Taylor Hill blogs that the debate on global warming is over. Way over. In May, Last Week Tonight host, John Oliver, attempted to visually demonstrate what a true debate on climate change should look like. Instead of bringing out one expert on either side of the issue, Oliver brought on set 97 scientists who support evidence that humans are causing global warming to argue with three climate skeptics, a statistically representative climate change debate, he said.
The sketch was based on the climate consensus, the notion that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is occurring and that humans are part of the problem. But if Oliver really wanted to be up-to-date on his stats, he would have put 99.99 scientists on one side of the desk. That is according to James L. Powell, director of the National Physical Sciences Consortium, who reviewed more than 24,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles on climate change published between 2013 and 2014.
Powell identified 69,406 authors named in the articles, four of whom rejected climate change as being caused by human emissions. That is one in every 17,352 scientists. Oliver would need a much bigger studio to statistically represent that disparity.
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