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97% of Climate Science Papers Agree Global Warming Is Man-made
An anonymous reader writes "A meta-study published yesterday looked at over 12,000 peer-reviewed papers on climate science that appeared in journals between 1991 and 2011. The papers were evaluated and categorized by how they implicitly or explicitly endorsed humans as a contributing cause of global warming. The meta-study found that an overwhelming 97.1% of the papers that took a stance endorsed human-cause global warming. They also asked the 1,200 of the scientists involved in the research to self-evaluate their own studies, with nearly identical results. In the interest of transparency, the meta-study results were published in an open access journal, and the researchers set up a website so that anybody can check their results. From the article: '... a memo from communications strategist Frank Luntz leaked in 2002 advised Republicans, "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate." This campaign has been successful. A 2012 poll from U.S. Pew Research Center found less than half of Americans thought scientists agreed humans were causing global warming. The media has assisted in this public misconception, with most climate stories "balanced" with a "skeptic" perspective. However, this results in making the 2–3% seem like 50%. In trying to achieve "balance," the media has actually created a very unbalanced perception of reality. As a result, people believe scientists are still split about what's causing global warming, and therefore there is not nearly enough public support or motivation to solve the problem.'"
Too bad the scientific method is no match for the stick-your-fingers-in-your-ears-and-yell-la-la-la-la-la method.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
But saying that 97% of climate science papers agree on it does not validate it.
Without regard to whether or not anthropogenic climate change is real: Which papers get published are largely a function of who's on the editorial board of each publication. If those boards are stacked with people holding a particular position, they tend to publish only papers which agree with that position.
That's an extremely biased viewpoint.
I know for a fact that 11,500 of those so-called "peer-reviewed papers" were paid for by Big Tree.
I am not commenting on Global warming.
I am wondering if the bias in publications plays any role in these numbers. Any idea how hard it is to publish something that goes against standard scientific thought in any field?
I think they mean 97% of scientists agree that some amount of global warming is caused by mankind.The amount that is caused by humans may be some or even most, but I don't think anyone could argue that it is ALL caused by mankind.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
They might all agree but I read this climatescienceskeptic blog which gives a whole bunch of really obvious ideas about why its natural or not happening at all like the solar output or volcanos which I'm pretty sure that all the scientists are too dumb to have realised happen so I'm going to go with the blog.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The problem is that science . . . as a scholarly field as opposed to the practice of science . . . has no way to deal with the idea that a significant percentage of our leaders are in willful denial of the sound science. The reality of the research is defeated by their ideology.
This is not new (ask Gallileo) but it is new for the U.S.
I think we're just fucked.
What you say is definitively true. But that is not the point of the article, the point is to verify that the vast majority of experts believes (base don their study) that global warming is man made. Yet everybody you talk to tends to say to "experts are still debating". Well, with these numbers they are not still debating, they are pretty much convinced.
Yet, they might be wrong. But policies have to be made based on experts opinion. And that opinion is not properly represented in the media.
Actually according to them, only 32.6% "of climate science papers agree on it":
We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. source
Right, you can never validate a hypothesis in science. You can only fail to falsify it. In other words, no one can seem to come up with another good explanation for the warming we've observed, so we've failed to falsify the idea that it's due to carbon dioxide emissions, a hypothesis first proposed in 1896. That doesn't mean it's the truth, but I sure know which way I'd bet!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Here's the way I see it. Scientists are like any other professionals. The ones that are doing top level research are the elites of their field. Some deniers will say that it is just everyone just covering each other when you get 97% consensus. At their level, you don't win grants and Nobel prizes by proving something everyone else has proven. You get them by discovering something no one else has found before. Scientists are arrogant and opinionated as much as your professional athlete, top notch lawyer, whatever. If you've ever attended meetings, discussions can delve into nasty fights reminiscent of British parliament debates. If 97% of them agree on something, then the science is probably sound.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Secondly, they don't all believe in the same god.
Thirdly, they don't have any evidence of their god being real.
Indeed in all ways noted, the deniers (such as yourself) are more like the priests.
97% of deniers believe AGW is a fraud.
They don't believe in the same reason for that being true. And they have no evidence of their personal belief in their stated reason for it being a fraud.
Science doesn't have a way to deal with the idea that a large number of scientist agree on something that is wrong either. As a scientist working in a different field, I assure you it is very hard to publish anything on the unpopular view point. No matter how much data you have.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
In other news, only a minority of physics papers agree that conservation of energy is real. The rest don't even mention it.
I find your lack of understanding of the philosophy and method of science disturbing.
In science, one can very rarely, if ever, "prove it irrefutably". One makes hypotheses to explain observations. The hypotheses must make testable predictions. The longer an hypothesis stands against scrutiny, and the more its predictions are verified, and the more new evidence is discovered which fits into the hypothesis, the more accepted it is considered.
Also, you say "else the first scientist to come along with better proof than yours will knock the whole house of cards down". My ignorant friend, this is exactly what science is. Exactly. If this were not the case it would not be science. At some point an accepted hypothesis becomes Theory, which is to say that if some contradictory observation were to be verified, it would necessitate a world-view-changing paradigm shift. Think, for example, of the revolution from Newtonian physics to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics; an important thing to note is that the previous Theory was not even disproved - only its boundaries of accurate description of reality more rigorously defined.
That 97% of the body of published climate science finds in favour of the man-made global warming hypothesis, but none of the 3% against has yet managed to present verified disproof means it is only those ignorant of science that would disagree simply on the grounds of personal comfort.
Lets look at the data:
explicit endorse, >50%: 65
explicit endorse: 934
implicit endorse: 2934
no position: 8269
implicit reject: 53
explicit reject: 15
explicit reject,
So that's some pretty straight up lies you're quoting there. Either say 65 against 10 (that is, out of all quantifying studies with explicit outcomes), or say 3933 against 78. Also note that most papers have no position, which makes the 12k+ claim kinda ridiculous, because over 66% doesn't take any position on the debate. Excluding those, we get that (78/(3933+78) ~) 1.94% rejects and (3933/(3933+78) ~ ) 98.1% accepts.
What about a situation in which 97.1% of people studying something come to a particular conclusion, while the 2.9% don't actually produce any evidence but merely claim that the evidence of the 97.1% is insufficient, while many of them just happen to be on the payroll of people who have a major financial interest in the conclusion in question not being true?
Because this is basically what the conversation looks like right now:
97.1%: "Foo points to this conclusion."
2.9%: "No, that's not enough evidence. What about Bar?"
97.1%: "We spent a couple of years looking at Bar, and that points to the same conclusion."
2.9%: "Well, but what about Foobar?"
97.1%: "After another couple of years of study, we know that Foobar points to the same conclusion."
2.9%: "Well, but what about Baz?"
This will continue until the consequences of the conclusion cause major disruptions to the status quo.
And I should point out that there's no real relationship between the beliefs of scientists and the beliefs of the general public, while there is a relationship between the beliefs of scientists and actually proven scientific truth. For instance, approximately 100% of biologists believe that the Theory of Evolution is basically right, while only 54% of the American public agrees with them.
I am officially gone from
Why is it MAN made? Why not WOMAN made?
I see more women driving the largest SUV possible. MY wife spends far more time in the bathroom running tons of electrical devices.
Help fight the Sexism in climate science!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If man had something to do with it, and our activity is essentially increasing exponentially with new humans being born all the time (and China kicking industrial action into high gear), then wouldn't the impact on climate also be exponential?
No, actually. CO2 concentrations increase temperature logarithmicly, so while population is increasing at a decreasing exponential rate (expected to hit 0% growth this century), the higher the concentration of CO2 goes, the less warming each addition ppm actualy contributes.
Human activity has been increasing, yet the whole warming thing STALLED 17 years ago.
You math is off, the warming trend is flat if (and only if) you take start from the fall of 1997, and that's 16 years currently. However, that's a cherry-picked start date and there are problems with choosing your data to make a particular point. more generally,you can always draw flat trend lines on noisy data regardless of whether the overall trend is up, down or constant.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Call me a denier for asking a question.
A new game. Few or none of the people here are doing that.
If 400ppm CO2 is causing global warming, then can someone please explain to me how the Earth's climate was cooler during the late Ordovician period [geocraft.com] when CO2 was about 4400ppm?
See here.
The answer to the puzzle you ask about was unknown for quite some time. It was one of the legitimate objections to the AGW theory. However, serious scientists looked for an answer rather than dismissing it. I've been following the AGW debate for 10-15 years. I wasn't convinced up until about 10 years ago, because there were many serious questions. One by one though most of the serious objections have been explained. That isn't proof (proof doesn't exist in science anyway) but there is a clear trajectory, which seems like a good way to bet. I'll take it on faith that you asked that question in all seriousness. However there are denialists who keep raising the same objections year after year, and most of them were legitimate objections at one time, but they ignore the explanations that have since been found for them.
You fail to understand many things.
Most importantly, you fail to understand the idea of "increased variance." The predictions of global warming period is not that it will get hotter all the time; or that it will get cooler all the time; but that there will be an increased frequency of oscillations between cooling and warming at rates not previously observed. It is this oscillation, this switching back and forth between heating and cooling too rapidly, that is the evidence for the global warming hypothesis (same goes for tornado strength). This is called "scatter."
Second, you fail to understand that "testable predictions" means reproducing past events. Global climate models cannot reproduce the temperature record for the past without including man-made heating during the industrial revolution. These same models, when run into the future, predict increased scatter and increasing mean temperature, with a scatter level that's high and a mean increase that's slow.
These two points continually have been mis-explained to the public, and the advocates for policy change to reverse climate change have failed miserably at getting these points through to the public---hence your post.
Please include any time when they stated a falsifiable claim.
They claim that global warming is man-made. This is a falsifiable claim: with enough understanding of the climate you can either find an alternative mechanism which is the cause of the heating or you can understand the man-made mechanism in enough detail that there is no room for doubt. This is not at all easy but there is no requirement that things be easily falsifiable.
So, if it gets hotter, it's global warming, if it gets colder, it's global warming. In the end, there's no way to prove it wrong. By your own definition, that's not science.
The climate is a complex beast and disturbing it can easily cause local cooling even if the overall global trend is to warm up. For example if the melting Greenland ice cap dumps enough fresh water into the Atlantic to disrupt the Gulf Stream then northern Europe will get a LOT colder. If there are reasonable, verifiable mechanisms for local then it is not unreasonable to have local cooling caused by global heating.
If you want to attack this survey then there are far better way to do it: which journals did they use and are they reputable? were the search criteria biased in any way and were control samples using a random selection of articles without the initial selection bias checked for a consistent result? Even if the survey was completely unbiased in every way can you really draw any sensible conclusions from numbers of papers?
As a scientist what I truly find really objectionable though is that this is science! You should make up your mind based on evidence not on what other people's opinions are: this is not some popularity contest! Personally I think the evidence for global warming is overwhelming and it is highly likely that humans are some or all of the reason behind it but don't believe me: I could easily be wrong! Listen to what the evidence is and make up your own mind.