Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature
By John Cook, D. Nuccitelli, S. Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, R. Way, P. Jacobs, A. Skuce. 2013
256 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors’ self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/02822d9bd3d277e0f2ea21fd42cbe341aa7f2c6c
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In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Fostering green investments and tackling climate-related financial risks: Which role for macroprudential policies? (2019, background): “There is now widespread recognition of climate change (Oreskes, 2004; Doran and Zimmerman, 2009; Cook et al., 2013).”
- Contributions and Risks of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Building Smarter Cities: Insights from a Systematic Review of the Literature (2020, background): “There exists a strong scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change is the biggest crisis of our time [1,2].”