Contrary to what conservatives might suggest, there really isn't a debate in the scientific community over whether climate change is real. The commonly cited statistic is that 97 percent of scientists agree that global warming is happening, and that it's caused by human activity. Another way of looking at that consensus comes courtesy of James Lawrence Powell, who examined a year's worth of climate-related scientific studies and found that virtually all accept man-made global warming.

Powell's analysis covers 2,258 articles published in peer-reviewed journals between November 2012 and December 2013, written by a total of 9,136 authors. He found but one holdout: S. V. Avakyan who, writing for the Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, concluded that "contribution of the greenhouse effect of carbon-containing gases to global warming turns out to be insignificant." Powell discusses Avakyan's dissenting opinion at his personal blog:

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