The scientific consensus confirmed, once again

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Almost 16 years after Harvard researcher Naomi Oreskes first documented an overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, a research team confirmed that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that human-caused climate change is happening. The study, published Tuesday, brought together 16 scientists, including seven authors of consensus studies that documented similar conclusions over the years despite varying research approaches. While reaching this so-called “consensus on consensus,” authors concluded that scientific agreement on human-caused climate change is “robust” with a range of 90 to 100 percent, depending on the question and methodology...

Meanwhile, 59 percent of the Republican House caucus and 70 percent of Republicans in the Senate deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and humans caused it, according to a recent analysis from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. That means more than six in 10 Americans are represented by someone in Congress who denies climate change.

Scientists Just Confirmed The Scientific Consensus On Climate Change | ThinkProgress

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Scientists Just Confirmed The Scientific Consensus On Climate Change

BY ALEJANDRO DAVILA FRAGOSO

APR 13, 2016 4:26 PM

Almost 16 years after Harvard researcher Naomi Oreskes first documented an overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, a research team confirmed that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that human-caused climate change is happening.

The study, published Tuesday, brought together 16 scientists, including seven authors of consensus studies that documented similar conclusions over the years despite varying research approaches. While reaching this so-called “consensus on consensus,” authors concluded that scientific agreement on human-caused climate change is “robust” with a range of 90 to 100 percent, depending on the question and methodology.

“It’s important to have [it] on the record,” said Will Cantrell, professor of physics at Michigan Technological University, who was not part of the study. “I don’t think any one study is going to change a lot of people’s minds, but it’s better to have the information than to not have it,” he told ThinkProgress.

Techniques used to assess expert views on human-caused climate change include analyzing peer-reviewed climate papers, surveying members of the relevant scientific community, compiling public statements by scientists, and mathematically analyzing citation patterns. For this paper, authors used a statistical technique called meta-analysis, which is a way to combine the findings from independent studies, and essentially did a meta-study of meta-studies.

The study also shows that the higher the level of expertise in climate science, the higher the agreement that global warming is caused by humans. “The consensus on consensus is very strong,” said Sarah A. Green, co-author and professor at Michigan Technological University, in an interview with ThinkProgress. “For me, this topic is deja vu — this consensus has been growing since I was a graduate student in the 80s.”

Yet Green said authors wanted to counter climate skeptics, and rebut a comment paper that criticized a consensus study John Cook, lead author of the study and researcher at the University of Queensland, wrote in 2013. “Not that it is wrong to have questions,” said Green. “It’s wrong to not listen to the answers.”

Richard Tol, who wrote the comment paper, is still unconvinced — despite the rebuttal. “It is good to do the occasional stock take of what we do and do not know. The usual form for that is through literature surveys and meta-analyses rather than consensus estimates like Cook’s,” said Tol, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, via email.

But Tol, who didn’t answer whether he accepts the science of climate change, is not the only consensus skeptic, though he is part of a dying breed. American understanding of human-caused global warming has lagged behind the scientific community, even though the national academies of science from 80 countries have issued statements endorsing the consensus position, and even though 2015 was the hottest year on record. That’s been changing, however. Last March, some 64 percent of adults said they are worried a “great deal” or “fair amount” about global warming, up from 55 percent at that time last year. According to the Gallup poll, concerns about global warming have increased among all party groups since 2015. Moreover, activists are pushing to unveil what they describe as decades of misinformation campaigns funded by fossil fuel interests. Indeed, it’s been widely reported that secret donor networks have funded groups that attack peer-reviewed scientific research.

Meanwhile, 59 percent of the Republican House caucus and 70 percent of Republicans in the Senate deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and humans caused it, according to a recent analysis from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. That means more than six in 10 Americans are represented by someone in Congress who denies climate change.

Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, said that disconnection between the consensus and politicians is worrisome. “We are a nation whose national treasure is our prowess of science,” Frank, who wasn’t part of the study, told ThinkProgress. “Once you start downs this road of pushing against science because it has political ramification, then all of science opens up to it.”

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That 97% is real..

In the scientific field of climate studies – which is informed by many different disciplines – the consensus is demonstrated by the number of scientists who have stopped arguing about what is causing climate change – and that’s nearly all of them.
Authors of seven climate consensus studies — including Naomi Oreskes, Peter Doran, William Anderegg, Bart Verheggen, Ed Maibach, J. Stuart Carlton, and John Cook — co-authored a 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.

The 97% consensus on global warming

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Scientists set about refuting the remaining climate-skeptic literature
Most people have heard the statistic that “97 percent of climate scientists agree” on climate change. That stat traces back to an infamous study in which researchers built a comprehensive database of peer-reviewed scientific papers on climate change and classified them by whether they challenged the mainstream consensus. Just a little over 2 percent of the papers did. (Somehow “97 percent of papers” became “97 percent of scientists.”)

The study came under predictable attack, but its conclusions were in line with several other studies on the level of consensus. Skeptical Science has a nice rundown.



(Skeptical Science)
Now some of the same researchers involved in that 2016 study — along with several new co-authors — have published a new study, in which they track down the peer-reviewed papers challenging the consensus and subject them to review. For each of the 38 papers, they analyze the data and methodology and attempt to replicate the conclusions. 

The results? You will not be surprised to hear that most of the papers had methodological errors and bad arguments. The authors cite “missing contextual information,” “ignoring information that does not fit the conclusions,” “insufficient model evaluation,” “false dichotomies, inappropriate statistical methods, [and] basing conclusions on misconceived or incomplete physics.”

If you’re interested in the details, the study dives in pretty deep into each paper’s errors and mistakes. Katherine Ellen Foley has a nice summary on Quartz, one of the co-authors, Dana Nuccitelli, discussed the implicationsover on the Guardian, and another co-author, Katharine Hayhoe, has a Facebook post about it.

The take-home message is simple: The 2 percent or so of papers in the peer-reviewed literature that dispute the basic findings of climate science are mostly junk. The arguments of contrarians “weren't suppressed,” writes Hayhoe. “They're out there, where anyone can find them.” They’re just bad.