Less Than Half of Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory

August 29th, 2007 2:01 PM

Consensus? What consensus?

A new survey about to be published by the journal Energy and Environment finds that less than 50 percent of the scientific papers written about climate change since 2004 have endorsed the view that man's activities are causing global warming.

Think Katie, Charlie, and Brian will be discussing this tonight?

As reported by DailyTech Wednesday (emphasis added throughout):

Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as [history professor Naomi] Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."

Think someone will be interviewing Al Gore in the next couple of days to get his view on this? Or James Hansen? Or any of the global warming alarmists?

But I digress:

The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the "primary" cause of warming, but it doesn't require any belief or support for "catastrophic" global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.

[...]

Schulte's survey contradicts the United Nation IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which gave a figure of "90% likely" man was having an impact on world temperatures. But does the IPCC represent a consensus view of world scientists? Despite media claims of "thousands of scientists" involved in the report, the actual text is written by a much smaller number of "lead authors."

If we had an honest media, this would be a huge part of today's reports. Unfortunately, it is quite likely that only conservative blogs, Fox News, and the Drudge Report will view this survey as being in any way newsworthy.

What a disgrace.