A broad survey of climate change literature for 2017 reveals that the alleged “consensus” behind the dangers of anthropogenic global warming is not nearly as settled among climate scientists as people imagine.
Author Kenneth Richard found that during the course of the year 2017, at least 485 scientific papers were published that in some way questioned the supposed consensus regarding the perils of human CO2 emissions or the efficacy of climate models to predict the future.
According to Richard’s analysis, the 485 new papers underscore the “significant limitations and uncertainties inherent in our understanding of climate and climate changes,” which in turn suggests that climate science is not nearly as settled as media reports and some policymakers would have people believe.
Richard broke the skeptical positions into four main categories, with each of the individual papers expounding at least one of these positions, and sometimes more.
The first position attributes greater weight to the role of natural mechanisms in changes to the climate system than are acknowledged by climate alarmists, while giving correspondingly less importance to the influence of increased CO2 concentrations on climatic changes. Over 100 of these papers, for instance, examine the substantial solar influence on climate and weather, such as temperature variations and precipitation patterns.
