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Inhofe Report – US Government Says Climate Change is Not Real

By January 1, 2009March 25th, 2014Deniers and Delayers

Senator Inhofe’s is still producing negative propaganda designed to obfuscate the public opinion on climate science. The Environment and Public Works Committee says 400 scientists say that climate change is not a problem.  Real Climate has an analysis of Inhofe’s history here.

The misunderstanding of the few remaining skeptics astounding given the amount of science that supports the consensus opinion. My favorite response to folks who have just begun to try and understand why there are those "scientists" out there who disagree with the consensus position goes like this: Inhofe’s new report has 650 scientists (as the following links show, many of these scientists have no business belonging to a report such as this in the first place, but that’s not my point). The IPCC has 2,500 scientists.  Then I get the response about the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine Treatise containing 20,000 "scientists" signatures. To that I respond, there were 2,500 that worked on the latest IPCC analysis of all of discoveries made in all fields of science across the entire planet over the six years prior to the report. Before that  several thousand scientists reviewed all of the previous scientific discoveries in climate for the previous three IPCC reports produced since 1988. All together between 150,000 and 200,000 citations are listed in Google Scholar for the period. A safe estimate for the number of scientists that are represented by this body of work would be 100,000 and the number could be as high as 200,000 to 300,000 because most papers have more than two or three authors and generally more than five or six authors.

The bad news is that the consensus position, by definition is conservative. And when talking about 2,500 scientists (IPCC) coming up with a position that they all can agree on, the position is going to be very conservative. This means that in all likelihood, climate change is much worse than the statements in the IPCC reports.

Additional analyses of the Public Works Report are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.