Maley letter: Global warming

In 2013, 12,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming and climate change were examined and 97 percent of those papers presented evidence that humans are causing global warming. The point here is this scientific consensus is not based on the polling of people with scientific background, but is based on the peer-reviewed, published scientific papers by climate scientists. Significantly, the greater the expertise, specialization and research in climate science, the more likely the scientist supports the consensus.

The denialists of human-caused global warming attempt to confuse the public about the scientific consensus by fraudulently promoting the position that there is a controversy among scientists. So, we have the bizarre situation where climate science is under attack from people who are not climate scientists, have no education or experience in climate science and have not published in the peer-reviewed scientific journals. For example, the Petition Project claims that some 31,000 scientists have signed a petition stating that “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere …” The problem with this fraudulent petition is that not a single one of the signers is a climate scientist.

This story was originally published June 12, 2017 at 3:56 PM with the headline "Maley letter: Global warming."