97% consensus

belaTED it's a Meme? thus target, like hockey stick?

8 25 KRK INCLUDES GENRAL NOTION OF SCI CONSENSUS

NO MERRI

see alex epstein BS ~

confirms oreskes 97%

Earlier this month, John Cook of Skeptical Scienceand his team of volunteers at the Consensus Project released the latest definitive study of global warming scientific consensus, revealing that 97 percent of peer-reviewed papers with a clear view on the subject agree that global warming is occurring and that humans are the primary cause.

Ever since, we've seen the predictable pushback from fossil fuel industry apologists and climate deniers.

The loudest response comes from the Alberta-based Friends of Science, a shadowy non-profit with a history of Canadian oil company ties, which DeSmogBlog has covered extensively over the years.

From their press release:

http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/5910

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mma

August 19, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show SALEM

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): You've taken on the entire kind of climate science world. Energy department attacks climate science in contentious report. By the way, you're in safe company here. We think this is all politicized. This is driven towards a environmentalist agenda that is trying to weaken American energy dominance. The agency asked five client skeptics to write a report criticizing the consensus on global warming.

First of all, science does not have consensus. This is a very important thing. Right? Science says nothing. Scientists say things. Okay? Science never talks. Science is silent. This is a good thing that could apply to everything. Scientists say things. And scientists, like we learned during COVID, we learned during the lockdowns, learned during the vaccines, can say a lot of different things with the data.

Now, again, global warming does not have consensus like the second law of thermodynamics. Global warming does not have consensus like a object at rest will stay at rest. Your reaction, Mr. Secretary, and how you think about this because they — again, let me read this New York Times article, The consensus on global warming. What an outrageous claim. Your thoughts, sir.

CHRIS WRIGHT (GUEST): Yeah. I always give the contrast between the science, which is what the left likes, which is the opposite of science. Science is a process of challenge and engagement and debate and wrestling with data. And if the data doesn't agree with your model, your model is wrong. Where the science is this top-down, authority-driven thing used with COVID to me was the climate movement in fast forward. The science told you what to do.

But as you said, Charlie, look at those critics. They critique the authors. Five skeptics. Well, skeptical of what? They presented — these are five highly distinguished scientists. One of them was undersecretary for science in the Obama administration, provost at Caltech, PhD from MIT. All of those scientists were accomplished scientists that are also tired of this censorship of the science, censoring real science and real process of engagement. But even on my CNN interview a couple weeks ago, I went on to talk about the climate report. There are zero questions about climate change. Zero. They want to impugn the writers or impugn the way we reference people. They want to find little things. What we want to talk about is the data.

Let's talk about climate science. Like, it's a real phenomenon. It's a slow-moving phenomenon, not even remotely close to the world's biggest problem, but it's used by the left to justify big government and top-down control of everything. Let's be honest. Let's engage in real science, as you said. That's what we're about. And I'm excited to have that debate over four years. We're going to end a lot of children's nightmares. We're going to end a lot of people trying to be pushed around and bullied by people that don't know what they're talking about. Like, I've spent twenty years studying climate science as physical data, and the people who were passionate about it never want to debate me because they don't know anything about it. But we're going to have that debate whether they want it or not.

KIRK: Science is a process. It doesn't tell you anything. People tell you. Science is a method. It's a methodology. And good science, which again is a verb, they they act as if, well, science, you know, puts something out. No. You do science. You go in exploration of truth. And then once you have a conclusion, you have to measure it, you have to analyze it, you have to inquire it, you have to cross-reference it. And by the way, we're bringing back that methodology to our government, RFK at HHS, and you at the Department of Energy.

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https://www.desmog.com/2022/11/30/heartland-institutes-survey-actually-supports-the-97-climate-science-consensus-its-trying-to-attack/

the Heartland Institute, a self-described free-market think tank notorious for its climate science denial efforts, is at it again. This time, Heartland is frantically spinning the results of a survey it commissioned in its latest attempt to dispute the robust scientific consensus on climate change.

To be clear, climate experts overwhelmingly agree that climate change is happening and that humans are primarily responsible. And there’s plenty of evidence about that consensus.

For example, cognitive scientist John Cook and his colleagues examined almost 12,000 abstracts of scientific papers on climate change and global warming published over a 20-year span and found, among the abstracts expressing a position, that upward of 97% accepted that human activity is responsible for the recent increase in average global temperature. They published these results in 2013 in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters.

That result wasn’t a fluke, either. Multiple independent studies using different methods have consistently produced estimates of the extent of scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change among climate scientists. And these estimates converge in the neighborhood of 97%, endowing the number with a certain iconic status.

Yet the headline of a recent Heartland Institute press release on its new survey blared, “97% consensus on climate change? Survey shows only 59% of scientists expect significant harm.” The survey in question was conducted by a survey research unit at Fairleigh Dickinson University — but the desperate contortions to spin its results are classic Heartland.

The fun begins with Heartland’s definition of scientists. The various studies establishing the scientific consensus on climate change generally survey expert scientific opinion, by either inspecting articles on climate change that appear in the peer-reviewed scientific research literature or directly polling the authors of such articles, who typically have earned doctoral degrees in relevant areas of science.

In the Heartland-commissioned survey, however, although the respondents were required to have earned degrees in climatology, meteorology, physics, geology, or hydrology, the majority of them — 76% — attained only a bachelor’s degree, and just 6% earned a Ph.D. Revealingly, only 11% of the 400 respondents reported that their professional activity was best described as research.

So comparing the results of the Heartland-commissioned survey with those of the studies establishing the scientific consensus on climate change is like comparing apples with oranges — equating the opinions of people with a modicum of past exposure to the relevant science with those of scientists currently engaged in advancing scientific knowledge about climate change.

Even so, the survey report reveals that 96% of the respondents to the Heartland-commissioned survey accept that global climate change is occurring. Asked to estimate what percentage of climate change is due to human activity, 92% of the respondents selected a value between 51 and 100%, with the average estimate at 75%. These figures are, of course, not far from the iconic 97% consensus.

For a long time, the Heartland Institute has been heavily invested in disputing the scientific consensus on climate change — and not always tastefully. Back in 2012, it erected a billboard in a Chicago suburb, not far from its headquarters, featuring a glowering photograph of the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, whose bombing campaign killed three and injured nearly two dozen. The billboard read: “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” That stunt was offensive enough for the group to lose a number of its corporate backers.

In 2017, in a campaign with a broader potential effect, the Heartland Institute mailed unsolicited packets of climate denial propaganda, including a booklet entitled “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming,” to up to 200,000 public school teachers across the country. Thankfully, the main response of science teachers was to deposit the mailing in the nearest recycling bin. As a welcome side effect, the campaign motivated some educators to redouble their efforts to educate teachers about climate science.

But now, in 2022, Heartland’s own commissioned survey undermines its central message, by confirming the 97% consensus. Amusingly, the Heartland representatives quoted in its press release can’t quite look the facts squarely in the face. “So, climate change? Yes. Humans responsible for most of it? The poll says, ‘yes,’” H. Sterling Burnett, Heartland’s environmental and climate policy center director says, as if he were mistrustful of his own poll.

But that’s not all. Even the press release’s headline is a bait-and-switch. The fact that 59% of respondents to the survey think that global climate change will cause significant harm to people alive today is wholly irrelevant to the estimate of the extent of scientific consensus on climate change. None of the 97% research addressed the issue of the harmful effects of climate change. Yet Heartland focuses on this issue as it tries to snatch a delusive victory from the jaws of statistical defeat.

Unfortunately for Heartland, there is ample evidence, albeit not from survey research, that there is a scientific consensus on the significant harm that climate change will cause — and indeed is causing. For example, in a report this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarized that “Human-induced climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme events, has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people, beyond natural climate variability.” The IPCC’s reports are produced with the input of leading scientists around the world and undergo rigorous and comprehensive review: they represent expert scientific opinion.

The Heartland Institute, for its part, routinely dismisses the IPCC’s credibility — without any evidence— while disseminating publications produced by something misleadingly called the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), a network that Heartland itself sponsors. In 2011, a news article in the journal Naturedescribed the NIPCC as ignoring “mountains of evidence about the adverse effects of global warming.” That remains sadly accurate.

The Heartland Institute’s recent press release represents yet another attempt to cloud the scientific consensus in order to delay, derail, or degrade action on climate change. Unfortunately, it won’t be the last — or, perhaps, the most absurd.

Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a non-profit organization that defends and promotes the teaching of evolution and climate change.

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heritage BS ctr data anal

...A common claim among proponents of action on climate change is that the overwhelming majority of climatologists agree on global warming science. One commonly cited statistic is that 97 percent of climatologists agree on global warming. This 97 percent number is recited and embellished by politicians and environmental activist organizations pushing to decarbonize America and the world’s energy sector. In a 2014 commencement speech at Boston College, Secretary of StateJohn Kerry said, “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.”[[2]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn2) This is, in fact, not the case.

The figure comes from a 2013 Cook et al. study in Environmental Research Letters that examines the abstracts of nearly 12,000 academic papers on climate change and global warming between 1991–2011. Of those papers, 66.4 percent expressed no opinion on anthropogenic warming, 32.6 percent “endorsed” anthropogenic warming, 0.7 percent rejected anthropogenic warming, and 0.3 percent were unsure of the cause.[[3]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn3) Of the 33.6 percent expressing an opinion on man-made global warming, “97.1 percent endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”[[4]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn4) Importantly, the claim says nothing about urgency or danger.

Cook’s paper was the subject of much criticism. Richard Tol, a professor at the University of Sussex, warned that “[t]his claim, frequently repeated in debates about climate policy, does not stand. A trend in composition is mistaken for a trend in endorsement. Reported results are inconsistent and biased. The sample is not representative and contains many irrelevant papers. Overall, data quality is low.”[[5]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn5)David R. Legates,former director of University of Delaware’s Center for Climatic Research, along with three other researchers, analyzed the same set of papers in the Cook study. They found that a mere 0.3 percent of all papers, or 1 percent of the 4,014 papers expressing an opinion on the matter, claim that the majority of warming since 1950 is man-made.[[6]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn6)

Further, the Cook et al. study is misleading as to what there is consensus on and glosses over major points of uncertainty and disagreement in the scientific community.To be clear, Cook et al. do not attempt to quantify how much global warming is man-made, or even say that man-made emissions contribute to the majority of global warming. The specific or even generalized amount of warming caused by anthropogenic emissions, according to Cook’s study, is undetermined. Furthermore, the search terms Cook used to aggregate the climate papers excluderesearch papers from climate “skeptics,” such as MIT atmospheric physicist and former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contributor Dr. Richard Lindzen.[[7]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn7)

The 97 percent statistic is nothing more than a false talking point; no overwhelming consensus exists among climatologists on the magnitude of future warming or on the urgency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Biases in Climate Research.There is increasing concern that climate science and scientific reviews are no longer truly independent. The state of climate science should be concerning to everyone, regardless of where scientific evidence leads and how policymakers choose to act on scientific knowledge.

The IPCChas had a powerful role in defining the scientific and political conversation and conclusions about global warming, especially through its guide for policymakers. Itsprematurely declared “consensus” that global warming is dangerous, accelerating, and instigated by carbon dioxide (CO2) has had a far-reaching influence, conflating scientific research with certain economic, energy, agricultural, and social policies. Many scientists and scientific institutions consequently have become quasi-political lobbies.[[8]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn8)

The U.S. is not insulated from the political biasing of climate science; in fact, it actively contributes to it. U.S. taxpayers help fund the IPCC, having contributed $10 million in 2015,[[9]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn9) in addition to the $22 billion spent within federal agencies.[[10]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn10) Rather than fostering scientific discovery in a field that is a mere few decades old, the U.S. government instead appears to express bias in funding science that supports federal climate policies.[[11]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn11) And while there has been relatively little comprehensive study into the government’s potential conflict of interest, there have been numerous personal reports of government bias in climate research.As Dr. Judith Curry, climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences of the Georgia Institute of Technology, recently testified before Congress:

I recently received [an e-mail] from a scientist employed at NASA: “I was at a small meeting of NASA-affiliated scientists and was told by our top manager that he was told by his NASA boss that we should not try to publish papers contrary to the current global warming claims, because he (the NASA boss) would then have a headache countering the ‘undesirable’ publicity.”[[12]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn12)

In addition, there have been high profile efforts to stifle non-government research that challenges global-warming catastrophism. For instance, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D–RI) proposed criminal investigations into scientists and funding organizations for what he and others deemed “a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead the American people” on climate science.[[13]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn13)

Frequently avoiding discussion on the merits of the science, critics of skeptics attempt, instead, to discredit the speaker.[[14]](https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-state-climate-science-no-justification-extreme-policies#_ftn14) Some scientists who were otherwise well-respected in the international scientific community have faced incredible pressure directed at their character rather than the quality of their science. For instance, Professor Lennart Bengsston, acclaimed Swedish meteorologist,gave some concerning reasons for his resignation just weeks after joining the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF):

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https://www.heartland.org/policybot/?author=david-t-stevenson

random bs

NOVEMBER 10, 2022

No Consensus on Climate Crisis, Scientist Survey Finds

By H. Sterling Burnett

NOVEMBER 10, 2022

The Systemic Racism of the Teachers' Unions

By Larry Sand

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

Re-elected Governor Newsom’s Energy Literacy Will Be Challenged Over the Next 4 Years

By Ronald Stein, P.E.

badish code no lnx

E-ELECTED GOVERNOR NEWSOM’S ENERGY LITERACY WILL BE CHALLENGED OVER THE NEXT 4 YEARS

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

By Ronald Stein, P.E.

Maybe Newsom will produce a plan in the next four years to finance the billions of dollars for the roads being used by EV’s or just pass that problem on to his predecessor.

Despite Newsom’s statewide policy decisions that are driving up costs of energy in the state, only a few Californians are upset with the ever-increasing costs for their electricity and gasoline, resulting in the excessive costs of living, increasing homelessness and crime. But most voters have just showed their approval of the bizarre energy policies that Newsom promotes and wish to incur four more years of financial torture.

The continuous exodus of residents from the state has resulted in a loss of a representative in Washington for the first time in its 171-year history. Departing residents are being followed by large corporations and privately owned businesses that have moved their headquarters out of California in 2021 at twice their rate in both 2020 and 2019 and at three times their rate in 2018.

California has a history of having the highest gasoline prices in the country. Why? For one, the West Coast fuels market is isolated from other supply/demand centers as California is an energy island. The Sierra Mountains are a natural barrier that prevents the state from pipeline access to any of that excess oil. As such, the West Coast is susceptible to unexpected outages of West Coast refineries as it is unable to backfill an unexpected loss in supply by quickly supplying additional products from outside of the region.

Newsom is emphatically complaining that the oil companies are making outlandish profits, but he may be out of touch with reality as two California refineries have shut down under his current watch and two more may be closing in his new term.

Under Newsom’s watch in the last few years, two of California’s refineries have virtually shut down and are no longer manufacturing gasoline, aviation fuels, or any oil derivatives. Those two, Phillips66 at Rodeo and Marathon at Martinez, are now only focusing on renewable diesel.

More financial sad news may occur under Newsom’s next term with the permanent closure of two more California refineries, the Chevron Refinery at Richmond and the PBF Refinery at Martinez. If the courts uphold the 2021 Bay Area Air Quality Management (BAAQMD) rule 6-5 for a further reduction in particulate emissions, both have stated that they will shut down before spending one billion dollars to retrofit their refineries to comply with further particulate emission reductions.

The world has seen the impact on Germany and Britain with their dependency on Russia for most of its energy, but for the 4th largest economy in the world, in California, Newsom already has the State more than 56 percent dependent on imported crude oil, but continuously seeks further reductions of in-state oil production that places greater dependency on foreign countries.

California’s growing dependency on foreign countries is a national security risk for all of America. Does Newsom expect a better outcome than what Germany and Britain experienced by not controlling more of its energy future demands?

I’m sure that Newsom had a chance to view the 2006 movie “Blood Diamonds” starring Leonardo DiCaprio that portrays many of the similar atrocities now occurring in pursuit of the “Blood Minerals” i.e., those exotic minerals and metals to support the “green” movement within wealthy countries that continue promoting environmental degradation to landscapes in developing countries, and imposes humanity atrocities to citizens with yellow, brown, and black skinned workers being exploited for the green movement of the few wealthy nations.

Despite the Biden administration’s declaration that EV battery materials from China may be tainted by child labor made with materials known to be produced with child or forced labor, Newsom continues to support subsidies to procure EV’s and build more wind and solar when those subsidies are providing financial incentives to the developing countries mining for those “green” materials that promotes further exploitations of poor people in developing countries. I personally thought that Newsom had higher moral and ethical standards that would stop him from exploiting the poor in developing countries.

Newsom seems to be oblivious to the reality that everything that needs electricity is made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil, but Newsom continues to support wind and solar that only generate intermittent electricity but cannot manufacture anything for society. Newsom has yet to identify a replacement for the oil derivatives that are the basis of more than 6,000 products and fuels for our various transportation infrastructures, and the economy.

Life Without Oil is NOT AS SIMPLE AS NEWSOM MAY THINK as renewable energy is only intermittent electricity from breezes and sunshine as NEITHER wind turbines nor solar panels can manufacture anything for society. Climate change may impact humanity but being mandated to live without the products manufactured from oil will necessitate lifestyles being mandated back to the horse and buggy days of the 1800’s and could be the greatest threat to civilization’s eight billion residents.

In Newsom’s all-electric world, Newsom’s bizarre energy policies reflect his believes that all the infrastructures developed in less than two centuries, from the products manufactured from crude oil, are NOT needed by future societies, such as medical, electronics, communications, and the many transportation infrastructures such as airlines, merchant ships, automobiles, trucks, military, and the space programs.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), California’s high cost of electricity is already fifty percent higher than the national average for residents, and double the national averages for commercial, and are projected to go even higher.

California is the nation’s top producer of electricity from solar, geothermal, and biomass, but the inability to replace the closure of continuously uninterruptable electricity from nuclear and natural gas power plants with intermittent electricity from renewables is causing the state to import more of its electricity.

Again, under Newsom’s watch, the EIA says that California imports more electricity than any other US state, more than twice the amount of Virginia, the second largest importer of electricity.

Newsom’s policies continue to force California to be the only state in contiguous America that imports most of its crude oil energy from foreign countries. That dependence has increased imported crude oil from foreign countries from 5 percent in 1992 to 56 percent today of total consumption.

At today’s price of crude oil approaching $100 per barrel the imported crude oil costs California more than $150 million dollars a day, yes, every day, being paid to oil-rich foreign countries, depriving Californians of jobs and business opportunities, and drivers to pay these premium prices for fuel.

Richer countries now have higher gasoline prices, while poorer countries and countries that produce and export oil have lower cost for fuels. A review of global petroleum gasoline prices per gallon in U.S. dollars shows the international intelligence and trends of gasoline prices of the wealthy countries that have opted to go “green” at any cost, compared with poorer countries and countries that produce and export oil.

Another issue that Newsom will not discuss is funding for future road maintenance. Newsom has mandated no sales of internal combustion engine vehicles after 2035 but appears incapable of acknowledging that heavier EV’s contribute nothing for road maintenance and repairs. California has almost 400,000 miles of roadways that are heavily dependent on road taxes from fuels that contribute more than $8.8 billion annually, the same tax base that also funds the environmental programs that will be diminishing in the decades ahead.

Maybe Newsom will produce a plan in the next four years to finance the billions of dollars for the roads being used by EV’s or just pass that problem on to his predecessor.

California voters had a chance to recall Newsom in 2021 but chose to support his bizarre and expensive energy policies. Following the failed recall, Newsom was just re-elected by the voters that are willing to accept the highest energy costs in America. Voters support his avoidance of addressing those tough energy policy questions that would expose his limited energy literacy over the next four years of financial torture upon the working class that voted for him.

97-percent-climate-consensus-busted

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

97% Consensus on Climate Change? Survey Shows Only 59% of Scientists Expect Significant Harm

By James Taylor, H. Sterling Burnett, Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken

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:{'97% Of Climate Scientists Agree' Is 100% Wrong - Forbes:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Jan 6, 2015If you look at the literature, the specific meaning of the 97% claim is: 97 percent of climate scientists agree that there is a global warming trend and that human beings are the main cause--that...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/10/climate-change-no-its-not-97-percent-consensus-ian-tuttle/

no lnx many

POLITICS & POLICY

The 97 Percent Solution

By IAN TUTTLE

October 8, 2015

Unable to address Texas senator Ted Cruz’s questions about “the Pause” — the apparent global-warming standstill, now almost 19 years long — at Tuesday’s meeting of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, Sierra Club president Aaron Mair, after an uncomfortable pause of his own, appealed to authority: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists concur and agree that there is global warming and anthropogenic impact,” he stated multiple times.

The relevant exchange begins at 1:39 (though the whole segment is worth watching):

The myth of an almost-unanimous climate-change consensus is pervasive. Last May, the White House tweeted: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” A few days later, Secretary of State John Kerry announced, “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.”

“Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists” say no such thing.

There are multiple relevant questions: (1) Has the earth generally warmed since 1800? (An overwhelming majority of scientists assent to this.) (2) Has that warming been caused primarily by human activity? And, if (1) and (2), is anthropogenic global warming a problem so significant that we ought to take action?

In 2004, University of California-San Diego professor Naomi Oreskes reported that, of 928 scientific abstracts from papers published by refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, “75% . . . either explicitly or implicitly accept[ed] the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.” Also remarkably, the papers chosen excluded several written by prominent scientists skeptical of that consensus. Furthermore, the claims made in abstracts — short summaries of academic papers — often differ from those made in the papers themselves. And Oreskes’s analysis did not take up whether scientists who subscribe to anthropogenic global warming think the phenomenon merits changes in public policy.

RELATED: On Climate, Science and Politics Are Diverging

The “97 percent” statistic first appeared prominently in a 2009 study by University of Illinois master’s student Kendall Zimmerman and her adviser, Peter Doran. Based on a two-question online survey, Zimmerman and Doran concluded that “the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific bases of long-term climate processes” — even though only 5 percent of respondents, or about 160 scientists, were climate scientists. In fact, the “97 percent” statistic was drawn from an even smaller subset: the 79 respondents who were both self-reported climate scientists and had “published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change.” These 77 scientists agreed that global temperatures had generally risen since 1800, and that human activity is a “significant contributing factor.”

A year later, William R. Love Anderegg, a student at Stanford University, used Google Scholar to determine that “97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here support the tenets of ACC [anthropogenic climate change] outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” The sample size did not much improve on Zimmerman and Doran’s: Anderegg surveyed about 200 scientists.

#share#Surely the most suspicious “97 percent” study was conducted in 2013 by Australian scientist John Cook— author of the 2011 book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand and creator of the blog Skeptical Science (subtitle: “Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism.”). In an analysis of 12,000 abstracts, he found “a 97% consensus among papers taking a position on the cause of global warming in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are responsible.” “Among papers taking a position” is a significant qualifier:

Only 34 percent of the papers Cook examined expressed any opinion about anthropogenic climate change at all. Since 33 percent appeared to endorse anthropogenic climate change, he divided 33 by 34 and — voilà — 97 percent!

When David Legates,a University of Delaware professor who formerly headed the university’s Center for Climatic Research, recreated Cook’s study, he found that “only 41 papers — 0.3 percentof all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent,” endorsed what Cook claimed.Several scientists whose papers were included in Cook’s initial sample also protested that they had been misinterpreted. “Significant questions about anthropogenic influences on climate remain,” Legates concluded.

RELATED: Scientists Don’t Actually Know What’s Causing ‘Extreme Weather’]

Studies showing a wider range of opinion often go unremarked. A 2008 survey by two German scientists, Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, found that a significant number of scientists were skeptical of the ability of existing global climate models to accurately predict global temperatures, precipitation, sea-level changes, or extreme weather events even over a decade; they were far more skeptical as the time horizon increased. Most did express concerns about global warming and a desire for “immediate action to mitigate climate change” — but not 97 percent.

#related#

A 2012 poll of American Meteorological Society members also reported a diversity of opinion. Of the 1,862 members who responded (a quarter of the organization), 59 percent stated that human activity was the primary cause of global warming, and 11 percent attributed the phenomenon to human activity and natural causes in about equal measure, while just under a quarter (23 percent) said enough is not yet known to make any determination. Seventy-six percent said that warming over the next century would be “very” or “somewhat” harmful, but of those, only 22 percent thought that “all” or a “large” amount of the harm could be prevented “through mitigation and adaptation measures.”

And according to a study of 1,868 scientists working in climate-related fields, conducted just this year by the PBL Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency, three in ten respondents said that less than half of global warming since 1951 could be attributed to human activity, or that they did not know.

Given the politics of modern academia and the scientific community, it’s not unlikely that most scientists involved in climate-related studies believe in anthropogenic global warming, and likely believe, too, that it presents a problem. However, there is no consensus approaching 97 percent. A vigorous, vocal minority exists. The science is far from settled.

IAN TUTTLE is the former Thomas L. Rhodes Journalism Fellow at the National Review Institute. @iptuttle

bray ~ 97%

:{https://www.:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{forbes.:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{com/sites/uhenergy/2016/12/14/fact-checking-the-97-consensus-on-anthropogenic-climate-change/:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

no grag lnx

Dec 14, 2016

Fact Checking The Claim Of 97% Consensus On Anthropogenic Climate Change

University ofHouston Energy Fellows

Energy

We are thought leaders in energy from the University of Houston.

POST WRITTEN BY

Earl J. Ritchie, Lecturer, Department of Construction Management

This article is more than 5 years old.

The claim that there is a 97% consensus among scientists that humans are the cause of global warming is widely made in climate change literature and by political figures. It has been heavily publicized, often in the form of pie charts, as illustrated by this figure from the Consensus Project.

(Graph by The Consensus Project)

The 97% figure has been disputed and vigorously defended, with emotional arguments and counterarguments published in a number of papers. Although the degree of consensus is only one of several arguments for anthropogenic climate change – the statements of professional societies and evidence presented in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are others – there is data to suggest that support is lower. In this post, I attempt to determine whether the 97% consensus is fact or fiction.

The 97% number was popularized by two articles, the first by Naomi Oreskes, now Professor of Science History and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, and the second by a group of authors led by John Cook, the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland. Both papers were based on analyses of earlier publications. Other analyses and surveys arrive at different, often lower, numbers depending in part on how support for the concept was defined and on the population surveyed.

This public discussion was started by Oreskes’ brief 2004 article, which included an analysis of 928 papers containing the keywords “global climate change.” The article says “none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position” of anthropogenic global warming. Although this article makes no claim to a specific number, it is routinely described as indicating 100% agreement and used as support for the 97% figure.

In a 2007 book chapter, Oreskes infers that the lack of expressed dissent “demonstrates that any remaining professional dissent is now exceedingly minor.” The chapter revealed that there were about 235 papers in the 2004 article, or 25%, that endorsed the position. An additional 50% were interpreted to have implicitly endorsed, primarily on the basis that they discussed evaluation of impacts. Authors addressing impacts might believe that the Earth is warming without believing it is anthropogenic. In the article, Oreskes said some authors she counted "might believe that current climate change is natural." It is impossible to tell from this analysis how many actually believed it. On that basis, I find that this study does not support the 97% number.

The most influential and most debated article was the 2013 paper by Cook,et al., which popularized the 97% figure. The authors used methodology similar to Oreskes but based their analysis on abstracts rather than full content. I do not intend to reopen the debate over this paper. Instead, let’s consider it along with some of the numerous other surveys available.

Reviews of published surveys were published in 2016 by Cook and his collaborators and by Richard S. J. Tol, Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex.The 2016 Cook paper, which reviews 14 published analyses and includes among its authors Oreskes and several authors of the papers shown in the chart below, concludes that the scientific consensus “is robust, with a range of 90%–100% depending on the exact question, timing and sampling methodology.” The chart shows the post-2000 opinions summarized in Table 1 of the paper. Dates given are those of the survey, not the publication date. I’ve added a 2016 survey of meteorologists from George Mason University and omitted the Oreskes article.

The classification of publishing and non-publishing is that used by Cook and his collaborators. These categories are intended to be measures of how active the scientists in the sample analyzed have been in writing peer-reviewed articles on climate change. Because of different methodology, that information is not available in all of the surveys. The categorization should be considered an approximation. The chart shows that over half the surveys in the publishing category and all the surveys in the non-publishing category are below 97%.

Scientists Opinions of Human-Caused Global Warming

(Graph by IOPScience)

Cook is careful to describe his 2013 study results as being based on “climate experts.” Political figures and the popular press are not so careful. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have repeatedly characterized it as 97% of scientists. Kerry has gone so far as to say that “97 percent of peer-reviewed climate studies confirm that climate change is happening and that human activity is largely responsible.” This is patently wrong, since the Cook study and others showed that the majority of papers take no position. One does not expect nuance in political speeches, and the authors of scientific papers cannot be held responsible for the statements of politicians and the media.

Given these results, it is clear that support among scientists for human-caused climate change is below 97%. Most studies including specialties other than climatologists find support in the range of 80% to 90%. The 97% consensus of scientists, when used without limitation to climate scientists, is false.

In the strict sense, the 97% consensus is false, even when limited to climate scientists. The 2016 Cook review found the consensus to be “shared by 90%–100% of publishing climate scientists.”One survey found it to be 84%.Continuing to claim 97% support is deceptive. I find the 97% consensus of climate scientists to be overstated.

An important consideration in this discussion is that we are attempting to define a single number to represent a range of opinions which have many nuances. To begin with, as Oreskes says, “often it is challenging to determine exactly what the authors of the paper[s] do think about global climate change.” In addition, published surveys vary in methodology. They do not ask the same questions in the same format, are collected by different sampling methods, and are rated by different individuals who may have biases. These issues are much discussed in the literature on climate change, including in the articles discussed here.

The range of opinions and the many factors affecting belief in anthropogenic climate change cannot be covered here. The variety of opinion can be illustrated by one graph from the 2013 repeat of the Bray and von Storch survey showing the degree of belief that recent or future climate change is due to or will be caused by human activity. A value of 1 indicates not convinced and a value of 7 is very much convinced. The top three values add to 81%, roughly in the range of several other surveys.

A survey of the perceptions of climate scientists 2013 (Graph by DennisBray & Hans von Storch)

Even though belief is clearly below 97%, support over 80% is strong consensus. Would a lower level of consensus convince anyone concerned about anthropogenic global warming to abandon their views and advocate unrestricted burning of fossil fuels? I think not. Even the 2016 Cook paper says “From a broader perspective, it doesn’t matter if the consensus number is 90% or 100%.”

Despite the difficulty in defining a precise number and the opinion that the exact number is not important, 97% continues to be widely publicized and defended. One might ask why 97% is important.Perhaps it’s because 97% has marketing value. It sounds precise and says that only 3% disagree. By implication, that small number who disagree must be out of the mainstream: cranks, chronic naysayers, or shills of the fossil fuel industry. They are frequently described as a “tiny minority.” It’s not as easy to discount dissenters if the number is 10 or 15 percent.

The conclusions of the IPCC are the other most often cited support for anthropogenic climate change. These conclusions are consensus results of a committee with thousands of contributors. Although this is often viewed as a monolithic conclusion, the nature of committee processes makes it virtually certain that there are varying degrees of agreement, similar to what was shown in the Bray and von Storch survey. The Union of Concerned Scientists says of the IPCC process “it would be clearly unrealistic to aim for unanimous agreement on every aspect of the report.” Perhaps this is a subject for another day.

Earl J. Ritchie is a retired energy executive and teaches a course on the oil and gas industry at the University of Houston. He has 35 years’ experience in the industry. He started as a geophysicist with Mobil Oil and subsequently worked in a variety of management and technical positions with several independent exploration and production companies. Ritchie retired as Vice President and General Manager of the offshore division of EOG Resources in 2007. Prior to his experience in the oil industry, he served at the US Air Force Special Weapons Center, providing geologic and geophysical support to nuclear research activities.

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website.

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We represent University of Houston students and faculty, appointed as UH Energy Fellows from across the energy-related colleges to ensure the subject is covered from a wide array of viewpoints as we seek to engage the public, other thought leaders and policymakers in a national conversation about energy. The University offers expertise in a range of energy-related areas,including international natural resource law and development, research into the science, engineering, economics, logistics and policy surrounding hydraulic fracturing and unconventional resources, offshore drilling,alternative energy, sustainability and energy conservation. In addition, UH offers the nation’sfirst subsea engineering program, a minor in Energy and Sustainabilityand is a research powerhouse with two energy related federally funded national research centers - one researching high-temperature superconductivity and electric energy storage and one concerned with the sustainable and safe development of energy resources in the Gulf of Mexico. Read Less

desmog

May 17, 2016

Writing at RealClear Energy, Doug Domenech cites a Heritage Foundation study as proof that the 97% consensus of scientists on man-made climate change is a “myth”: [13]

“On Earth Day, The Heritage Foundation published, ‘The State of Climate Science: No Justification for Extreme Policies.’ The report reviews much of what climate apologists insist is true including the myth that 97 percent of all climate scientists agree on global warming. That is a powerful rhetorical point and often quoted by the President, but it is also false and based on a faulty review of the abstracts of a limited number of papers,” [elsewhere calimed 77 papers?] Domenech wrote. [13]

“There is little doubt that the proposed solution to the CO2 ‘problem’ will be all-pain with no-gain. The high cost will produce animmeasurable difference in CO2 concentrations,” he added. [13]

https://www.desmogblog.com/2016/04/14/new-meta-study-confirms-consensus-97-publishing-climate-scientists-agree-we-causing-global-warming

By John Cook, The University of Queensland

When we published a paper in 2013 finding 97% scientific consensus on human-caused global warming, what surprised me was how surprised everyone was.

Ours wasn’t the first study to find such a scientific consensus. Nor was it the second. Nor were we the last.

Nevertheless, no-one I spoke to was aware of the existing research into such a consensus. Rather, the public thought there was a 50:50 debate among scientists on the basic question of whether human activity was causing global warming.

This lack of awareness is reflected in a recent pronouncement by Senator Ted Cruz (currently competing with Donald Trump in the Republican primaries), who: The stat about the 97% of scientists is based on one discredited study.

Why is a US Senator running for President attacking University of Queensland research on scientific agreement? Cruz’s comments are the latest episode in a decades-long campaign to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on climate change.

Back in 2002, a Republican pollster advised conservatives to attack the consensus in order to win the public debate about climate policy. Conservatives complied. In conservative opinion pieces about climate change from 2007 to 2010, their number one argument was “there is no scientific consensus on climate change.”

Recent psychological research has shown that the persistent campaign to confuse the public about scientific agreement has significant societal consequences. Public perception of consensus has been shown to be a “gateway belief,” influencing a range of other climate attitudes and beliefs.

People’s awareness of the scientific consensus affects their acceptance of climate change, and their support for climate action.

The psychological importance of perceived consensus underscores why communicating the 97% consensus is important. Consensus messaging has been shown empirically to increase acceptance of climate change.

And, crucially, it’s most effective on those who are most likely to reject climate science: political conservatives.

In other words, consensus messaging has a neutralising effect, which is especially important given the highly polarised nature of the public debate about climate change.

Expert agreement

Consequently, social scientists have urged climate scientists to communicate the scientific consensus, countering the misconception that they are still divided about human-caused global warming.

But how do you counter the myth that the 97% consensus is based on a single study?

One way is to bring together the authors of the leading consensus papers to synthesise all the existing research: a meta-study of meta-studies. We did exactly that, with a new study published in Environmental Research Letters featuring authors from seven of the leading studies into the scientific consensus on climate change.

...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science

The history of the scientific discovery of climate change began in the early 19th century when ice ages and other natural changes in paleoclimate were first suspected and the natural greenhouse effect first identified. In the late 19th century, scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change the climate. Many other theories of climate change were advanced, involving forces from volcanism to solar variation. In the 1960s, the evidence for the warming effect of carbon dioxide gas became increasingly convincing. Some scientists also pointed out that human activities that generated atmospheric aerosols (e.g., "pollution") could have cooling effects as well.

During the 1970s, scientific opinion increasingly favored the warming viewpoint. By the 1990s, as a result of improving fidelity of computer models and observational work confirming the Milankovitch theory of the ice ages, a consensus position formed: greenhouse gases were deeply involved in most climate changes and human-caused emissions were bringing discernible global warming.Since the 1990s, scientific research on climate change has included multiple disciplines and has expanded. Research has expanded our understanding of causal relations, links with historic data and ability to model climate change numerically. Research during this period has been summarized in the Assessment Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Climate change, broadly interpreted, is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions, or in the distribution of weather around the average conditions (such as more or fewer extreme weather events). Climate change is caused by factors that include oceanic processes (such as oceanic circulation), biotic processes (e.g., plants), variations in solar radiation received by Earth, plate tectonics and volcanic eruptions, and human-induced alterations of the natural world. The latter effect is currently causing global warming, and "climate change" is often used to describe human-specific impacts.

Regional changes, antiquity through 19th century

...

Increasing concerns 50's 60's:

Better spectrography in the 1950s showed that :{CO:{

2}:}: and water vapor absorption lines did not overlap completely. Climatologists also realized that little water vapor was present in the upper atmosphere. Both developments showed that the :{CO:{

2}:}: greenhouse effect would not be overwhelmed by water vapor.^[26]

In 1955 Hans Suess's carbon-14 isotope analysis showed that :{CO:{

2}:}: released from fossil fuels was not immediately absorbed by the ocean. In 1957, better understanding of ocean chemistry led Roger Revelle to a realization that the ocean surface layer had limited ability to absorb carbon dioxide, also predicting the rise in levels of :{CO:{

2}:}: and later being proven by Charles David Keeling.^[36] By the late 1950s, more scientists were arguing that carbon dioxide emissions could be a problem, with some projecting in 1959 that :{CO:{

2}:}: would rise 25% by the year 2000, with potentially "radical" effects on climate.^[26] In 1960 Charles David Keeling demonstrated that the level of :{CO:{

2}:}: in the atmosphere was in fact rising. Concern mounted year by year along with the rise of the "Keeling Curve" of atmospheric :{CO:{

2}:}:.

Another clue to the nature of climate change came in the mid-1960s from analysis of deep-sea cores by Cesare Emiliani and analysis of ancient corals by Wallace Broecker and collaborators. Rather than four long ice ages, they found a large number of shorter ones in a regular sequence. It appeared that the timing of ice ages was set by the small orbital shifts of the Milankovitch cycles. While the matter remained controversial, some began to suggest that the climate system is sensitive to small changes and can readily be flipped from a stable state into a different one.^[34]

Scientists meanwhile began using computers to develop more sophisticated versions of Arrhenius's calculations. In 1967, taking advantage of the ability of digital computers to integrate absorption curves numerically, Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald made the first detailed calculation of the greenhouse effect incorporating convection (the "Manabe-Wetherald one-dimensional radiative-convective model").^[37][38] They found that, in the absence of unknown feedbacks such as changes in clouds, a doubling of carbon dioxide from the current level would result in approximately 2 °C increase in global temperature.

By the 1960s, aerosol pollution ("smog") had become a serious local problem in many cities, and some scientists began to consider whether the cooling effect of particulate pollution could affect global temperatures. Scientists were unsure whether the cooling effect of particulate pollution or warming effect of greenhouse gas emissions would predominate, but regardless, began to suspect that human emissions could be disruptive to climate in the 21st century if not sooner.

In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Paul R. Ehrlich wrote, "the greenhouse effect is being enhanced now by the greatly increased level of carbon dioxide... [this] is being countered by low-level clouds generated by contrails, dust, and other contaminants... At the moment we cannot predict what the overall climatic results will be of our using the atmosphere as a garbage dump."^[39]

In 1965, the landmark report, "Restoring the Quality of Our Environment" by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee warned of the harmful effects of fossil fuel emissions:

The part that remains in the atmosphere may have a significant effect on climate; carbon dioxide is nearly transparent to visible light, but it is a strong absorber and back radiator of infrared radiation, particularly in the wave lengths from 12 to 18 microns; consequently, an increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide could act, much like the glass in a greenhouse, to raise the temperature of the lower air.^[28]

A 1968 study by the Stanford Research Institute for the American Petroleum Institute noted:^[40]

If the earth's temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur, including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans, and an increase in photosynthesis. [..] Revelle makes the point that man is now engaged in a vast geophysical experiment with his environment, the earth. Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000 and these could bring about climatic changes.

In 1969, NATO was the first candidate to deal with climate change on an international level.It was planned then to establish a hub of research and initiatives of the organization in the civil area, dealing with environmental topics^[41] as acid rain and the greenhouse effect. The suggestion of US President Richard Nixon was not very successful with the administration of German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger. But the topics and the preparation work done on the NATO proposal by the German authorities gained international momentum, (see e.g. the Stockholm United Nations Conference on the Human Environment 1970) as thegovernment of Willy Brandt started to apply them on the civil sphere instead.^{[41][clarification} ^needed]

Also in 1969, Mikhail Budyko published a theory on the ice-albedo feedback, a foundational element of what is today known as Arctic amplification.^[42] The same year a similar model was published by William D. Sellers.^[43] Both studies attracted significant attention, since they hinted at the possibility for a runaway positive feedback within the global climate system.^[44]

Scientists increasingly predict warming, 1970s

Mean temperature anomalies during the period 1965 to 1975 with respect to the average temperatures from 1937 to 1946. This dataset was not available at the time.

In the early 1970s, evidence that aerosols were increasing worldwide encouraged Reid Bryson and some others to warn of the possibility of severe cooling. Meanwhile, the new evidence that the timing of ice ages was set by predictable orbital cycles suggested that the climate would gradually cool, over thousands of years. For the century ahead, however, a survey of the scientific literature from 1965 to 1979 found 7 articles predicting cooling and 44 predicting warming (many other articles on climate made no prediction); the warming articles were cited much more often in subsequent scientific literature.^[45] Several scientific panels from this time period concluded that more research was needed to determine whether warming or cooling was likely, indicating that the trend in the scientific literature had not yet become a consensus.^[46][47][48]

John Sawyer published the study Man-made Carbon Dioxide and the “Greenhouse” Effect in 1972.^[49] He summarized the knowledge of the science at the time, the anthropogenic attribution of the carbon dioxide greenhouse gas, distribution and exponential rise, findings which still hold today. Additionally he accurately predicted the rate of global warming for the period between 1972 and 2000.^[50][51]

The increase of 25% CO2 expected by the end of the century therefore corresponds to an increase of 0.6°C in the world temperature – an amount somewhat greater than the climatic variation of recent centuries. – John Sawyer, 1972

The mainstream news media at the time exaggerated the warnings of the minority who expected imminent cooling. For example, in 1975, Newsweek magazine published a story that warned of "ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change."^[52] The article continued by stating that evidence of global cooling was so strong that meteorologists were having "a hard time keeping up with it."^[52] On 23 October 2006, Newsweek issued an update stating that it had been "spectacularly wrong about the near-term future".^[53]

:{In the first two "Reports for the Club of Rome" in 1972^[54] and 1974,^[55] the anthropogenic climate changes by :{CO:{

2}:}: increase as well as by waste heat were mentioned. About the latter **John Holdren** wrote in a study^[56] cited in the 1st report, “… that global thermal pollution is hardly our most immediate environmental threat. It could prove to be the most inexorable, however, if we are fortunate enough to evade all the rest.}:” Simple global-scale estimates^[57] that recently have been actualized^[58] and confirmed by more refined model calculations^[59][60] show noticeable contributions from waste heat to global warming after the year 2100, if its growth rates are not strongly reduced (below the averaged 2% p.a. which occurred since 1973).

Evidence for warming accumulated. By 1975, Manabe and Wetherald had developed a three-dimensional Global climate model that gave a roughly accurate representation of the current climate. Doubling :{CO:{

2}:}: in the model's atmosphere gave a roughly 2 °C rise in global temperature.^[61] Several other kinds of computer models gave similar results: it was impossible to make a model that gave something resembling the actual climate and not have the temperature rise when the :{CO:{

2}:}: concentration was increased.

In a separate development, an analysis of deep-sea cores published in 1976 by Nicholas Shackleton and colleagues showed that the dominating influence on ice age timing came from a 100,000-year Milankovitch orbital change. This was unexpected, since the change in sunlight in that cycle was slight. The result emphasized that the climate system is driven by feedbacks, and thus is strongly susceptible to small changes in conditions.^[10]

The 1979 World Climate Conference (12 to 23 February) of the World Meteorological Organization concluded "it appears plausible that an increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can contribute to a gradual warming of the lower atmosphere, especially at higher latitudes....It is possible that some effects on a regional and global scale may be detectable before the end of this century and become significant before the middle of the next century."^[62]

In July 1979 the United States National Research Council published a report,^[63] concluding (in part):

When it is assumed that the :{CO:{

2}:}: content of the atmosphere is doubled and statistical thermal equilibrium is achieved, the more realistic of the modeling efforts predict a global surface warming of between 2°C and 3.5°C, with greater increases at high latitudes.… we have tried but have been unable to find any overlooked or underestimated physical effects that could reduce the currently estimated global warmings due to a doubling of atmospheric :{CO:{

2}:}: to negligible proportions or reverse them altogether.

Consensus begins to form, 1980–1988

Main article: Attribution of recent climate change

Hansen and others published the 1981 study Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, and noted:By the early 1980s, the slight cooling trend from 1945–1975 had stopped. Aerosol pollution had decreased in many areas due to environmental legislation and changes in fuel use, and it became clear that the cooling effect from aerosols was not going to increase substantially while carbon dioxide levels were progressively increasing.

It is shown that the anthropogenic carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climate variability by the end of the century, and there is a high probability of warming in the 1980s. Potential effects on climate in the 21st century include the creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia as part of a shifting of climatic zones, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage.^[64]

In 1982, Greenland ice cores drilled by Hans Oeschger, Willi Dansgaard, and collaborators revealed dramatic temperature oscillations in the space of a century in the distant past.^[65] The most prominent of the changes in their record corresponded to the violent Younger Dryas climate oscillation seen in shifts in types of pollen in lake beds all over Europe. Evidently drastic climate changes were possible within a human lifetime.

In 1973 James Lovelock speculated that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) could have a global warming effect. In 1975 V. Ramanathan found that a CFC molecule could be 10,000 times more effective in absorbing infrared radiation than a carbon dioxide molecule, making CFCs potentially important despite their very low concentrations in the atmosphere. While most early work on CFCs focused on their role in ozone depletion, by 1985 Ramanathan and others showed that CFCs together with methane and other trace gases could have nearly as important a climate effect as increases in :{CO:{

2}:}:. In other words, global warming would arrive twice as fast as had been expected.^[66]

In 1985 a joint UNEP/WMO/ICSU Conference on the "Assessment of the Role of Carbon Dioxide and Other Greenhouse Gases in Climate Variations and Associated Impacts" concluded that greenhouse gases "are expected" to cause significant warming in the next century and that some warming is inevitable.^[67]

:{Meanwhile, ice cores drilled by a Franco-Soviet team at the Vostok Station in Antarctica showed that :{CO:{

2}:}: and temperature had gone up and down together in wide swings through past ice ages}:. This confirmed the :{CO:{

2}:}:-temperature relationship in a manner entirely independent of computer climate models, strongly reinforcing the emerging scientific consensus. The findings also pointed to powerful biological and geochemical feedbacks.^[68]

In June 1988, James E. Hansen made one of the first assessments that human-caused warming had already measurably affected global climate.^[69] Shortly after, a "World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security" gathered hundreds of scientists and others in Toronto. They concluded that the changes in the atmosphere due to human pollution "represent a major threat to international security and are already having harmful consequences over many parts of the globe," and declared that by 2005 the world would be well-advised to push its emissions some 20% below the 1988 level.^[70]

The 1980s saw important breakthroughs with regard to global environmental challenges. Ozone depletion was mitigated by the Vienna Convention (1985) and the Montreal Protocol (1987). Acid rain was mainly regulated on national and regional levels.

Modern period: 1988 to present

[Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Climate_Change "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change")	[Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Climate_Change "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change")	[Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Climate_Change "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change")

IPCC Assessment Reports:	IPCC Assessment Reports:	IPCC Assessment Reports:
First (1990)	First (1990)	First (1990)
1992 supplementary report	1992 supplementary report	1992 supplementary report
Second (1995)	Second (1995)	Second (1995)
Third (2001)	Third (2001)	Third (2001)
Fourth (2007)	Fourth (2007)	Fourth (2007)
Fifth (2014)	Fifth (2014)	Fifth (2014)
IPCC Special Reports:	IPCC Special Reports:	IPCC Special Reports:
Emissions Scenarios (2000)	Emissions Scenarios (2000)	Emissions Scenarios (2000)
Renewable energy sources (2012)	Renewable energy sources (2012)	Renewable energy sources (2012)
Extreme events and disasters (2012)	Extreme events and disasters (2012)	Extreme events and disasters (2012)
Global Warming of 1.5 °C (2018)	Global Warming of 1.5 °C (2018)	Global Warming of 1.5 °C (2018)
Climate Change & Land (2019)	Climate Change & Land (2019)	Climate Change & Land (2019)
Ocean & Cryosphere (2019)	Ocean & Cryosphere (2019)	Ocean & Cryosphere (2019)

UNFCCC	WMO	UNEP

Main articles: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Scientific consensus on climate change, and global warming

Since the 1990s, research on climate change has expanded and grown, linking many fields such as atmospheric sciences, numerical modeling, behavioral sciences, geology and economics, or security....

In 1988 the WMO established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with the support of the UNEP. The IPCC continues its work through the present day, and issues a series of Assessment Reports and supplemental reports that describe the state of scientific understanding at the time each report is prepared. Scientific developments during this period are summarized about once every five to six years in the IPCC Assessment Reports which were published in 1990 (First Assessment Report), 1995 (Second Assessment Report), 2001 (Third Assessment Report), 2007 (Fourth Assessment Report), and 2013/2014 (Fifth Assessment Report).^[72]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change (talk kinda lively, often about Cook?]

There is currently a strong scientific consensus that the Earth is warming and that this warming is mainly caused by human activities. This consensus is supported by various studies of scientists' opinions and by position statements of scientific organizations, many of which explicitly agree with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) synthesis reports.

Nearly all actively publishing climate scientists (97–98%^[1]) support the consensus on anthropogenic climate change,^[2][3] and the remaining 2% of contrarian studies either cannot be replicated or contain errors.^[4]

Consensus points

The current scientific consensus is that:

Earth's climate has warmed significantly since the late 1800s.^[a]
Human activities (primarily greenhouse gas emissions) are the primary cause.
Continuing emissions will increase the likelihood and severity of global effects.
People and nations can act individually and collectively to slow the pace of global warming, while also preparing for unavoidable climate change and its consequences.

Several studies of the consensus have been undertaken.^[6] Among the most cited is a 2013 study of nearly 12,000 abstracts of peer-reviewed papers on climate science published since 1990, of which just over 4,000 papers expressed an opinion on the cause of recent global warming. Of these, 97% agree, explicitly or implicitly, that global warming is happening and is human-caused.^[7][8] It is "extremely likely"^[9] that this warming arises from "human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases"^[9] in the atmosphere.^[10] Natural change alone would have had a slight cooling effect rather than a warming effect.^{[11][12][13][14]}

This scientific opinion is expressed in synthesis reports, by scientific bodies of national or international standing, and by surveys of opinion among climate scientists. Individual scientists, universities, and laboratories contribute to the overall scientific opinion via their peer-reviewed publications, and the areas of collective agreement and relative certainty are summarised in these respected reports and surveys.^[15] The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) was completed in 2014.^[16] Its conclusions are summarized below:

"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia."^[17]
"Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years."^[18]
Human influence on the climate system is clear.^[19] It is extremely likely (95–100% probability)^[20] that human influence was the dominant cause of global warming between 1951 and 2010.^[19]
"Increasing magnitudes of [global] warming increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts."^[21]
"A first step towards adaptation to future climate change is reducing vulnerability and exposure to present climate variability."^[22]
"The overall risks of climate change impacts can be reduced by limiting the rate and magnitude of climate change"^[21]
Without new policies to mitigate climate change, projections suggest an increase in global mean temperature in 2100 of 3.7 to 4.8 °C, relative to pre-industrial levels (median values; the range is 2.5 to 7.8 °C including climate uncertainty).^[23]
The current trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions is not consistent with limiting global warming to below 1.5 or 2 °C, relative to pre-industrial levels.^[24] Pledges made as part of the Cancún Agreements are broadly consistent with cost-effective scenarios that give a "likely" chance (66–100% probability) of limiting global warming (in 2100) to below 3 °C, relative to pre-industrial levels. ...These assessments are generally consistent with the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Some scientific bodies have recommended specific policies to governments, and science can play a role in informing an effective response to climate change. Policy decisions, however, may require value judgements and so are not included in the scientific opinion.^[26][27]

No scientific body of national or international standing maintains a formal opinion dissenting from any of these main points. The last national or international scientific body to drop dissent was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists,^[28] which in 2007^[29] updated its statement to its current non-committal position.^[30] Some other organizations, primarily those focusing on geology, also hold non-committal positions.

Synthesis reports

Synthesis reports are assessments of scientific literature that compile the results of a range of stand-alone studies in order to achieve a broad level of understanding, or to describe the state of knowledge of a given subject.^[31]

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2014

Main articles: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and IPCC Fifth Assessment Report

The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report followed the same general format as the Fourth Assessment Report, with three Working Group reports and a Synthesis report.^[16] The Working Group I report (WG1) was published in September 2013.^[16] The report's Summary for Policymakers stated that warming of the climate system is 'unequivocal' with changes unprecedented over decades to millennia, including warming of the atmosphere and oceans, loss of snow and ice, and sea level rise. Greenhouse gas emissions, driven largely by economic and population growth, have led to greenhouse gas concentrations that are unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. These, together with other anthropogenic drivers, are "extremely likely" (where that means more than 95% probability) to have been the dominant cause of the observed global warming since the mid-20th century.^[32]

It said that

Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems. Limiting climate change would require substantial and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions which, together with adaptation, can limit climate change risks.^[32]

Reporting on the publication of the report, The Guardian said that

In the end it all boils down to risk management. The stronger our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the lower the risk of extreme climate impacts. The higher our emissions, the larger climate changes we'll face, which also means more expensive adaptation, more species extinctions, more food and water insecurities, more income losses, more conflicts, and so forth.^[33]

The New York Times reported that

In Washington, President Obama's science adviser, John P. Holdren, cited increased scientific confidence "that the kinds of harm already being experienced from climate change will continue to worsen unless and until comprehensive and vigorous action to reduce emissions is undertaken worldwide."^[34]

It went on to say that Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, had declared his intention to call a meeting of heads of state in 2014 to develop such a treaty. The last such meeting, in Copenhagen in 2009, the NY Times reported, had ended in disarray.^[34]

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007

In February 2007, the IPCC released a summary of the forthcoming Fourth Assessment Report. According to this summary, the Fourth Assessment Report found that human actions are "very likely" the cause of global warming, meaning a 90% or greater probability. Global warming in this case was indicated by an increase of 0.75 degrees in average global temperatures over the last 100 years.^[35]

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report stated that:

- Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as evidenced by increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, the widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.^[36]
- Most of the global warming since the mid-20th century is very likely due to human activities.^[37]

- Benefits and costs of climate change for [human] society will vary widely by location and scale.^[38] Some of the effects in temperate and polar regions will be positive, and others elsewhere will be negative.^[38] Overall, net effects are more likely to be strongly negative with larger or more rapid warming.^[38]
- The range of published evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time.^[39]
- The resilience of many ecosystems is likely to be exceeded this century by an unprecedented combination of climate change, associated disturbances (e.g. flooding, drought, wildfire, insects, ocean acidification), and other global change drivers (e.g. land-use change, pollution, fragmentation of natural systems, over-exploitation of resources).^[40]

The New York Times reported that "the leading international network of climate scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is 'unequivocal' and that human activity is the main driver, 'very likely' causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950".^[41]

A retired journalist for The New York Times, William K. Stevens wrote: "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the likelihood was 90 percent to 99 percent that emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, spewed from tailpipes and smokestacks, were the dominant cause of the observed warming of the last 50 years. In the panel's parlance, this level of certainty is labeled 'very likely'. Only rarely does scientific odds-making provide a more definite answer than that, at least in this branch of science, and it describes the endpoint, so far, of a progression.".^[42]

The Associated Press summarized the position on sea level rise:

On sea levels, the report projects rises of 7 to 23 inches by the end of the century. An additional 3.9 to 7.8 inches are possible if recent, surprising melting of polar ice sheets continues.^[43]

U.S. Global Change Research Program

Main article: United States Global Change Research Program

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2017_Global_warming_attribution_-based_on_NCA4_Fig_3.3_-single-panel_version.png)

Fourth National Climate Assessment ("NCA4", USGCRP, 2017) includes charts^[44] illustrating how human factors, especially accumulation in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases, are the predominant cause of observed global warming.

Thirteen federal agencies, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), worked together under the auspices of the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) to prepare the country's Fourth National Climate Assessment, published in two volumes as described below.

The Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I (October 2017) provided the following summary:

This assessment concludes, based on extensive evidence, that it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.

Background

Formerly: Climate Change Science Program

The U.S. Global Change Research Program reported in June 2009^[45] that:

Observations show that warming of the climate is unequivocal. The global warming observed over the past 50 years isdue primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.These emissions come mainly from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas), with important contributions from the clearing of forests, agricultural practices, and other activities.

The 2009 report, which is about the effects that climate change is having in the United States, also said:

Climate-related changes have already been observed globally and in the United States. These include increases in air and water temperatures, reduced frost days, increased frequency and intensity of heavy downpours, a rise in sea level, and reduced snow cover, glaciers, permafrost, and sea ice. A longer ice-free period on lakes and rivers, lengthening of the growing season, and increased water vapor in the atmosphere have also been observed. Over the past 30 years, temperatures have risen faster in winter than in any other season, with average winter temperatures in the Midwest and northern Great Plains increasing more than 7 °F (3.9 °C). Some of the changes have been faster than previous assessments had suggested.

Arctic Climate Impact Assessment

In 2004, the intergovernmental Arctic Council and the non-governmental International Arctic Science Committee released the synthesis report of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment:^[46]

Climate conditions in the past provide evidence that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are associated with rising global temperatures. Human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), and secondarily the clearing of land, have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping ("greenhouse") gases in the atmosphere...There is international scientific consensus that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.^[47]

Policy

There is an extensive discussion in the scientific literature on what policies might be effective in responding to climate change.^[48] Some scientific bodies have recommended specific policies to governments (refer to the later sections of the article).^[49] The natural and social sciences can play a role in informing an effective response to climate change.^[26] However, policy decisions may require value judgements.^[26] For example, the US National Research Council has commented:^[27]

The question of whether there exists a "safe" level of concentration of greenhouse gases cannot be answered directly because it would require a value judgment of what constitutes an acceptable risk to human welfare and ecosystems in various parts of the world, as well as a more quantitative assessment of the risks and costs associated with the various impacts of global warming. In general, however, risk increases with increases in both the rate and the magnitude of climate change.

This article mostly focuses on the views of natural scientists. However, social scientists,^[48] medical experts,^[50] engineers^[48] and philosophers^[51] have also commented on climate change science and policies. Climate change policy is discussed in several articles: climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, climate engineering, politics of global warming, climate ethics, and economics of global warming.

Statements by scientific organizations of national or international standing

...

Scholarly articles for 97% climate science consensus meta-analysis
… scientific consensuson climate change: plain facts, pie … - ‎Van der Linden - Cited by 108 … to 'Quantifying the consensuson anthropogenic global … - ‎Cook - Cited by 26 Meta-analysisof grain yield QTL identified during … - ‎Swamy - Cited by 125

Scholarly articles for **97% climate science consensus meta-analysis**

… **scientific consensus**on **climate change**: plain facts, pie … - ‎Van der Linden - Cited by 108

… to 'Quantifying the **consensus**on anthropogenic global … - ‎Cook - Cited by 26

**Meta**-**analysis**of grain yield QTL identified during … - ‎Swamy - Cited by 125

The 97% consensus on global warming - Skeptical Science

https://skepticalscience.com › global-warming-scientific-consensus

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{That humans are causing :{global warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is the position of the Academies of Science from 19 countries plus many scientific organizations that :{study:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: climate ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

The Cook et al. (2013) 97% consensus result is robust

https://skepticalscience.com › 97-percent-consensus-robust

In short, the 97% consensus on human-caused global warming is a robust result, ..... standard scientific methods for aggregating knowledge, e.g. meta-analyses, ...

New 'Meta' Study Confirms Consensus: 97% of Publishing ...

https://www.desmogblog.com › 2016/04/14 › new-meta-study-confirms-c...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Apr 16, 2016 - When we published a paper in 2013 finding :{97:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:% scientific :{consensus:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: on human-caused :{global warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, what surprised me was how ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates ...

https://iopscience.iop.org › article

by J Cook - ‎2016 - ‎Cited by 476 - ‎Related articles

Apr 13, 2016 - The consensus that humans are causing recent global warming is shared ... that the finding of 97% consensus in published climate research is ...

Abstract · ‎Introduction · ‎Assessing expert ... · ‎Interpreting consensus data

It's settled: 90–100% of climate experts agree on human ...

https://www.theguardian.com › climate-consensus-97-per-cent › apr › its-s...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Apr 13, 2016 - More. Climate :{Consensus:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: - the :{97:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:% ... Scientific :{consensus:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: on human-caused :{global warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: as compared to the expertise of the surveyed ... These claims are usually based on an :{analysis:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: done by James Powell, and the ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Survey finds 97% climate science papers agree warming is ...

https://www.theguardian.com › climate-change-scienceofclimatechange

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{May 16, 2013 - For example, a :{study:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: which takes it for granted that :{global warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: will .... about :{climate change:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is that there is a :{97:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:% :{consensus:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: amongst the ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Fact Checking The Claim Of 97% Consensus On ... - Forbes

https://www.forbes.com › sites › uhenergy › 2016/12/14 › fact-checking-t...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Dec 14, 2016 - Belief in the scientific community in human-caused :{climate change:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is clearly below ... The claim that there is a :{97:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:% :{consensus:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: among scientists that humans are ... Both papers were based on :{analyses:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of earlier publications.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Scientific Consensus | Facts – Climate Change: Vital Signs of ...

https://climate.nasa.gov › scientific-consensus

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Vital Signs of the Planet: Global :{Climate Change:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and :{Global Warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. ... show that :{97:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: percent or more of actively publishing :{climate scientists:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: agree*: Climate-warming .... IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, :{Summary:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: for Policymakers (2014).:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Missing: meta- ‎| Must include:meta-

97% consensus on climate change? More like 99.94%, study ...

https://www.zmescience.com › Environment › Climate

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Apr 9, 2018 - Scientific :{consensus:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: on human-caused :{global warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: as compared ... But in 2017, James Powell published an even larger :{meta:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-:{analysis:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Countering Climate Science Denial and Communicating ...

climatescience.oxfordre.com › acrefore › acrefore-9780190228620-e-314

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

How One GOP-Controlled Committee Is Waging A War On Science

The American Independent Institute | By Brad Johnson

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/24/house-science-committee_n_5525609.html?1403707503

At a March 26 hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Republican congressmen took turns attacking President Obama's top science advisor, John Holdren.On climate change, their statements became increasingly heated, accusatory, and bizarre.

Southern California conservative Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) challenged Holdren on the fact that about97 percentof the world's practicing climate scientists agree that human activity is responsible for climate change. "Why can't anybody admit that you've got a group of people putting out a bogus figure here?" he charged.

[long list pro] links grafix below

...

Non-committal

American Association of Petroleum Geologists

As of June 2007, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) Position Statement on climate change stated:

the AAPG membership is divided on the degree of influence that anthropogenic CO

2 has on recent and potential global temperature increases ... Certain climate simulation models predict that the warming trend will continue, as reported through NAS, AGU, AAAS and AMS. AAPG respects these scientific opinions but wants to add that the current climate warming projections could fall within well-documented natural variations in past climate and observed temperature data. These data do not necessarily support the maximum case scenarios forecast in some models.[129]

Prior to the adoption of this statement, the AAPG was the only major scientific organization that rejected the finding of significant human influence on recent climate, according to a statement by the Council of the American Quaternary Association.[28] Explaining the plan for a revision, AAPG president Lee Billingsly wrote in March 2007:

Members have threatened to not renew their memberships ... if AAPG does not alter its position on global climate change ... And I have been told of members who already have resigned in previous years because of our current global climate change position ... The current policy statement is not supported by a significant number of our members and prospective members.[130]

AAPG President John Lorenz announced the "sunsetting" of AAPG's Global Climate Change Committee in January 2010. The AAPG Executive Committee determined:

Climate change is peripheral at best to our science ... AAPG does not have credibility in that field ... and as a group we have no particular knowledge of global atmospheric geophysics.[131]

American Institute of Professional Geologists (AIPG)

The official position statement from AIPG on the Environment states that "combustion of fossil fuel include and the generation of GHGs [greenhouse gases] including carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Emissions of GHGs are perceived by some to be one of the largest, global environmental concerns related to energy production due to potential effects on the global energy system and possibly global climate. Fossil fuel use is the primary source of the increased atmospheric concentration of GHGs since industrialization".[132]

In March 2010, AIPG's Executive Director issued a statement regarding polarization of opinions on climate change within the membership and announced that the AIPG Executive had made a decision to cease publication of articles and opinion pieces concerning climate change in AIPG's news journal, The Professional Geologist.[133]

Opposing

Since 2007, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists released a revised statement,[29] no national or international scientific body any longer rejects the findings of human-induced effects on climate change.[28][30]

Surveys of scientists and scientific literature

Main article: Surveys of scientists' views on climate change

Click to see a more detailed summary of the sources.

Naomi Oreskes,[134] Peter Doran,[135] William Anderegg,[136] Bart Verheggen,[137] Neil Stenhouse,[138] J. Stuart Carlton,[139] and John Cook.[140][6]

Various surveys have been conducted to evaluate scientific opinion on global warming. They have concluded that the majority of scientists support the idea of anthropogenic climate change.

In 2004, the geologist and historian of science Naomi Oreskes summarized a study of the scientific literature on climate change.[134] She analyzed 928 abstracts of papers from refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 and concluded that there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change.

Oreskes divided the abstracts into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Seventy-five per cent of the abstracts were placed in the first three categories (either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view); 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, thus taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. None of the abstracts disagreed with the consensus position, which the author found to be "remarkable". According to the report, "authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point."

In 2007, Harris Interactive surveyed 489 randomly selected members of either the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union for the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) at George Mason University. 97% of the scientists surveyed agreed that global temperatures had increased during the past 100 years; 84% said they personally believed human-induced warming was occurring, and 74% agreed that "currently available scientific evidence" substantiated its occurrence. Catastrophic effects in 50–100 years would likely be observed according to 41%, while 44% thought the effects would be moderate and about 13 percent saw relatively little danger. 5% said they thought human activity did not contribute to greenhouse warming.[141][142][143][144]

Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch conducted a survey in August 2008 of 2058 climate scientists from 34 different countries.[145] A web link with a unique identifier was given to each respondent to eliminate multiple responses. A total of 373 responses were received giving an overall response rate of 18.2%. No paper on climate change consensus based on this survey has been published yet (February 2010), but one on another subject has been published based on the survey.[146]

The survey was made up of 76 questions split into a number of sections. There were sections on the demographics of the respondents, their assessment of the state of climate science, how good the science is, climate change impacts, adaptation and mitigation, their opinion of the IPCC, and how well climate science was being communicated to the public. Most of the answers were on a scale from 1 to 7 from "not at all" to "very much".

...[long list pro]

...

Non-committal

American Association of Petroleum Geologists

As of June 2007, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) Position Statement on climate change stated:

the AAPG membership is divided on the degree of influence that anthropogenic :{CO:{

2}:}: has on recent and potential global temperature increases ... Certain climate simulation models predict that the warming trend will continue, as reported through NAS, AGU, AAAS and AMS. AAPG respects these scientific opinions but wants to add that the current climate warming projections could fall within well-documented natural variations in past climate and observed temperature data. These data do not necessarily support the maximum case scenarios forecast in some models.^[129]

Prior to the adoption of this statement, the AAPG was the only major scientific organization that rejected the finding of significant human influence on recent climate, according to a statement by the Council of the American Quaternary Association.^[28] Explaining the plan for a revision, AAPG president Lee Billingsly wrote in March 2007:

Members have threatened to not renew their memberships ... if AAPG does not alter its position on global climate change ... And I have been told of members who already have resigned in previous years because of our current global climate change position ... The current policy statement is not supported by a significant number of our members and prospective members.^[130]

AAPG President John Lorenz announced the "sunsetting" of AAPG's Global Climate Change Committee in January 2010. The AAPG Executive Committee determined:

Climate change is peripheral at best to our science ... AAPG does not have credibility in that field ... and as a group we have no particular knowledge of global atmospheric geophysics.^[131]

American Institute of Professional Geologists (AIPG)

Opposing

Since 2007, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists released a revised statement,^[29] no national or international scientific body any longer rejects the findings of human-induced effects on climate change.^[28][30]

Surveys of scientists and scientific literature

Main article: Surveys of scientists' views on climate change

Click to see a more detailed summary of the sources.

Naomi Oreskes,^[134] Peter Doran,^[135] William Anderegg,^[136] Bart Verheggen,^[137] Neil Stenhouse,^[138] J. Stuart Carlton,^[139] and John Cook.^[140][6]

Various surveys have been conducted to evaluate scientific opinion on global warming. They have concluded that the majority of scientists support the idea of anthropogenic climate change.

In 2004, the geologist and historian of science Naomi Oreskes summarized a study of the scientific literature on climate change.^[134] She analyzed 928 abstracts of papers from refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 and concluded that there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change.

Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch conducted a survey in August 2008 of 2058 climate scientists from 34 different countries.^[145] A web link with a unique identifier was given to each respondent to eliminate multiple responses. A total of 373 responses were received giving an overall response rate of 18.2%. No paper on climate change consensus based on this survey has been published yet (February 2010), but one on another subject has been published based on the survey.^[146]