Slashdot Mirror


Consensus On Consensus: Climate Experts Agree On Human-Caused Global Warming (theguardian.com)

mspohr quotes a report from The Guardian written by Dana Nuccitelli, environmental scientist and contributor to SkepticalScience.com: There is an overwhelming expert scientific consensus on human-caused global warming. Authors of seven previous climate consensus studies -- including Naomi Oreskes, Peter Doran, William Anderegg, Bart Verheggen, Ed Maibach, J. Stuart Carlton, John Cook, [Dana Nuccitelli] and six of her colleagues -- have co-authored a new paper that should settle this question once and for all. The two key conclusions from the paper are: 1) Depending on exactly how you measure the expert consensus, it's somewhere between 90% and 100% that agree humans are responsible for climate change, with most of our studies finding 97% consensus among publishing climate scientists. 2) The greater the climate expertise among those surveyed, the higher the consensus on human-caused global warming.

Quoted from IOPscience: Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming. The consensus that humans are causing recent global warming is shared by 90%-100% of publishing climate scientists according to six independent studies by co-authors of this paper. Those results are consistent with the 97% consensus reported by Cook et al based on 11 944 abstracts of research papers, of which 4014 took a position on the cause of recent global warming. A survey of authors of those papers also supported a 97% consensus. Tol comes to a different conclusion using results from surveys of non-experts such as economic geologists and a self-selected group of those who reject the consensus. We demonstrate that this outcome is not unexpected because the level of consensus correlates with expertise in climate science. At one point, Tol also reduces the apparent consensus by assuming that abstracts that do not explicitly state the cause of global warming ('no position') represent non-endorsement, an approach that if applied elsewhere would reject consensus on well-established theories such as plate tectonics. We examine the available studies and conclude that the finding of 97% consensus in published climate research is robust and consistent with other surveys of climate scientists and peer-reviewed studies.

3 of 795 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Newsflash by Socguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Of course your seemingly reasonable argument in favor of the status quo falls flat when you realize that the dollar cost of fixing the problem is actually less than the dollar cost of dealing with the ever-increasing problems.

  2. Re:Biased source? by mspohr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The Guardian is a newspaper. It's reporting on a scientific article published in a peer reviewed journal. If you don't like The Guardian, you can read the original article (both are linked in the summary). If you don't like science... well, I don't know what to say.

    --
    I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
  3. Re:Who the fuck cares by GuB-42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Scientists now are not trying to prove that human-made global warming is true, they are trying to quantify it, like they always did. The consensus is simply the result of error margins being smaller.
    The error is still present though, and it is big, that's why now we don't know much besides "global warming is happening" and that's why research is still going on.

    Quantifying is very important because we have solutions but none of them are without drawbacks. There is the solution of doing nothing, which may not be that bad, and there are ridiculous solutions like covering the oceans with white stuff and there is everything in between.