Reply to Comment on ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature’

By John Cook, Kevin Cowtan. 2013

267 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.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1a480e4f476f79f3117fdc52ead5cb9f91248bb7

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Citations in the corpus

Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence (2017, background): “Several studies have found nearly unanimous agreement among publishing climate scientists that humans are causing global warming [22,23,24], and a similar pervasive consensus exists in the scientific literature [25,26].”
The influence of personal beliefs, friends, and family in building climate change concern among adolescents (2019, background): “Considerable progress has been made in understanding the mechanisms of anthropogenic global climate change (Cook et al. 2013; IPCC 2013) and predicting likely impacts such as sea level rise (National Aeronautics and Space Administration 2014), increased flooding and droughts (Min et al. 2011), and…”
Seepage: Climate change denial and its effect on the scientific community (2015, background): “Studies have repeatedly shown that the vast majority of climate scientists—around 97%—endorse the basic conclusion that the globe is warming from greenhouse gas emissions (Anderegg et al., 2010; Cook et al., 2013; Doran and Zimmerman, 2009; Oreskes, 2004).”
How to communicate the scientific consensus on climate change: plain facts, pie charts or metaphors? (2014, result): “…on the subject of global climate change found that 97 % of the papers accept the consensus position that humans are causing global warming (Cook et al. 2013) – a finding consistent with results of earlier surveys of the scientific literature on climate change (Oreskes 2004; Anderegg et…”