Again, it's the literature reviews that establish the consensus.
There have been almost 13,000 peer-reviewed papers since 1993 that mention the words "climate change." Do you know everything about the content of all of these papers? It is a mixed bunch in terms of how the phrase is employed. For example, some of them describe climate changes over various periods of the Holocene, and over certain regions of the globe, indicating wide-ranging temperature shifts due to natural causes. Some, for example, discuss climate change due to changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation. By the way, these are the same
natural causes that the IPCC states a
low-level of understanding of, and are drivers of climate that have existed long before any potential human signal was in effect, and are no doubt natural drivers that exist and are in effect to this very day. Climate has always been variable, and it is not well understood as to why. Others papers are restricted to the period of time for when thermometer measures of surface atmosphere temperatures have been available (since about 1870). Yet others employ the idea of human-caused climate change as a fact without question, as they are discussing things other than how such a consensus was arrived at.
No. We've been through this.
I then suppose that the academies that were mentioned in an earlier post don't matter to you as their members are not restricted to climatology or climatologists. How did the governing members arrive at their conclusion (and are they all climatologists)?
A literature review is undertaken to look at recent work done on climate change. It's found that the vast majority, if not all, of the work concludes that climate change is mainly the result of human activity. Review after review after review has the same findings. Case closed. There's your consensus. No assumptions, no preconcieved notions. Just the proof you seem to think is so elusive.
Has anyone done such a wide-ranging review of the most recent work in order to assess the state of publication? Can you cite such a review?
A vast majority, if not all? Do you know this for a fact? I'd be fascinated to see such a wide-ranging meta-survey and its analysis.
The last attempt at such a wide-ranging survey was undertaken in 2003 and was carried out by Naomi Oreskes and published in
Science in 2004. Oreskes, who is a historian of science, examined 928 papers published between 1993 and 2003 in order to assess whether there was a "consensus" on whether 1). human activities had modified concentrations of atmospheric constituents, and 2). whether most of the observed warming over the last 50 years had likely been due to increases in greenhouse gases.
On the basis of her study she claimed that a positive consensus existed, with 75% of the papers explicitly or
implicitly accepting a consensus view. The other 25% expressed no such view. Her findings were (and still are) controversial among many scientists for a variety of reasons (for example, paleoclimate temperature records show many positive and negative variations in temperature long before any human effects). Also worth noting, all the papers that mention climate change or any of the variations for expressing this
natural fact have to be put aside in order to define those that discuss human activities and climate change.
In other words, from the start, the potential for purely natural causes based on historical trends are largely removed from the study sample. To discuss the potential for human effect you have to look just at a human time frame, (and not at climate change as a natural phenomenon over time). Right from the start there is an assumed presupposition that the two are automatically linked. Add to that, there is no attempt to attribute how much change is caused by human activity or by natural variability. The over-emphasis on stating (and reiterating) a consensus obscures the important fact that there is no way to delineate natural from assumed anthropogenic effects. That means there is no way to forecast the future climate with any degree of accuracy.
This argument is specious.
This answer is meaningless.