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Thursday, Apr. 24, 2025

Do the 31,000 signatures of the OISM Petition Project invalidate the scientific consensus on climate change?

Sue Bin Park, Skeptical Science
no

Climatologists made up only 0.1% of signatories to a 1998 petition denying human-caused climate change — the consensus among qualified scientists stands.

Anyone claiming they had a science degree could sign the petition without expertise in climate science. There is a strong consensus among actively publishing climate scientists on the existence of human-made climate change that has only grown since 1998.

The 31,487 signatures, many found to be fictional or unverifiable, would represent 0.25% of all U.S. science graduates. Holding a science degree does not indicate expertise in scientific fields outside one’s specialty.

The petition was accompanied by a manuscript deceptively formatted to resemble the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. PNAS disavowed any affiliation with the manuscript and rejected its conclusions.

A 2021 review of 88,125 peer-reviewed climate change papers published since 2012 found that the climate change consensus exceeded 99%.

See a full discussion of this at Skeptical Science

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Skeptical Science is a non-profit science education organization. Our goal is to remove a roadblock to climate action by building public resilience against climate misinformation. We achieve this by publishing debunking of climate myths as well as providing resources for educators, communicators, scientists, and the general public. Skeptical Science was founded and is led by John Cook, a Senior Research Fellow with the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change at the University of Melbourne.

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