The ruling paradigm of climate science

It is often quoted by climate change skeptics that there is no real scientific consensus that the current state is anthropogenic induced, so I thought it would be interesting to look at the amount of published articles that disptue this. In 2005, Naomi Oreskes published an article in the journal Science entitled Beyond the Ivory Tower, The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. In it she analyzed scientific articles published 1993-2003 with the keyword of global climate change. Out of the 928 found, none rejected human-caused global warming. This could actually be considered quite surprising, but the author divided the papers into 6 categories, "explicit endorsement..., evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, palaeo climate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position"  (Oreskes 2005). Three quarters belong in the first 3 categories with the rest dealing with methodology or palaeo climatology. The author herself even pointed out that it is expected that papers related to palaeo or impacts et cetera can understandably argue the natural caused state, but none of her 928 papers did this.

http://www.jamespowell.org/PieChart/piechart.html

James Lawrence Powell has updated this research, picking up where Oreskes left off and  looked at peer reviewed articles published between 1 January 1991 and 9 November 2012. He expanded his key word search to  global warming or global climate change. He found  13,950 articles. Using his perhaps less-rigorous methodology than the affore mentioned article,  24 or .17% clearly reject global warming or deny CO2 emissions as the fault. He pointed out a good thought; if one of the 24 articles had proven human caused global warming is false, it would be the most famous and most cited paper in the history of climate science. The most cited has 17 (Powell, J.L. 2011). One wouldn't have to hunt for it. If interested, his list of "articles that reject global warming is here." 

http://www.jamespowell.org/PieChart/piechart.html

There are a few interesting points I took away from this. Firstly it is very smart and scientifically required in this case that both authors make their methodoly very clear and even give you steps in how to re-create their journal search for these articles. Oreskes expecially had troubles from skeptics attacking her research claiming she was wrong in her conclusion of no papers proving natural variation, but here results can be easily recreated using her parameters! One issue I had was when Powell claimed that when choosing his parameters, using “climate change” without the "global" prefix would make no difference in the number that reject it. I would disagree with this in that a paper may agree with a slight regional cliamte change, but not a general global climate change or warming. 

 "Within science, global warming denial has virtually no influence. Its influence is instead on a misguided media, politicians all-too-willing to deny science for their own gain, and a gullible public....Scientists do not disagree about human-caused global warming. It is the ruling paradigm of climate science, in the same way that plate tectonics is the ruling paradigm of geology" (Powell, J.L. 2011).

references:

Oreskes, N. Beyond the Ivory Tower, The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. Science.  December 2004: Vol. 306 no. 5702 p. 1686. DOI: 10.1126/science.1103618

Powell, J.L. 2011.  The Inquisition of Climate Science. 2011. Columbia University Press. Also online 

Further and more recent readings on same subject: 

Scientific Assessments of Climate Change Information in News and Entertainment MediaScience Communication. August 2012: 435-459.
The Temporal Structure of Scientific Consensus Formation.American Sociological Review. December 2010: 817-840.