Scientific consensus on global warming

Science community concurs warming is happening — and people are the cause

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The most respected scientific bodies have stated unequivocally that global warming is occurring, and people are causing it by burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests.

This conclusion is shared by the national science academies of developed and developing countries (read the statement [PDF]), plus many other organizations, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was established by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization to provide the world with "a clear scientific view" on climate change.

The only real debate is about how fast warming will occur, and how much damage will be done, as a result of human activities that produce heat-trapping CO2 and other greenhouse-gas emissions.

Peer review ensures sound science

Climate scientists, like all scientists, are professional skeptics. They welcome — in fact, rely upon — rigorous challenges to their work from colleagues. Through this process of peer review and independent verification, scientists critique and double- (and triple- and quadruple-) check each others work.

This can lead to debate and controversy, but over time, solid research is validated, errors are discarded, and a body of reliable facts is created. In addition, science advances by focusing on what is not yet known. In the case of climate change, for example, there is an extremely good general understanding of the phenomenon, but many details are not yet understood. These gaps in the research, as they come to light, are systematically tackled by the scientific community.

In this context, the kind of material used by climate-change skeptics to cast doubt on global warming — whether it be a handful of emails stolen from an East Anglian research facility or a few errors in an IPCC report — are meaningless. The mountain of climate data assembled over decades by the scientific community as a whole is irrefutable. The records collected and analyzed by independent scientists from many disciplines and thousands of locations, paint a consistent, verifiable picture of a rapidly warming world.

Make no mistake: Science has given us unequivocal warning that global warming is real. The time to start working on solutions is now.