16 May 2013
| Source:
Environmental Research Letters
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, the study has been published today, Thursday
16 May, in IOP Publishing’s journal
Environmental Research Letters.
The
study went one step further, asking the authors of these papers to rate
their entire paper using the same criteria. Over 2000 papers were rated
and among those that discussed the cause of recent global warming, 97
per cent endorsed the consensus that it is caused by humans.
The
findings are in stark contrast to the public’s position on global
warming; a 2012 poll* revealed that more than half of Americans either
disagree, or are unaware, that scientists overwhelmingly agree that the
Earth is warming because of human activity.
John Cook said: “Our
findings prove that there is a strong scientific agreement about the
cause of climate change, despite public perceptions to the contrary.
“There
is a gaping chasm between the actual consensus and the public
perception. It’s staggering given the evidence for consensus that less
than half of the general public think scientists agree that humans are
causing global warming.
“This is significant because when people
understand that scientists agree on global warming, they’re more likely
to support policies that take action on it.”
In March 2012, the
researchers used the ISI Web of Science database to search for
peer-reviewed academic articles published between 1991 and 2011 using
two topic searches: “global warming” and “global climate change”.
After
limiting the selection to peer-reviewed climate science, the study
considered 11 994 papers written by 29 083 authors in 1980 different
scientific journals.
The abstracts from these papers were randomly
distributed between a team of 24 volunteers recruited through the
“myth-busting” website
skepticalscience.com, who used set
criteria to determine the level to which the abstracts endorsed that
humans are the primary cause of global warming. Each abstract was
analyzed by two independent, anonymous raters.
From the 11 994
papers, 32.6 per cent endorsed AGW, 66.4 per cent stated no position on
AGW, 0.7 per cent rejected AGW and in 0.3 per cent of papers, the
authors said the cause of global warming was uncertain.
Co-author
of the study Mark Richardson, from the University of Reading, said: "We
want our scientists to answer questions for us, and there are lots of
exciting questions in climate science. One of them is: are we causing
global warming? We found over 4000 studies written by 10 000 scientists
that stated a position on this, and 97 per cent said that recent warming
is mostly man made.”
Visitors to the
skepticalscience.com website also raised the funds required to allow the study to be accessible to the public.
Daniel Kammen, editor-in-chief of the journal
Environmental Research Letters, said: “"This paper demonstrates the power of the
Environmental Research Letters
open access model of operation in that authors working to advance our
knowledge of climate science and to engage in a public discourse can
guarantee all interested parties have the opportunity to review the same
data and findings."
*
http://www.pewresearch.org/2013/04/02/climate-change-key-data-points-from-pew-research/
No comments:
Post a Comment