Global Warming Denial: What Does it Take? A Case Study of Climate Change Denialists

Introduction

In the mid-1970s after the consensus dismissed the bullshit idea of "global cooling," serious concerns were raised about global climate change: its impact on the earth, and how we were (and still are) contributing to it. Vast research efforts were put into this issue, and now the international community is on board to combat the effects of global warming. The official consensus is now that global climate change is real, it's happening, and we're responsible for it.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently reported that this past October was the fifth month this year to reach record temperatures; and that unless we find some drastic decline in the temperature in November and December, 2014 will mark the hottest year on record. The effects will be catastrophic if global temperature means continue to increase as they have been. Some infectious diseases and parasitic insects will likely multiply at alarming rates from increasing heat, the sea levels will rise from the melting of the ice caps, and of course it will be very, very hot. The effects of global warming are numerous, and we're all ready to jump on board to help remove our carbon footprints and mitigate the effects of this dramatic rise on global temperatures. Or are we?

This blog has covered global warming denial in the past, and the results have been quite hilarious. Some denialists dispute the consensus over global warming, which has been addressed here. To summarize, there are numerous studies which all suggest that at least 90% of scientists agree that global warming is happening and that we're responsible for it. These studies all had different methodologies, but came to concordance on the conclusion. Denialists dispute the validity of these studies, but when the results have been replicated by multiple different methods, it's hard to argue that they're all wrong. Some also dispute based on the wording of the questions asked, suggesting that they're ambiguous and that even 'climate realists' would respond "yes" to most of the questions. This is, of course, a major semantics debate; and in the face of a semantics debate, it's helpful to apply Occam's razor and take the more parsimonious conclusion. The result is simple: the consensus on global climate change is solid.

Others will outright ignore the consensus and try to argue based on their knowledge, or what they've read online, that global warming isn't happening. Many of these arguments, as well, have been addressed on this blog. I won't go through a summary of those talking points, but I would highly recommend reading the linked post. Basically, scientific evidence is also not on the side of denialists (no surprise there).

Given the evidence, it's fairly obvious that denialists of Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) don't have a leg to stand on. Why, then, do they persist? What does it take to convince a denialist?

Extreme Weather

Many scientists up until now have believed that with enough droughts, floods, heat waves and other examples of extreme weather, climate change "skeptics" (quotes because I don't like this warm, fuzzy term being used for such persistent denialists) will come to terms with reality and start addressing it appropriately. This isn't without evidence [Hamilton & Keim, 2007; Egan & Mullan, 2012], and seems reasonable enough - both studies have displayed that there is a correlation between regional weather experiences and political orientation concerning global climate change. It makes sense that if someone is getting the worst of something, they are more likely to support a theory which addresses their concerns.

As recent research shows, however, this hypothesis is not very robust and has mixed support. Moreover, it is only one piece of the puzzle. The winter of 2012 was the fourth warmest winter on record going back to 1895; and yet when asked whether or not they attribute this to climate change, only 35% of respondents said yes [McCright et al., 2014]. Granted, the study does find that individual experiences with weather anomalies has a significant effect on perceived warming; however, it still shows that even direct consequences of global warming aren't enough to convince some people. How about that? Climate change denialists are Monty Python's Black Knights.

Political Party

Although intuitive, the study by McCright et al. clarifies that there is an association between political party identification and climate change denial. This is not the first time the lead study author has established said association [McCright et al., 2011], but it raises an important question of politicization of climate change and how it affects people's perceptions of the issue.

We should all be familiar with the efforts by Bush aides to quash research and publication thereof concerning climate change. This was a major strike for party politics in science - governmental influence can be non-transparent in some scenarios, and the officials we have in government may be influencing the publication of important scientific research. Publication bias is definitely not an unheard of phenomenon, but I believe most Americans like to think that "the system" is not so corrupt. Perhaps it is. Certainly McCright thinks so: his research and examination of conservative anti-reflexivity and its impact on climate science and policy speaks for itself [McCright & Dunlap, 2010].

Don't think that conservatives are exclusive in science denialism, however. While conservatives are more likely to take a stance against global warming, liberals are more traditionally associated with anti-GMO sentiments [Lewandowsky et al., 2013], although this connection is not too strong. I can support that conclusion, however. Regardless, it stands to be said that conservativism and free-market ideology serve as good predictors for rejection of science.

Denialism can come from within the scientific community as well. Naomi Oreskes, who is well known for her study which contributed to the establishment of public knowledge of a scientific consensus on climate change [Oreskes, 2004], wrote a book, one that I would highly recommend, with Erik Conway on the political underpinnings and implications of research on several key and contentious issues in historic scientific discourse entitled Merchants of Doubt. The authors draw attention to seven issues - acid rain, smoking, secondhand smoking, the ozone hole, global warming, the Strategic Defensive Initiative, and the banning of DDT - and clarifies the scientific consensus on all of them, as well as pinpointing which small groups of scientists have been largely responsible for the unfounded charges against the consensus, which science reporters and internet bloggers had uncritically repeated.

Internet

I and my coauthor share the concerns raised by Oreskes and Conway regarding science reporting and internet blogging of scientific research, which has become very weak and uncritical in recent years; though I can't argue from experience that it has ever been too strong. Needless to say, the internet may play an even more crucial role in the public's perception of climate change that one may think.

This gets into a research topic that is of personal interest to me. I've always been interested in the ideological implications of internet filter bubbles and how web pandering to people of specific interests serves to uphold the biases and preconceptions they may have on an issue. Not everyone is familiar with filter bubbles, so let me provide two examples of how a filter bubble works: both of which are very real.

Let's use the example of hypothetical person A (HPA) and hypothetical person B (HPB). HPA (who I have modeled after myself) is very fascinated with international politics and loves to look at the historical context which led up to certain key events in American history, such as 9/11. Perhaps he has read a few books on the issue, such as The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright. When he looks up "9/11" on Google, then, his first results will most likely be the Wikipedia page and a few books and articles on the situation, or maybe recent news articles regarding the issue.

HPB (who I have modeled over an old administrator of mine) is a libertarian, possibly a conspiracy nut, and despises the American government. He likes to look for all the disgusting things America has done - some of them being true, such as the atrocities at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. He's also interested in the evidence that the planes which crashed into the Twin Towers could not have caused the destruction they did, or at least in the same manner. There had to be bombs, and someone had to plant those bombs. Thus when he searches "9/11" on Google, his first result may be from Loose Change.

Let me give the other example: very recently, I wanted to look up my internet download/upload rate and see if it's comparable, or at least adequate, to modern standards. I typed into Google "is X mbps a good download rate," expecting a solid response from someone on a torrent website I've visited before. To my incredible surprise, the very first result was a thread in Stormfront. Why? Because I've also been involved in the debates over race that Lex has gotten herself into, and so despite absolutely clearing all of my search history and browser cookies/preferences, that was the result I got. When I used a web proxy, however, and searched the same thing, the Stormfront thread did not appear.

This is how filter bubbles can affect the results of your research, where you may think you're looking into something objectively, but in reality your search engine is pandering to your interests and giving you things it thinks you will like. While there is little research in this arena as far as I'm aware of, I think this is a very real cause of concern for scientific research and public engagement in the scientific discourse. The internet may be playing a dangerous role in inhibiting discussion and polarizing political and social players - or at least, a more dangerous role than we already know to be the case. While not covered heavily, I believe this can also explain part of the reason individuals persist in climate change denial, and many other types of pseudoscience, such as water fluoridation.

I gave a lot of attention to this section, but it's important to mention and make people aware of what they're potentially subjecting themselves to when they research things online. It's not very often you can extend topics of such specification beyond their initial scope like this.

Education

This is perhaps the biggest issue regarding climate change denial. One cornerstone paper in Nature displayed that conservatives who are more scientifically or mathematically literate are even less likely than their liberal counterparts to accept global warming [Kahan et al., 2011]. This suggests that education cannot, by itself, mitigate climate change denial when political polarization is an overwhelming variable in the mixture. That being said, new research does have some interesting statements to make, both about ideology and about education.

Since it seems to be the case that science literacy can intensify polarization, as shown by the Kahan study, a better case may be to examine adolescents, perceived as a more receptive audience. Testing the level of climate literacy in teenagers, it was found that individuals with more individualistic worldviews were 16.1% less likely than communitarians to accept global warming at initial stages [Stevenson et al., 2014]. At low levels of literacy, individualists were even less likely to accept global warming - 24.1% less likely than communitarians; however, at high levels of literacy, the gap essentially closes, and the effect of climate literacy and education has a much more positive effect on individualists than communitarians. These results seem to suggest that while polarization may be an overwhelming factor in adults, early intervention and science education for adolescents and younger, equally receptive audiences can mitigate climate change denial.

Of course, it seems intuitive that educating people would help, right? Then there are those who would call it "indoctrination," but...

Gender/Race

The "while male" effect describes how men tend to judge risks lower than women, and whites judge risks lower than blacks [Finucane et al., 2010]. I'm not too well read on this particular aspect and its contributions to climate change denial, but the evidence seems to suggest there is some association. The aforementioned study by Stevenson et al. did find a significant difference in global warming acceptance between males and females, whites and non-whites; non-whites and females were more likely to accept global warming than whites and males, thus invoking the "white male" effect. There is no solid explanation for these things - Finucane et al. suggests a complex interaction between the two factors. At an initial glance, I could say that one confounding variable would be (of course) political ideology, since non-whites and females are more likely to be liberal than whites and males. The answer, however, is not clear.

Conclusion

There are a multitude of reasons behind climate change denial and why it persists against the scientific consensus. Political party and the internet, in my opinion, play the biggest roles in the issue. As far as "what does it take," I think the most prospective mitigation effort would have to be science education at an early age. I recall very limited environmental science education from my early years in public primary school, and even more limited in parochial secondary school, and so am fortunate that I was not convinced at my younger ages that ACC was a hoax. I know others, however, who were not so fortunate.

There was a book I used to read a lot when I was very little, If You Give a Pig a Pancake. I think the action-consequences relationship between pigs and pancakes, and all of the related stories I read of the same syntax, describes the associations I reviewed in this article fairly well. I would have entitled this post If You Give a Denialist an Evidence, but the flow wouldn't have been good (not just because of the horrible grammar), and it also wouldn't have fit into the "Global Warming Denial" series, nor would it have revealed what I would be covering in the post itself. All my readers who got through this post in its entirety, however, may call it whatever they please.

Thank you all for reading, and I'll see you all next time!



Sources:

Egan, P., & Mullin, M. (2012). Turning Personal Experience into Political Attitudes: The Effect of Local Weather on Americans’ Perceptions about Global Warming. The Journal of Politics, 74 (03), 796-809 DOI: 10.1017/S0022381612000448

Finucane, M., Slovic, P., Mertz, C., Flynn, J., & Satterfield, T. (2000). Gender, race, and perceived risk: The 'white male' effect. Health, Risk & Society, 2 (2), 159-172 DOI: 10.1080/713670162

Hamilton, L., & Keim, B. (2009). Regional variation in perceptions about climate change. International Journal of Climatology, 29 (15), 2348-2352 DOI: 10.1002/joc.1930

Kahan, D., Peters, E., Wittlin, M., Slovic, P., Ouellette, L., Braman, D., & Mandel, G. (2012). The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks. Nature Climate Change, 2 (10), 732-735 DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1547

Lewandowsky, S., Gignac, G., & Oberauer, K. (2013). The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science. PLoS ONE, 8 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0075637

McCright, A., & Dunlap, R. (2010). Anti-reflexivity: The American Conservative Movement's Success in Undermining Climate Science and Policy. Theory, Culture & Society, 27 (2-3), 100-133 DOI: 10.1177/0263276409356001

McCright, A., & Dunlap, R. (2011). The Politicization of Climate Change And Polarization in The American Public's Views of Global Warming, 2001-2010. Sociological Quarterly, 52 (2), 155-194 DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-8525.2011.01198.x

McCright, A., Dunlap, R., & Xiao, C. (2014). The impacts of temperature anomalies and political orientation on perceived winter warming. Nature Climate Change, 4 (12), 1077-1081 DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2443

Oreskes, N. (2004). Beyond The Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. Science, 306 (5702), 1686-1686 DOI: 10.1126/science.1103618

Stevenson, K., Peterson, M., Bondell, H., Moore, S., & Carrier, S. (2014). Overcoming skepticism with education: interacting influences of worldview and climate change knowledge on perceived climate change risk among adolescents. Climatic Change, 126 (3-4), 293-304 DOI: 10.1007/s10584-014-1228-7

Global Warming Denial: Common Arguments and Misconceptions

A while back, I had a very long discussion with several people over anthropogenic climate change. It took place on a video of Marc Morano and Bill Nye debating over the topic, thus I was bound to encounter quite a few people who are simply ill informed on the subject. Fate took hold and the bastions of idiocy and pseudoscience were brought before me, and I was placed in a position where I felt it was my obligation to clear the air of misconceptions and bad arguments that were being made by the global warming denialists. There was a lot of information passed around, so I wanted to take the time to place some of the arguments here and address them. Many of you will encounter these arguments at some point, so I want to be sure that my readers are well equipped with the knowledge to counter the folly.

If you want to read the full discussion, the thread can be found here. Quick note: denialist questions will be in bold, while my responses will not be. Beyond that, let's get started.

There is no consensus on global warming.

Of course, I've already addressed this before. Feel free to read into that as well as this post. I've heard some people counter by claiming that appealing to a scientific consensus is an appeal to popularity. Fortunately, no it isn't. Appeal to popularity refers to an uninformed public, or "just because a lot of people agree means that it's true." Appeal to scientific consensus is where we appeal to qualified experts in the relevant fields of research and ask for their views. If the overwhelming majority decide that global warming is real, and it's caused by humans, then it's our responsibility as laypeople to take their decision as fact. We have scientists for a reason, and that is so that the uninformed public has a panel or community of experts to go to on issues that they are unqualified in. If we start ignoring that community, we abandon rationality.

Temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period were hotter than today.

Locally, temperatures in some regions of Europe were hotter than they are today; however, this is not representative of the entire population. In Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly by Mann et al. (2009), researchers used a global climate proxy network of more than 1,000 tree ring, ice core, coral, sediment and other assorted proxy records spanning both hemispheres over the past 1500 years. They concluded that while in some regions, temperatures matched today's temperatures or may have been hotter, they do not meet global averages today. The trend is clear: global average temperatures have been rising at intimidating levels, and are hotter than ever before. For this point, the NOAA and the IPCC are great resources as well.

Global temperatures haven't risen in 16 years and counting.

This is just a fabrication. IPCC data clearly displays that global mean temperatures have been rising all the way up to the point of 2006. The year 1998 only ranks as the third hottest year on record, being bested by 2005 and then 2010. Even if it weren't a fabrication, it doesn't matter. We can take any period of time and say "there was no global warming from here to here" and pretend it disproves the overall trend; however, it just doesn't.

Weather reports are unreliable, so how do you expect to predict global climates?

I don't think I really need to hammer in the difference between climate and weather, but that's what it comes down to. Regardless of what variance there is in a particular region from day to day, we can still calculate global means based on the data available to us. If these averages show us that temperatures are rising at extraordinary rates, then we have reason to be cautious.

Aside from that, for what they're worth, weather reports aren't even that unreliable. They're just a lot more sporadic than climate models.

Global CO2 levels are not increasing.

Global CO2 levels are increasing. Some global warming denialists don't actually argue this point, but instead argue that rising CO2 levels don't matter. I'll look at a few of those arguments now.

CO2 is basically plant food.

I hear this one a lot, and it's not so much an issue of data as it is an issue of misconceptions. CO2 can be plant food, but not always. It depends on the plant, first of all, and even at that it only confidently works in a controlled environment (which, just for the record, the earth's atmosphere is not). Still, even if CO2 were basically plant food, that isn't a good thing. Growing plants means growing consumption of water and nutrients as well. Such a rise in consumption would result in the expansion of deserts, causing eco-zones to move towards the poles in search of a more suitable environment, and would eventually lead to the decline of those eco-zones. Ever hear of the phrase, "too much of a good thing is a bad thing?"

Global temperatures have only increased by one degree.

Yes, and one degree of global temperature changes can have a massive impact on ice sheets, sea levels, and many other things. All it took in the past to plunge us into the Little Ice Age was a 1-2 degree drop in temperature. People who use this argument are evidently superficial and unfamiliar with the scientific data.

And that's all she wrote.

I'd highly encourage global warming denialists to come here and make their arguments so that I can either expand the list or just refute the claims in the comment section. Come on, don't be shy!

And of course, thank you all very much for reading.



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References:

Mann, M., Zhang, Z., Rutherford, S., Bradley, R., Hughes, M., Shindell, D., Ammann, C., Faluvegi, G., & Ni, F. (2009). Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly. Science, 326 (5957), 1256-1260 DOI: 10.1126/science.1177303

Global Warming Denial: A Face Against Facts and Consensus

Recently, I had a very brief discussion with an individual who denied that there is any climate change being caused by human activity. He made many sweeping assertions, and overall it came down to a matter of ignorance of the facts. What I learned is that there is a somewhat substantial number of people who actually go against the scientific consensus on this topic and believe that there is either no climate change, or if there is, it's not being caused by us, but by natural causes. The reason these people do so is at least in part by a belief that there is no consensus, and that people who claim there is are frauds.

I'm not a climatologist. I'm a woman on the verge of becoming a professional student with either too much or too little time on her hands. I do have an interest in science, however, and my university offers broad access to a very large number of scientific, peer-reviewed literature in numerous areas of study - this being one of them. So while I will not take the time here to explain exactly why the consensus believes global climate change is caused by human activity, I will explain that such a consensus exists, and that it is unequivocal given the enormous amount of evidence.

We're not burning up? Really?

As an introduction, on their website for climatology, NASA released a graph highlighting, to our best knowledge, global temperature in degrees Celsius from 1880 to 2010. The data shows that the decade of 2000 to 2010 has been the warmest on record. Many in the opposition will refer to the outlier in 1998 which towers above the mean of the past decade (suggesting that the temperature has actually decreased), but outliers are outliers, and an exception does not disprove the general rule. The data for this graph was produced, as shown in the image, by four large international science institutions: the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the Met Office Hadley Centre, the NOAA National Climatic Data Center, and the Japanese Meteorological Agency. As you can see, the four agencies all produced similar estimates for annual temperature.

This is only the beginning of the consensus, however. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their fifth assessment report in 2013 summarizing their findings. I encourage you to read this report, but to take a quote from it:

"Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes. This evidence for human influence has grown since AR4. It is extremely likely (95-100%) that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century."

Multiple scientific surveys have been conducted as well to see the general stance of scientists, specifically climatologists, on global climate change. I will begin by explaining three studies cited by NASA's article entitled "Consensus: 97% of climate scientists agree."

The first study entitled "Expert credibility in climate change" was conducted by William Anderegg, James Prall, Jacob Harold and Stephen Schneider in 2010 on anthropogenic climate change (ACC), and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Anderegg et al. collected a list of 1,372 climate researchers "based on authorship of scientific assessment reports and membership on multisignatory statements about ACC" in order to consider only those defined to be "experts" in the field of climatology. After collecting this list, they examined each researcher and established that they must have a minimum of 20 publications on climate research in order to be considered a climate researcher. This narrowed down the selection to 908 researchers. It was found that varying the minimum publication cutoff would not materially alter the results.

These 908 researchers were then ranked based on the number of their scholarly publications on climate research, and ordered accordingly. The list is said not to be representative of the entire scientific community, but as it draws from the most high-profile reports and public statements on ACC, it is representative of probably the strongest and most credentialed researchers in the field. The researchers in the list were classified as being either "convinced by the evidence" (CE) or "unconvinced by the evidence" (UE). The results show that the UE group comprise only 2% of the top 50 in the list, 3% of the top 100, and 2.5% of the top 200. This is consistent with the findings of other surveys which estimate the scientific consensus (as suggested by the aforementioned article by NASA) to be ~97%. Further analysis of the results shows, also, a large disparity between the expertise of the UE group and the CE group. Mean expertise of the UE group was nearly half of the mean expertise of the CE group (noted at 60 publications and 119 publications respectively). The medians were even further divided with the UE group at 34 publications and the CE group at 84 publications. The study conducts further analysis of this disparity as well.

The second study entitled "Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change" was conducted by Peter Doran and Maggie Zimmerman in 2009, published in Eos. Here, Doran and Zimmerman asked a total of 10,257 "earth scientists" 2 questions, to which they received 3,146 responses. However, they make a distinction between "earth scientists" and climate scientists:

"In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total)."

So the most specialized respondents in climatology numbered to 79 in this survey. The questions were listed as 1) "When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?" and 2) "Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?" In other words, question 1 asks whether or not the respondent believes global temperature has risen, and question 2 asks if they believe human activity is responsible for that effect. Of the specialists who responded, 76 out of 79 of them (96.2%) responded to question 1 stating that they have risen, and 75 out of 77 of them (97.4%) answered "yes" to question 2. This is consistent, once again, with the consensus.

I will set aside a moment here to address a common response. A generically produced rebuttal to the study I just explained is that the study was web-based, and therefore "not a scientific survey." While it is true that it used an online database built from Keane and Martinez in 2007, which "lists all geosciences faculty at reporting academic institutions, along with researchers at state geologic surveys associated with local universities, and researchers at U.S. federal research facilities," this was for purposes of convenience and to receive the greatest number of responses. The fact that it was a web-based survey, however, does not mean the survey was not scientific. "Scientific survey" refers to how the survey was conducted, not what was used to conduct it. If the surveying follows the scientific method, it is a scientific survey. I'll make further comment on pedantic criticisms with the results of these surveys shortly.

The third and final study cited in the article was one entitled "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," and was conducted by Naomi Oreskes in 2004. There has been criticism of the methodology of this study, but I will still explain it. The study examined 928 abstracts of papers published in scientific, peer-reviewed journals between the years of 1993 and 2003. Oreskes assigned six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, while 25% fell into the categories of "methods" or "paleoclimate analysis." None of the papers rejected the consensus position. While some of the articles discussing methods or paleoclimate analysis could have taken the position that the climate change was a result of natural occurrences, not a single one of them made such a claim.

There were other surveys conducted as well, such as Lichter (2008), however the studies mentioned above are the strongest leading pieces of evidence to support the scientific consensus. I have received numerous small criticisms of how the studies were conducted, such as the comment of the second study being web-based, and the third study only observing abstracts. However, this is a common tactic I see in debates, and to respond to it, I like to refer to the word "substantiality." If I can produce study after study which all suggest the same conclusion - that around 97% of climatologists have accepted ACC - then you can nitpick at the studies all you wish. The evidence suggests that even with those minor flaws, the estimate is accurate. All that is confirmed by finding these minor flaws is this: nothing is perfect.

The superiority of these sources, as well, outweighs the fact that they have minor flaws. There are opposing citations of public opinion surveys, where results show a lower estimate of a consensus that global climate change is a result of human activity. However, these are public opinion surveys, and the majority (if not the totality) of all surveys of climatologists and experts in similar fields suggest the conclusions drawn from the studies explained above.

Further in the article by NASA is a list of scientific associations and their statements which agree with the consensus. The citations provided by NASA are mostly broken, so I will link to them directly. The statements are from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the American Physical Society (APS), the Geological Society of America (GSA), the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), and the fourth assessment report by the IPCC.

In addition, the California Governor's Office of Planning and Research compiled a list of 198 international scientific organizations which have all taken the stance that global climate change is caused by human action.

I believe, now, I have sufficiently made my point. The scientific consensus, beyond a reasonable doubt, is that global climate change is a result of human activity. No post, however, would be complete without a paragraph of application or significance.

There are hundreds, even thousands of fields of research and study which cover different topics. Some of these overlap, but it is generally safe to say that most of us - the uninformed public, or members of other fields - are not experienced enough in climatology, or in science in general, to make judgments of global climate change on our own merit. We have educational systems which allow for people to specialize in these fields, so that we have experts to trust when looking for answers in matters that go beyond our comprehension. When there is clearly a consensus among these experts, it is obligatory of us to accept the consensus and do what we can to stop aiding the issue and help to diminish the growing temperature in Earth's climate system. To ignore this consensus and insist that they're wrong is to ignore the requisite of substantiality, or to suggest that our insistence alone is superior to the word of those who are trained and qualified in climatology. If such narcissism outweighs the risk of contributing to further toxicity in our climate, then I fear we have lost all hope.

Thank you for reading.

[EDIT: (12/9/14) The statement by the AMA is no longer online from what I can see. Instead, I have linked to an article which discusses recent research published in JAMA, which should suffice for now.]



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