It isn't 97% any more. Everybody quotes that one number from a few years ago on the scientific consensus on Global Warming. But a more recent study found one (1) paper by one (1) author rejecting Global Warming in 2013.
Why Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility: Only 1 of 9,136 Recent Peer-Reviewed Authors Rejects Global Warming.
James Lawrence Powell wrote
I have brought my previous study…up-to-date by reviewing peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals over the period from Nov. 12, 2012 through December 31, 2013. I found 2,258 articles, written by a total of 9,136 authors…Only one article, by a single author in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, rejected man-made global warming.
That's 99.989% of scientists supporting Anthropogenic Global Warming, and 0.011% against.
Of course, it is possible to dispute Roberts's methodology. What counts as a peer-reviewed paper? In which journals? Should we count papers that discuss warming without considering its causes equally with those that blame anthropogenic CO2 and other such gases? But no matter how you slice it, AGW denial is still weapons-grade bolonium. Or, from a different comedy/snark Science Fiction epic,
Zaphod Beeblebrox: How many escape pods does this ship have?
Ford Prefect: None.
Zaphod: Did you count them?!
Ford: Twice.
Douglas Adams,
HHGTTG
There is no way out. No Infinite Improbability Drive-powered spaceship is going to unaccountably turn up and scoop the Deniers out of this one at an improbability level of 2 to the power of James Hansen's telephone number in order to make the infinite improbability calculations complete. But it's OK. They can deny that, too, as I described in Grokking Republicans: Cognitive Dissonance, discussing the UFO cult in the book When Prophecy Fails.
Here is a source for the "97% of climate scientists", plus a lot of other links to cutting-edge research of the time, now lamentably outdated.
NASA, 2010: Consensus: 97% of climate scientists agree
W. R. L. Anderegg, “Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 107 No. 27, 12107-12109 (21 June 2010); DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1003187107.
Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
The reality of the effects of Global Warming on the oceans, agriculture, extreme weather, habitat loss, and more is worse than any of the projections from back then. But at the same time, technologies for renewable energy have advanced faster than previously thought possible, so that we are going through the transition known as Grid Parity over an ever wider area of the Earth's surface. We know what to do:
How to Solve Global Warming
We are doing it an an approximately exponentially-increasing pace. Now that real money is at stake, the financial markets have spoken against investments in fossil carbon resources and facilities, and in favor of utilities buying ever more, ever cheaper renewable energy. India and China are gradually coming aboard, as I will Diary soon. Ideological obstruction and obfuscation continue to matter at the margins, but can no longer stop us from moving forward. For example, the Koch brothers couldn't even derail wind power in Kansas, their home state.
Here are Powell's earlier data, tabulating papers and authors since 1991.
13,950 peer-reviewed climate articles [sic; should be papers] 1991-2012; 24 reject global warming
33,700 authors of peer-reviewed climate change papers; only 34 reject that it's caused by humans
What do you suppose are the odds on getting the media to take note of this? How about Democratic politicians? Your friends on Facebook? Don't tell me about your crazy uncle, and I won't tell you about mine. Well, at least mine was polite about it.