The Daily Caller wrote that a recent survey of scientific literature only confirmed the “uncontroversial points” that warming has occurred and that it is in part manmade, but the Daily Caller itself has cast doubt on these facts.
The peer-reviewed survey found that 97 percent of scientific abstracts that stated a position on global warming endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. While these points are uncontroversial in the scientific world, they are controversial among many in Congress and the public -- due in part to the misinformation pushed by conservative media outlets such as the Daily Caller.
A Daily Caller columnist, for example, granted Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), who has called global warming a “hoax,” an "[a]ward" for “debunking” the “global warming myth.”
The Daily Caller also regularly publishes articles that cast doubt on global warming -- including near-transcriptions of Sen. Inhofe's latest attacks on climate science -- yet conveniently leave out the “uncontroversial” fact that the majority of scientists agree that manmade, or anthropogenic, climate change is occurring. For instance, the online publication promoted “Lord” Christopher Monckton, who likes to compare climate activists to Nazis, challenging “Al baby” (Al Gore) to debate him on climate change without stating that the majority of scientists accept that climate change is real and manmade.
The Daily Caller article, headlined “Report: There is no 97 percent global warming consensus,” quoted the Global Warming Policy Foundation's Andrew Montford (who is not a scientist) quibbling with the survey by claiming it didn't examine whether the papers endorsed the view that “human activity is the main driver behind global warming” (emphasis added). However, the authors of the report have already addressed this criticism, a fact the Daily Caller left out, explaining that the scientific abstracts they examined didn't go into this detail, but they contacted the authors and 96 percent of them agreed that humans have caused more than half of recent warming (emphasis removed):
Another characteristic of movements that deny a consensus involves impossible expectations. The tobacco industry perfected this approach in the 1970s, demanding ever-more stringent levels of proof that smoking caused cancer in order to delay government regulation of their products. This technique of impossible expectations was illustrated in another blog post claiming that only papers which quantify the human contribution to global warming count as endorsing the consensus. Most climate-related research doesn't quantify how much global warming humans are causing, especially in the abstract; there's simply no reason to.
We didn't expect scientists to go into nitty gritty detail about settled science in the valuable real estate of the abstract (the short summary at the start of the paper). However, we did expect to see it more often in the full paper, and that's exactly what we observed. When scientists were asked to rate the level of endorsement of their own papers, in the 237 papers that actually specified the proportion of human-caused global warming, over 96% agreed that humans have caused more than half of the recent global warming.
Several other surveys have confirmed that the vast majority of climate scientists agree that most of the rise in global temperatures is due to human activities. A 2008 survey further found that 84 percent of climate scientists say “the general public should be told to be” worried about the impacts of climate change, which encompass everything from deadly heat waves to rapid shifts in agricultural yields to flooding from sea level rise.