31,000 scientists can't be wrong

Some 31,000 scientists have signed a petition denying anthropogenic global warming.

More than 31,000 scientists have signed a petition denying that man is responsible for global warming.

The academics, including 9,000 with PhDs, claim that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are actually beneficial for the environment.

The Telegraph dutifully trots out an opposing viewpoint from an unnamed spokesman for the Royal Society, Britain's national science academy:

“The world’s leading climate experts at the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believe that it is greater than 90 per cent likely that human activity is responsible for most of the observed warming in recent decades. That is a pretty strong consensus.

“The science has come a long way since 1998 and it continues to point in one direction - the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avert dangerous climate change.”

Um, yeah. That science has come a long way since 1998. So far, in fact, that the latest science shows that since 1998, the planet's temperature has actually declined. Not what a reasonable scientist would expect given that carbon dioxide levels have greatly increased since then.