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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.'"

27 of 1,105 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah... by Greyfox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Yeah... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz read on this guy, its not LALALALA it is a concentrated, orchestrated, and payed for effort to hide the truth to the benefit of a few very wealthy individuals http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/the-koch-brothers-exposed-20120420.

    2. Re:Yeah... by JobyOne · · Score: 5, Informative

      You're right with your point that cars and incandescents aren't "SOLELY" to blame...but with that one little adjective you're reduced to tilting at straw men.

      FACTS: Worldwide 15% of CO2 emissions are from personal vehicles, and that number is rising. The United States accounts for half of that. Our houses use so much energy that they produce twice the CO2 that our cars even do. That means American personal cars and homes produce between 1/4 and 1/5 of the world's CO2 emissions. Given our wealth and the relative ease with which we can invest in energy-saving technology, that makes them pretty good places to start trying to improve efficiency.

      If you want to reduce greenhouse gases, improving the efficiency of American cars and homes is important by any reasonable standard. That's a fact. No politics involved.

      Manufacturers would also be a good place to look, but since publicly traded companies can only look as far ahead as their next earnings report I imagine you've drunk their Kool-Aid and would start shrieking "OMG TEH JOB CREATORZ" at the slightest whiff of regulation.

      --
      Porquoi?
    3. Re:Yeah... by Dishevel · · Score: 5, Funny

      Oh. Nature does not matter.
      Remember. Until humans came along temperatures on the earth were stable and no species ever went extinct.
      We are evil.

      --
      Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
    4. Re:Yeah... by joh · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think the real debate is what the consequences are from global warming. Most skeptics I know don't doubt that we impact out world. The questions we have is how large an impact that really is and whether the earth can adapt to it (without wiping us out.)

      It doesn't help that the extremest on the global warming side keep giving dire apocalyptic warnings with near timelines that keep turning out false (or not anywhere near as dire as the predictions where told to us.)

      NOBODY is saying this is going to wipe us out. Really. It's just going to be really costly, wrecking havoc with economies and ecosystems and causing migrations, wars and collapsing economies here and there.

      All this jumping around by saying "It's not happening!", then "It's happening, but it's not caused by us!" and then "It's happening and it's caused by us but we won't be wiped out, so let's just pretend it isn't happening anyway!", but NEVER saying "OK, it's happening and it's going to be really troublesome but since it is caused by us we luckily can try to limit it by what we do!" is really strange.

    5. Re:Yeah... by IWannaBeAnAC · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That isn't very accurate. At some point 97% of geologists had never heard of plate techtonics. Once the theory was proposed there was, of course, some opposition because it was so different to what was previously believed. But once geologists properly evaluated the evidence, almost every geologist took it on board.

      Similarly, once the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs became widely known, it didn't take all that long for scientists to take a good objective look at the evidence and rewrite the textbooks.

      There is no comparison to climate change because the "for" and "against" theories have been known for 30+ years by now. So far no one has managed to find any convincing evidence against global warming, and at this point the basic theory is so well established it is inconceivable that anyone ever will. You might argue about the magnitude of the problem, and whether some other effect might mask the warming (which is true anyway, eg I don't think anyone really knows why the deep ocean has been warming faster than expected, and somewhat masking surface warming). But there isn't going to be a "smoking gun" that disproves the basic notions, not any more than there will ever be a "smoking gun" that disproves Newton's theory of gravity. That doesn't mean that the theories won't get refined (eg, general relativity can be seen as a refinement of Newtonian gravity).

    6. Re:Yeah... by phlinn · · Score: 5, Informative

      Unfortunately, this paper wasn't particularly scientific. It's got the characteristics of a push poll, in that the most appropriate choice wasn't an available option for the survey. It was based on reviewer's opinions of the articles, with no controls on who was doing the reviewing. Only 68 papers out of 12,000 asserted greater than 50% of the cause to humans, while 78 explicitly rejected it.

      This number appears to be as flawed as the "98% of climate scientists" number a few years ago, where they didn't like their initial results and excluded a number of papers to bring the consensus amount up.

      --
      "Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
    7. Re:Yeah... by dkleinsc · · Score: 5, Informative

      If you don't want to read the extended analysis, just watch Penn and Teller (hardly left-wingers) showing Luntz in action:
      Bleep You, Frank

      --
      I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
    8. Re:Yeah... by jopsen · · Score: 5, Informative

      almost every major scientific advance has been made by a few "rogue" scientists advocating rogue theories which at one time have been dismissed by most scientists in the field

      No, only a few scientific advances has be been by "rogue" scientists... The vast majority of scientific advancement in any field today happens by lots of people working hard publishing papers, attending conferences, talking to each other and trying a lot of different experiments.

      Most scientific advancement, and in particular the big advancements, are done one step at the time, but a large collective of scientists working hard.


      We notice the few cases in history when a few "rogue" scientists changes the world, because it is unusual and we like to celebrate the individual. It's the exception that makes the rule. Science happens by hard work, not by a sudden moment of clarity (or in this case campaign contributions).

    9. Re:Yeah... by sydneyfong · · Score: 5, Insightful

      A counter example is, well, a counter example.

      In case you don't know what it is, a counter example is a way to show that the original point was not as rigorous as it purports to be, by demonstrating a case that the claim does not hold.

      The original (implicit) claim is that when 97% of scientists agree on something, it must be right. The GP provides a counter example. In doing so, he does not claim that his example is representative of the vast majority of similar cases.

      I guess the problem with this story is that it's neither here nor there. Statements that 97% people believe in can be true (usually) or can be false (rarely). But given that we actually have evidence and data, why should we try to ascertain the truth by looking at what other people believe?

      It's like having a headline "97% people believe the world is round" -- yeah it's probably true, but if you really want to know the truth badly enough, you don't ask around for personal belief statistics, you try to go around the world to see whether you can get back to the original spot.

      --
      Don't quote me on this.
    10. Re:Yeah... by PapayaSF · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That means American personal cars and homes produce between 1/4 and 1/5 of the world's CO2 emissions.

      That can't be correct. Total human emissions of CO2 only account for about 3% of the world's CO2 emissions, so do you mean that American cars and homes account for between 1/4 and 1/5 of that 3%?

      --
      Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
    11. Re:Yeah... by Holi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Except medicare versus private insurance.

      --
      Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
    12. Re:Yeah... by vux984 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You do realize medicare/medicaide is more expensive than private insurance, don't you?

      Are you living under a rock?

      Canada, UK, and other 'socialized medicine countries" pay less per capita for healthcare than American's do.

      Sure, you may not pay for it up front when visiting the doctor or paying for your drugs, but you do pay for it in taxes, along with everyone else.

      Yes, and it still costs less.

      American's pay more per capita and more as a percentage of GDP, than any country with socialized medicine.

      It baffles me that anyone would argue for privatized health care. Unless you are the 1% private healthcare its not "better" healthcare. Its not cheaper healthcare for society as a whole.

      I really don't object to the 1% wanting to spend their money on private health care (because they aren't really buying "insurance" they are just buying the healthcare they need directly, as needed, when needed -- they are "self insured"). I can see why they want that, and if I was in their position I'd want it to. Its their money, and they can decide how little or how much of it they want to spend on their healthcare.

      But I can't figure out why the other 99% wants private for profit insurance companies managing their healthcare, when it just costs them more and provides them less. Its counter to their own interests.

    13. Re:Yeah... by AdamWill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Right, this is one of the two things that irks me the most about this debate: how both sides tend to assume the 'environmentalist' side is some sort of happy-clappy kum-ba-ya singing Mother Earth thing.

      It's not. Well, you know, the nutty kum-ba-ya singing Mother Earth types think so, but we can safely ignore them. For sane people, global warming is not a problem for the globe. The earth's a big spinning ball of rock, it'll be a big spinning ball of rock practically forever, no matter whether the temperature goes up or down two or five or ten or fifty degrees. Plus, it's not conscious and doesn't have any feelings. The Earth is going to be just fine.

      Global warming is a problem for people. The most 'conservative' folks, those who think things are pretty good and we shouldn't mess with them too much and who pride themselves on being sensible and taking the long view, should be the most worried about global warming, for several reasons. One, a world which is five degrees warmer is a world that from a human perspective is massively different. You want your life to go on pretty much as before? You damn well don't want it to be ten degrees hotter than it was 100 years ago. Two, the longer we delay taking action, the more extreme and disruptive the action we wind up having to take is going to be. That alone is against 'conservative' principles, but the double whammy is that once that action becomes sufficiently extreme and disruptive, the only agencies that are practically capable of carrying it out will be national governments. You want a solution to global warming which doesn't involve massive, unilateral government action (and if you're a small-state conservative, surely you do!), you should be out in the streets right now to make sure it happens before it's not practical.

      The other thing that narks me off no end is people who seem to think Priority Number One should be 'the economy', and Priority Number Two should be the environment. Erk-err. Precisely the wrong way around. You can only have an economy in an environment. We can keep building coal-burning power plants and oil pipelines and everyone makes money in the very short term, but once the level of emissions and consequent global warming gets too high, the result will be an economic catastrophe as much as an environmental one. Really, if you want to be a hard-headed conservative pragmatist, the only reason an environmental catastrophe is a catastrophe at all is because it is inevitably also an economic catastrophe.

  2. Publication bias by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. That's not the whole story by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. bias in publications? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  5. Yes, they might all agree but... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  6. Re:I do believe it because it based on sound scien by godrik · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:I do believe it because it based on sound scien by Paul+Slocum · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  8. Re:I do believe it because it based on sound scien by bunratty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  9. 97% of priests don't believe in god. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:I do believe it because it based on sound scien by delt0r · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?
  11. Re:I do believe it because it based on sound scien by Typical+Slashdotter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In other news, only a minority of physics papers agree that conservation of energy is real. The rest don't even mention it.

  12. Re:BUYING SLASHDOT ACCOUNTS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  13. Re:There are more papers in the study... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  14. Re:BUYING SLASHDOT ACCOUNTS by dkleinsc · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/