For you j: (one more time)
The 32,000 “leading” scientists — 9,000 saying they have Ph.D.s — come from a petition by the George C. Marshall Institute, an outfit funded by hundreds of thousands of dollars from Exxon-Mobil that has helped create uncertainty over scientific consensus on global warming. The petition came with a cover letter by Frederick Seitz, a scientist who received much money from the R.J. Reynolds cigarette company and helped to create uncertainty over medical consensus on the harms of tobacco smoke.
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So what do actual climatologists think?
Kelly Redmond, regional climatologist at Reno’s Desert Research Institute, told Fact Checker, “There seems little doubt that the earth as a whole is warming, based on separate evidence from the surface, the lower atmosphere and from satellites.”
Asked if the main causes are human-related, he said, “Without invoking human-related influences, we are at a loss for mechanisms that can account for the observed warming.”
He is far from alone. Not a single scientific organization of national or international standing denies that global warming is taking place.
Peter T. Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman from the University of Illinois-Chicago surveyed more than 3,000 world scientists, with more than 90 percent having Ph.D.s.
They found that the vast majority of scientists said the earth is warming and human activity is a significant factor in global temperature changes. Among scientists specializing in and publishing peer-reviewed research in the field of climatology, the rate of consensus was about 97 percent for both questions.
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In another instance that came out in court documents, a fossil-fuel-industry group called the Global Climate Coalition asked its scientists about global warming caused by human activity and they reported back, “The scientific basis … is well established and cannot be denied.”
Not only that, its scientists concluded that those who were skeptical of global warming “do not offer convincing arguments.”
Despite this internal document — similar to actions by the tobacco industry — the fossil fuel industry continued to sow confusion about climate change, until the coalition disbanded in 2002.
http://www.rgj.com/article/20101228...bal-warming-Look-past-Fox-News?nclick_check=1
Kevin Grandia: The 30,000 Global Warming Petition Is Easily-Debunked Propaganda
