Naomi Oreskes Answers

Naomi “Don’t Call Me Nancy” Oreskes responded yesterday in the Los Angeles Times to Richard Lindzen’s Wall Street Journal claim that her Science magazine review of the climate change literature had been refuted:

My study demonstrated that there is no significant disagreement within the scientific community that the Earth is warming and that human activities are the principal cause.

Papers that continue to rehash arguments that have already been addressed and questions that have already been answered will, of course, be rejected by scientific journals, and this explains my findings. Not a single paper in a large sample of peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 refuted the consensus position, summarized by the National Academy of Sciences, that “most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”

(Hat tip Ken.)