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Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree climate change is man-made
A comprehensive analysis of peer-reviewed articles on the topic of
global warming and climate change has revealed an overwhelming consensus
among scientists that recent warming is human-caused.
The study
is the most comprehensive yet and identified 4000 summaries, otherwise
known as abstracts, from papers published in the past 21 years that
stated a position on the cause of recent global warming - 97 per cent of
these endorsed the consensus that we are seeing man-made, or
anthropogenic, global warming (AGW)
Led by John Cook at the
University of Queensland, with contributions by Mark Richardson at the
University of Reading, the study was published on Thursday 16 May,
in IOP Publishing's journal
Environmental Research Letters.
Mark Richardson said:
"Here's the paper:
It's open access thanks to volunteer donations, which averaged about $30 each.
We got plenty of news coverage:
Including in other languages:
with coverage in (at least) the US, Canada, Italy, Norway,
Singapore, India, Cuba, Brazil, Australia, UK, Germany, South Africa
& Taiwan.
The biggest surprise was when President Obama tweeted about it:
Which led to some other coverage, including at the Sydney Morning
Herald where 8 times as many people viewed the 'Obama Tweet' story than
checked the story about the original paper!
It was a completely volunteer project and it shows that citizen
science can be a great tool to answer scientific questions such as 'is
most recent global warming man-made?', where we now know 97% of
researchers say 'yes'. We had coauthors from the US, Canada, Germany
& Australia and most of us had to fit it around our 'day jobs'.
Thanks to my PhD work I've done with NCEO I felt confident about being
able to understand the research we were looking at. Comparison of our
work with the judgments of the authors of the papers shows that we can
be confident we did a good job.
In some ways I feel a bit strange about the attention the paper
got: it wasn't new work and there are loads of excellent scientists
doing a great job exploring the forefront of human knowledge. But we
got some attention because we focused on a question that a lot of
people want to know the answer to, and we were able to give what I
think is a clear answer."
See also: https://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR507153.aspx
