Human Contribution to Global Warming

In this published article the authors conducted a study analyzing thousands of peer reviewed scientific articles to oppose a consensus on the scientific and public view of Anthropogenic global warmin. Based on the author’s heavy research they concluded that 97% of scientist agree with human involvement and contribution to global warming and that 57% of the US public is neither aware or disagrees that scientist agree with human contribution to global warming. Without the proper distribution of this information the public will continue to hold a false idea and there will be no changes to reverse this destruction to our earth.

Figure 3 shows the percentage of papers endorsing the consensus from ones that had either a clear rejection or endorsement on AGW. These papers ranged from 1990-2010 and have shown scientific endorsement of AGW of 80% or higher over the course of 20 years. These articles where also observed by independent scientist who rated them as endorsing or rejecting AGW, these results where near identical to the authors abstract ratings and proved very unbiased results. It was calculated that 97% of scientist Endorsed the idea that humans had contribution to global warming. The drastic scientific endorsement on the consensus of AGW helps to show how non peer reviewed articles found all over the Web can be false and misleading when compared to thousands of scientific peer reviewed articles.

The scientific peer reviewed Process is very significant in determining credibility of an article. To get a paper peer reviewed a scientist or group must first conduct a study/experiment and form some sort of write up or explanation of there findings. Within this study usually consist of an overall summarization and abstract of the findings as well as methods to achieve this and finally a conclusion or explanation to the theory. Following this process a scientist must submit their work to a journal that has relation to there scientific research. Editors will then evaluate the paper to see if the research is of similarity and category to the papers they publish. If accepted the paper then peers who work in a similar field to review the work. These peers can choose to reject it, send it back for revisions or accept it based on quality and accuracy of the work. If the work has been approved of high reliable quality it is then sent to a final editor and can be accepted for publication.If the paper is sent back for revisions the scientist/group must make these changes and then resubmit for another evaluation.

If the paper is rejected then it will be returned and have no chance of being published. This long time consuming process is very important and almost necessary to have any reliable, accurate or credible work, many scientist or normal pubic writers avoid peer review and can post freely on the internet providing misleading information that most of the public can't tell from right or wrong. For example in Ross Mctriks writings of “Putting the 'con' in consensus” is a non peer reviewed article that actually directly criticizes Cook et al; and there findings on the consensus of AGW. His work is has no scientific studies but more of just thoughts and opinions of how Cook and the authors falsely concluded this percentage. Mistriks work has neither references nor any peer review showing no accuracy or credibility. In Mistricks work he also refrences a few non peer reviewed website articles that have no support of accuracy. Cook et al; on the other hand have very in depth studies and analyzations of there data, including figures, explanations and summaries of their work. They include an abstract, references, and publication. Making it a clear decisions that the authors have very reliable trustworthy work in comparison to Mctricks.

I highly agree with the author's conclusion that the public's misconception of scientific consensus on AGW has great impact on the lack of response/actions being taken to help end the major global warming epidemic . This article greatly influenced my opinion of AGW, with little knowledge prior to this article on AGW I always believed AGW was something not very serious on the effect to our earth and that few scientist dramatized the idea that us contributors were really doing harm. I never realized just how many scientist actually endorsed this idea and how there's practically no scientist to even reject this idea.

I believe the public has no idea of these thousands of credible scientist that all do agree and it's more of a lack of informing the seemingly clueless population of this and the great affect and disaster we are introducing to our earth. The most challenging part of this information was the reading and understanding of this material, which most likely correlates with why such a large percent of the public is unaware of how many scientist really do contribute humans to global warming contribution. It was very interesting to see how Media and others on the internet could post these non peer reviewed articles with such false misleading information to persuade the public into ideas, the scariest part about it is that I had read some of these false conceptions in the past and believed them. Even though this article took an extreme amount of time to analyze and process the data I am very glad of the new informative information that has now changed my outlook on the world and has even opened my eyes up to global warming studies.

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