Phil Plait, a blogger for Slate magazine, recently linked to a literature-review style “investigation” which claims that only 1 out of 2,258 “peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals over the period from Nov. 12, 2012 through December 31, 2013…rejected man-made global warming”.

Here’s an example of the quality of analysis that went into the literature review.

Paper number 2254 is titled “X-ray emission from high-redshift miniquasars: self-regulating the population of massive black holes through global warming”. The subject of the paper is super-massive black hole formation believed to have occurred in the first billion years of the universe, which the authors attempt to explain in a way that is consistent with the observational record of distant quasars.  The “global warming” referred to in the paper has nothing to do with planet Earth, it is the name given to a warming of the intergalactic medium, associated with early cosmological objects, that occurred 12-and-a-half-billion years ago (i.e., the 13.7 billion year estimated age of the universe, minus the first billion years, plus or minus a few hundred million).

This is one of the 2,257 papers considered as supporting the consensus that human-driven global warming is occurring.

Anyone claiming the mantle of “science” should realize that events that occurred 12-and a-half billion years ago are not relevant to the particulars of Earth’s climate of the last several centuries — but ironically and dangerously, actually reading a scientific paper and trying to understand what it means and how it fits with other work is more likely at the present time to be labeled “anti-science”, than is taking a decidedly unscientific posture that details matter less than consensus, when trying to prove the existence of scientific phenomena.