This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In "Stewart and climate" (Forum, April 18), Bill Spiva claims that "many scientists," including him, suspect that climate change is not primarily man-caused. To date, no scientific body of national standing rejects the findings of primarily human-induced effects on the climate.
Moreover, all reliable surveys of scientists in academic, peer-reviewed journals indicate that about 97 percent of scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is occurring. One of the latest surveys, a 2010 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, reviewed publication and citation data for 1,372 climate researchers and drew the following two conclusions:
1. Of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field, 97–98 percent support the tenets of anthropogenic climate change, and
2. The relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers who are unconvinced of anthropogenic climate change are substantially below that of the convinced researchers, and they only amount to 2-3 percent of the climate researchers who publish in the field.
If this is what Spiva meant by "many scientists," then my apologies.
Christian Cueva
Sandy