The Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming Matters

Skuce et al., responding to Powell, title their article, “Does It Matter if the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming Is 97% or 99.99%?” I argue that the extent of the consensus does matter, most of all because scholars have shown that the stronger the public believe the consensus to be, the more they support the action on global warming that human society so desperately needs. Moreover, anyone who knows that scientists once thought that the continents are fixed in place, or that the craters of the Moon are volcanic, or that the Earth cannot be more than 100 million years old, understands that a small minority has sometimes turned out to be right. But it is hard to think of a case in the modern era in which scientists have been virtually unanimous and wrong. Moreover, as I show, the consensus among publishing scientists is demonstrably not 97%. Instead, five surveys of the peer-reviewed literature from 1991 to 2015 combine to 54,195 articles with an average consensus of 99.94%.