Climate Basics

There is an overwhelming scientific consensus that the planet is warming based on temperature records and discernible effects such as the loss of glacial ice mass across the globe. Per the IPCC, "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen."

Until the latter part of the last century, global warming was a theoretical prediction based on the well-understood science of heat trapping gases. That changed in 1999 when Dr. Michael Mann et. al. published a paper detailing their reconstruction of temperature records for the past 1000 years using proxy data. The chart summarizing their results, since dubbed the "hockey stick graph," showed that global temperatures have been on the rise since the industrial revolution. Since then, their work has been confirmed by many other teams of scientists, as described here.

According to the IPCC, "Human influence on the climate system is clear," and per NASA, "climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities." The heat-trapping properties of gases like CO2 and methane, among others, has been well understood since the 19th century. Moreover, the recent warming trend clearly coincides with increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Peer-reviewed scientific studies have shown that the link between warming and anthropogenic emissions is virtually certain, and have ruled out other causes such as solar variation or volcanoes.

In short, no. The proportion of published papers that contradict the consensus is extremely small, and when a sample of these papers were reviewed, all were found to contain serious errors in their assumptions or analysis. Comprehensive surveys of published scientific papers on the topic have found that "The number of papers rejecting AGW [Anthropogenic, or human-caused, Global Warming] is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time. Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.”

In 2015, a team of researchers led by Dr. Rasmus Benestad reviewed a sample of the most influential papers that expressed views contradicting the consensus. They found that every one of the 38 papers contained flaws such as cherry-picking of data, overfitting of data, or faulty assumptions that influenced their results. Co-author Dr. Katharine Hayhoe commented, “Of that sample, 100% we discovered to have errors that, if corrected, would bring them in line with the consensus." Moreover, while the scientific consensus presents a consistent and comprehensive view, contrarian arguments make contradictory claims such as denying warming is happening or blaming it on the sun, ocean currents, or long-term patterns. There is no single consistent theory that contradicts the consensus.