There’s a new blog post at the fair and balanced named blog NoTricksZone claiming the consensus on climate change is “crumbling” because there were 500 peer-reviewed papers published in 2016 that support the skeptical position.
Now, if one takes the time to look at the papers, as others have done with similar lists in the past, you might find that a lot of the papers are not actually supportive of the skeptical position, or are weakly suggestive but far from providing a conclusion, dealing with very specific details or otherwise unconvincing. This is why they’re published as blog posts, and not as peer-reviewed papers.
Let’s be charitable though, and take them at their word. Would 500 papers over the course of a year really destroy the consensus? It sounds like a whole lot of studies! But over the course of a whole year, how many supporting the fossil fuel-climate change link are published?
For reference, google scholar returns 3,550 results for “climate change” studies published since 2017. (As of 1/2/2017.)
Suddenly those 500 papers over the course of an entire year don’t seem so many.
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