Nowadays, television news shows and newspaper and magazine articles that mention global warming rarely resort to outright lies
like this grotesque piece of propaganda from
Forbes. Instead, you'll likely catch a reportorial "balancing" act that purports to show "both sides." Scientists, you'll be told, don't all agree that humans are causing the earth's climate to change, the implication being that an intellectual wrestling match is going on among experts in the know.
In fact, not all scientists do agree that humans are causing global warming. As researchers under the guidance of John Cook at Skeptical Science discovered in a "citizen science" survey of 11,944 peer-reviewed articles, 1.6 percent of the authors expressing an opinion on the subject rejected or were uncertain about the consensus that the earth is undergoing anthropogenic (human-generated) global warming (AGW). And 97.1 percent of the nearly 4,000 articles in which the author(s) took a position endorsed the AGW consensus. (The survey was published May 15 in Environmental Research Letters as an open access article.)
The survey will not, of course, persuade the professional deniers, several of whom have already weighed in with attacks on the credibility of Cook and Skeptical Science itself. What optimists might hope for, however, is that the media will finally get the message and stop implying that some significant proportion of scientists dispute the anthropogenic nature of global warming. If only we could get the number of warming rejectionists in Congress down to 1.6 percent.
Cook's team of volunteers, recruited from the Skeptical Science website's readers in eight countries, expanded on an original survey conducted in 2004 by Naomi Oreskes. That survey found 928 peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature from 1993-2004. Here's how the Skeptical Science team did its work:
We performed a keyword search of peer-reviewed scientific journal publications (in the ISI Web of Science) for the terms 'global warming' and "global climate change" between the years 1991 and 2011, which returned over 12,000 papers. John Cook created a web-based system that would randomly display a paper's abstract (summary). We agreed upon definitions of possible categories: explicit or implicit endorsement of human-caused global warming, no position, and implicit or explicit rejection (or minimization of the human influence). [...]
We took a conservative approach in our ratings. For example, a study which takes it for granted that global warming will continue for the foreseeable future could easily be put into the implicit endorsement category; there is no reason to expect global warming to continue indefinitely unless humans are causing it. However, unless an abstract included (either implicit or explicit) language about the cause of the warming, we categorized it as "no position."
The reviewers also asked the authors of some 2,100 articles to rate their own views about AGW. In this short video, Cook explains some of the details:
Please continue reading below the fold for more on the survey.
Cook says the findings are important because "people who correctly perceive the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming are more likely to support government action to curb greenhouse gas emissions."
The problem? Research shows the public is misinformed (disinformed might be a better description) about the scientific consensus. That traditional media "balance" is part of the reason. But the malicious anti-warming propaganda emitted from hate-radio, denier websites and intense, well-funded lobbying has taken a huge toll on the truth about global warming. Consequently, as the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found in polling last year, while two-thirds of Americans agree that global warming is happening, less than half know that the vast majority of scientists agree humans are causing it to happen.
Chart shows the difference between public perception of the scientific consensus
on global warming and what the consensus actually is.
Spreading the word can make a difference in public policy, Cook says. But Suzanne Goldenberg, a U.S.-based environment reporter at
The Guardian found a contrary view from Robert Brulle. He is a sociologist at Drexel University "who studies the forces underlying attitudes towards climate change." And he doesn't think convincing a wider segment of the public about the scientific consensus on global warming's cause will change the political equation. What matters, he says, is getting leaders to act:
"I don't think people really want to come around to grips with the fact that climate change is a highly ideological issue and it is not amenable to the information deficit model," he said.
"The information deficit model, this idea that if you just pile on more information people will get convinced, is just completely inadequate, he said. "It strengthens the people who actually read and pay attention but it is certainly not going to change or shift the opinions of others."
In fact, the percentage of the American public that sees human activities as being the "primary cause" of global warming has been on the upswing for the past five years. The Gallup Poll
puts it at 57 percent currently, seven points higher than it was in 2010. But 61 percent of Americans saw it that way a decade ago.
What's different now is that there is a growing number of activists from various walks of life who are committed to making changes, as this event coordinator for Organizing for America in South Minneapolis discovered when he tried to move on without addressing the concerns of opponents of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
