‘No doubt left' about scientific consensus on global warming, say experts

The scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming is likely to have passed 99%, according to the lead author of the most authoritative study on the subject, and could rise further after separate research that clears up some of the remaining doubts.

A desert road in Death Valley national park, California. 

Three studies published in Nature and Nature Geoscience use extensive historical data to show there has never been a period in the last 2,000 years when temperature changes have been as fast and extensive as in recent decades.

It had previously been thought that similarly dramatic peaks and troughs might have occurred in the past, including in periods dubbed the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Climate Anomaly. But the three studies use reconstructions based on 700 proxy records of temperature change, such as trees, ice and sediment, from all continents that indicate none of these shifts took place in more than half the globe at any one time.

Read the story from The Guardian by Jonathan Watts - “‘No doubt left' about scientific consensus on global warming, say experts.”

The politics of confronting climate change

Vinod Thomas -
confronting the
politics of
climate change.

Scientific evidence on man-made global warming is so loud and clear that leaders of 195 countries adopted the first climate agreement at a summit in Paris at end 2015 to reduce carbon emissions. But to appreciate the divide between the scientific consensus and climate action, one only needs to see the neglect of the issue in the U.S. presidential elections.

This gulf between science and policy rests on politics that see climate mitigation as a drag on economic growth. For example, Maryland officials are resisting making carbon cuts from power plants for fear they will raise power bills and hurt the state's economy.

Read The Baltimore Sun story - “The politics of confronting climate change.”

Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming

We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'.

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.

Read this research paper by John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce as published on IOPScience - “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature.”