showing that less than 3% of academic papers on the subject contest the fact of anthropogenic climate change. In other words, there is 97% agreement on the issue. That’s what they used to call consensus.
A new study published online today in the journal Environmental Research Letters puts a figure on how real this (genuine) scientific consensus is. The takeaway figure? Ninety-seven percent of scientific papers that take a position on anthropogenic climate change say it exists, and of authors of those papers, 97 percent endorse the idea of human-caused warming. That suggests both a consensus, and an overwhelming one. (Yes, that’s right in line with smaller past surveys, but no, still not universal.)
As the paper’s nine authors, headed by University of Queensland physicist John Cook, conclude: “A systematic, comprehensive review of the literature provides quantitative evidence countering this assertion [that a consensus is collapsing]. The number of papers rejecting [anthropogenic global warming] is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time.”
But largely because of big money obfuscation and a pliant press that prefers to report he-said she-said controversy rather than established scientific consensus, a huge swath of the general public has been snowed by the deniers:
While the researchers used crowd-sourcing to help analyze the nearly 12,000 papers reviewed, the crowd itself is in no way so unified. As the paper notes, there is a “consensus gap” between science and the man on the street; a Pew poll from March reported that while 69 percent of Americans believe there is “solid evidence” the Earth is warming, only 42 percent accept this is mostly due to human activity. (Those are actually the highest figures in five years; as recently as 2006 the relevant numbers were 77 and 47 percent respectively.)
This difference between objective reality and public perception works out very well for the big money behind the fossil fuels industry.
However, the increasingly obvious connection between human activity and global warming is leading to a shift by the conservative denial crowd. First, they insisted that warming isn’t happening at all. While there are still a few holdouts on that front, most have given that one up. Now the lie is that warming is happening, but humans aren’t to blame for it. That lie is also unraveling. So many deniers are already moving to the “well, there’s nothing we can do about it” stage. That’s also not true. Doing something about it would just be economically inconvenient for the deniers and the people who write their checks.
One day the climate deniers will be as universally scorned as the Ku Klux Klan and the wealthy conservatives who defended the practice of child labor. But unfortunately, it’s worse than that. Future generations can slowly repair the damaging legacy of racism and economic exploitation. But if we don’t do something about climate, we may well reach a situation on the planet that future generations are unable to repair.
Most of the lead deniers know that they’re lying about an issue that could realistically lead to the destruction of over 90% of the world’s population (if not the entire human race) as well as most of the world’s living species, within just a few generations. And they’re doing it purely for momentary self-enrichment, at a time of record global inequality between rich and poor.
That makes them without exaggeration potentially the greatest villains in all of human history.
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