Most Americans are unaware that the National Academy of Sciences, known for its cautious and even-handed reviews of the state of science, is firmly on board with climate change. It has been for years. Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy, paraphrased its most recent report on the subject. "The consensus statement is that climate changes are being observed, are certainly real, they seem to be increasing, and that humans are mostly likely the cause of all or most of these changes," he said. That's not just the view of the U.S. National Academies. There's also a consensus statement from the presidents of science academies from around the world, including the academies of China, the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Russia, France, Brazil, the list goes on. Cicerone also points to strong statements about climate change from the leading professional organizations in the United States, including from the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society and others. Of course, it's still possible to find a few scientists who reject the consensus. Cicerone says it is appealing to think they are right when they say there's no need to worry about complicated cap-and-trade policies or otherwise fuss about climate change. Warming real - consensus
Brooks 12 (Jon Brooks, staff writer, KQED news, citing Craig Miller, environmental scientist, 5/3/12, "Is Climate Change Real? For the Thousandth Time, Yes," KQED News, http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2012/05/03/is-climate-change-real-for-the-thousandth-time-yes/)
BROOKS: So what are the organizations that say climate change is real? MILLER: Virtually ever major, credible scientific organization in the world. It’s not just the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And that's echoed in most countries around the world. All of the most credible, most prestigious scientific organizations accept the fundamental findings of the IPCC. The last comprehensive report from the IPCC, based on research, came out in 2007. And at that time, they said in this report, which is known as AR-4, that there is "very high confidence" that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming. Scientists are very careful, unusually careful, about how they put things. But then they say "very likely," or "very high confidence," they’re talking 90%. BROOKS: So it’s not 100%? MILLER: In the realm of science; there’s virtually never 100% certainty about anything. You know, as someone once pointed out, gravity is a theory. BROOKS: Gravity is testable, though... Virtually every major credible scientific organization in the world says climate change is real. MILLER: You're right. You can’t drop a couple of balls off of the Leaning Tower of Pisa to prove climate change. That’s why we have to rely on mathematical models to try to figure out where this is all going. And that's difficult. But it’s not impossible, as some people like to paint it. You know, the people doing the models are not inept. Over the past nearly four years, Climate Watch has interviewed a lot of scientists, attended conferences, read academic papers. To me, as what you might call an informed observer, the vast preponderance of scientific evidence supports this notion that the Earth is warming and that human activity is a significant cause. BROOKS: Are there legitimate debunkers of this proposition? MILLER: Certainly there are legitimate scientists on the other side of the question. If you take, for example, a guy by the name of John Christy from the University of Alabama, who is very strongly identified with climate change skeptics. That doesn’t mean that his work is invalidated. He came out recently with a study that basically refuted the idea that there’s been an observable shrinkage in the snow pack of the Sierra Nevada. And we talked to other scientists who do believe in anthropogenic or human-induced global warming and do believe that the Sierra snow pack is going to be shrinking, who thought that this study was sound. But that’s one study in a sea of studies. And you have look at the preponderance of the evidence and not at any one particular study, not any particular year, not even any particular ten years, because even a 10-year trend does not necessarily constitute climate change. BROOKS: What are some of the metrics scientists have looked at to come to the conclusion that human-caused climate change is real? MILLER: They study temperature records. There have been tidal gauges in place for a long time, looking at sea-level rise, and also augmented now by satellite data that measure with greater accuracy the rate of the rise. They’ve looked at things like ice cores from Greenland and elsewhere which gives us sort of a reverse chronological story of what the climate has done. And you can actually pull one of those ice cores and see the amount of C02 that was in the atmosphere at the time. And what they've found is what looks to be a pretty convincing relationship between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the behavior of the Earth’s climate. BROOKS: But there are some who refute that evidence? MILLER: Absolutely. We’ll get people frequently commenting on our blog who will say the sea level is not rising and that there’s been no warming for the past ten years. As I already pointed out, ten years of anything does not constitute a definitive pattern; it’s just too short a time span. It’s this idea of cherry-picking data, which both sides accuse the other of doing. You have to look at the Earth’s climate over time as a really big, complicated jigsaw puzzle. And clearly there are pieces missing. And there are pieces sitting off to the side that aren’t missing, but we don’t quite know how they fit into the puzzle yet. But still, you see enough of the picture to know what’s going on. The science has yielded at least -- as Stanford's Chris Field of the IPCC puts it -- a blurry picture of the future. And the blurry picture is enough to know the general direction we’re heading, even without knowing all of the specifics. BROOKS: Are there former critics who now acknowledge the reality of climate change? MILLER: Richard Muller would be a good example of that. He’s the physicist over at UC Berkeley who was identified with the skeptic camp for a long time. He wasn’t buying a lot of climate change theory. He launched a temperature-data audit because he wasn’t convinced that the temperature data being used by the IPCC and NOAA and others was accurate, that there were fundamental issues – they were getting bad data, garbage in, garbage out.