Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature
'Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature' is the title of John Cook et al. (2013) which was a landmark climate research paper. The paper found that 97.1% of climate scientists supported the consensus position that human cause climate change.[1] As of March 2021, the paper has received at least 1,270,076 downloads.[1]
This paper has proved so influential that institutions like the AAAS and world leaders such as Barack Obama and David Cameron have cited or endorsed it.[2][3] The editors of the journal Environmental Research Letters awarded the paper as Best article of 2013.[4]
Background[edit]
Research conducted with similar aims to John Cook’s paper have found similar results.
Doran and Zimmerman (2011) found a 97% consensus among climatologists.[5]
Anderegg et al. (2010) studied climate expert’s opinion’s and again found a 97% consensus.[6]
Leiserowitz et al. (2020) found a discrepancy between the opinion of the average American and what scientists think about the threat of global warming. They cite a consensus among scientists exceeding 90%.[7]
Methodology and findings[edit]
The study was "conceived as a citizen science project by volunteers contributing to the Skeptical Science website". 11,944 abstracts were acquired by searching the Web of Science database, with criteria such as "global warming" or "global climate change". Volunteers then assessed each abstract and assigned it a 'level of agreement' - under Cook et al.'s agreement criterion. The abstracts were randomly distributed to volunteers to rate, with only the abstract and title visible. Each abstract was assessed by at least two raters.[1] They also invited authors to rate their own papers and found that, while 35.5% rated their paper as expressing no position on AGW, 97.2% of the rest endorsed the consensus. In both cases the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position was marginally increasing over time.[1]
Criticisms of the study[edit]
University of Oxford researcher Benjamin John Floyd Dean stated - "The study used levels of endorsement of global warming as outlined in their table 2; however, I could see no mention as to how these levels were created and how reliable they were in terms of both inter-rater and intra-rater reliability (Cohen's kappa) Best practice on rater reliability indicates that both inter-rater and intra-rater should have been measured and documented in a study such as Dr Cook's [2] and I am surprised that this fact appears to have been neglected.[8]"
Writing for The Guardian, Dr Richard Tol stated; "Cook and co selected some 12,000 papers from the scientific literature to test whether these papers support the hypothesis that humans played a substantial role in the observed warming of the Earth. 12,000 is a strange number. The climate literature is much larger. The number of papers on the detection and attribution of climate change is much, much smaller".[9]
Response to the criticism[edit]
In response to the critisism Cook et al in 2016 performed a follow up study, called Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming, which sums up the consensus studies of 6 different studies regarding the scientific consensus about human caused climate change. [10] Furthermore Sceptical Science dedicated a website to the criticism and its rebuttal.[11]
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Cook, John; Nuccitelli, Dana; Green, Sarah A; Richardson, Mark; Winkler, Bärbel; Painting, Rob; Way, Robert; Jacobs, Peter; Skuce, Andrew (2013-05-15). "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature". Environmental Research Letters. 8 (2): 024024. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024. ISSN 1748-9326.
- ↑ "John Cook | Center For Climate Change Communication". www.climatechangecommunication.org. Retrieved 2021-05-30.
- ↑ AAAS: What we know
- ↑ Certificate from ERL
- ↑ Doran, Peter T.; Zimmerman, Maggie Kendall (2009). "Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change". Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union. 90 (3): 22–23. doi:10.1029/2009EO030002. ISSN 2324-9250.
- ↑ Anderegg, William R. L.; Prall, James W.; Harold, Jacob; Schneider, Stephen H. (2010-06-07). "Expert credibility in climate change". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107 (27): 12107–12109. doi:10.1073/pnas.1003187107. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 2901439. PMID 20566872.
- ↑ Yale Climate Communication: Climate Change in the American Mind
- ↑ Dean, Benjamin John Floyd (2015-03-01). "Comment on 'Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature'". Environmental Research Letters. 10 (3): 039001. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/039001. ISSN 1748-9326.
- ↑ Tol, Richard (2014-06-06). "The claim of a 97% consensus on global warming does not stand up | Richard Tol". the Guardian. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
- ↑ Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming
- ↑ SkepticalScience: The scientific consensus on global warming online
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