Appearing on the July 10 edition of Fox News' Dayside, ABC News 20/20 co-anchor John Stossel claimed that global warming is "[p]robably not" a “big problem,” and, in an attack on former Vice President Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount Classics, May 2006), repeated the false claim that there is no scientific consensus on the causes of global warming. Stossel stated: “Many scientists do not agree, despite what you hear in the Al Gore movie.” In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has documented the potential threats to human ecosystems posed by global warming, and a recent National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report confirmed the scientific consensus that “human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming” of the planet.

Stossel was on Dayside promoting his new book, Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity: Get out the Shovel -- Why Everything You Know is Wrong (Hyperion, May 2006).

From the July 10 edition of Dayside:

STEVE DOOCY (guest host): All right. John, we're in the lightning round. We've got a list of a number of things. We're going to try to see how many we can get through. Global warming, we hear, is a big problem, and we're causing it.

STOSSEL: Global warming is happening. Is it a big problem? Probably not. Many scientists do not agree, despite what you hear in the Al Gore movie. And Kyoto wouldn't make any difference even if we did sign and if the countries that did obeyed, which they're not.

Stossel's denials of the threats posed by global warming and of the consensus within the scientific community are nothing new. As Media Matters for America noted the last time Stossel downplayed the global warming threat, the IPCC concluded in a 2001 report that "[r]ecent regional changes in climate, particularly increases in temperature, have already affected hydrological systems and terrestrial and marine ecosystems in many parts of the world." The IPCC also noted that if global warming trends persist as predicted over the next century, the impact on human systems could be catastrophic.

Stossel's implication that there is no scientific consensus on the causes of global warming is false. Notwithstanding the very small minority of scientists who discount human causes of global warming (many of whom have connections to the petroleum industry), a June 22 NAS report affirmed the “scientific consensus regarding human-induced global warming,” based on multiple “lines of evidence” supporting “the conclusion that human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming” of the Earth.