So Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) has shown himself to be one of the far too many Republicans who are not content to simply make foolish and inaccurate statements about climate change, but to make the claim that the entire idea is a fraud pushed by his political opponents for political reasons. He cries fraud when presented with the idea that human activity can affect climate. This is in essence no different than Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who refers to it as a hoax.
Both of these accusations mean that a group or groups of people are purposefully making false claims concerning scientific fact for their own nefarious reasons. This implies pretty strongly that there is a massive conspiracy involved here. Who are these liberals determined to harm America, and indeed the world? Well, here are a few organizations that issued statements.
- American Chemical Society (30,000+ members)
- National Academy of the Sciences
- American Geophysical Union
- American Academy for the Advancement of Science (126,995 individual and organizational members)
- American Meteorological Society
- American Institute of Physics (135,000+ members in its member societies including the AGU)
It must be noted, of course, that not every member of all of these organizations agree with these statements and the overall membership often doesn’t vote on them. Yet it does seem to reflect the opinion of the majority of scientists in the field. The web site Skeptical Science recruited volunteers who used a set of guidelines to analyze 12,000 peer reviewed papers and came to the same conclusion reached by other researchers that about 97% of those papers agreed that our current period of warming is caused primarily by human action. But even assuming a much greater level of disagreement than I have been able to find any evidence for, all of this would seem to indicate an amazingly large number of professionals involved in this conspiracy. A number of professionals large enough, in fact, to make the idea of it not having fallen apart well before now far more unbelievable than the idea of humans affecting our planet’s climate in my opinion.