Environment & Energy

sarin

(137 posts) Sun Nov 25, 2012, 05:09 PM Nov 2012

Why Climate Deniers Have no Credibility...in an easy to understand graphic

From a tweet by the RDFRS (Richard Dawkin Foundation)

Polls show that many members of the public believe that scientists substantially disagree about human-caused global warming. The gold standard of science is the peer-reviewed literature. If there is disagreement among scientists, based not on opinion but on hard evidence, it will be found in the peer-reviewed literature.

-snip-

This work follows that of Oreskes (Science, 2005) who searched for articles published between 1993 and 2003 with the keyword phrase “global climate change.” She found 928, read the abstracts of each and classified them. None rejected human-caused global warming. Using her criteria and time-span, I get the same result. Deniers attacked Oreskes and her findings, but they have held up.

Some articles on global warming may use other keywords, for example, “climate change” without the "global" prefix. But there is no reason to think that the proportion rejecting global warming would be any higher.

By my definition, 24 of the 13,950 articles, 0.17% or 1 in 581, clearly reject global warming or endorse a cause other than CO2 emissions for observed warming.

http://richarddawkins.net/news_articles/2012/11/25/-why-climate-deniers-have-no-scientific-credibility-in-one-pie-chart#.ULKHeeR9LId

The pie chart is rather convincing in of itself.