User:CurtisSwain/Sandbox

The majority of climate scientists agree that global warming is primarily caused by human activities such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation. Environmental organizations, many governmental reports, and the non-U.S. media agree on this virtually unanimous scientific community agreement  substantiating human-caused global warming, although there is less agreement on the specific consequences of this warming. Opponents either maintain that most scientists consider global warming "unproved," dismiss it altogether, or highlight the dangers of focusing on only one viewpoint in the context of unsettled science.

National and international science academies and scientific societies have assessed the current scientific opinion, in particular on recent global warming. These assessments have largely followed or endorsed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) position of January 2001 that states:

"An increasing body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and other changes in the climate system... There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."

As of 2007, no scientific body of national or international standing has maintained a dissenting opinion. A few organisations hold non-committal positions.

=Synthesis reports= Synthesis reports are assessments of scientific literature that compile the results of a range of stand-alone studies in order to achieve a broad level of understanding, or to describe the state of knowledge of a given subject.

=Position Statements of scientific organizations=

Dissenting
With the release of the revised statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 2007, no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate change.

Statements by individual scientists opposing the mainstream assessment of global warming do include claims that the observed warming is likely to be attributable to natural causes.

Surveys of scientists and scientific literature
Various surveys have been conducted to determine a scientific consensus on global warming. =Consensus statements by scientific oranisations= A question which frequently arises in popular discussion of climate change is whether there is a scientific consensus regarding human-caused global warming. Several scientific organizations have explicitly used the term "consensus" in their statements.

=See also=


 * Economic opinion on climate change
 * Global warming controversy
 * List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming
 * National Registry of Environmental Professionals survey on climate change

=References=