“The articles have a total of 33,690 individual authors. The
24 rejecting papers have a total of 34 authors, about 1 in 1,000.” Source: http://www.jamespowell.org/
According to Powell, about one tenth of one percent of
scientific authors who published in peer-reviewed journals on global climate
change issues in the last twenty years do not believe that that change is
caused by humans. One tenth of one percent. But I suppose some people believe
that’s not a consensus or that all the other scientists who believe in AGW are intentionally
falsifying or skewing their results, or are getting paid by some nefarious
liberal organization.
But one tenth of one percent seems incredibly persuasive,
given that the top ten countries where the research was performed are, in
numerical order: USA, England, China, Germany, Japan, Canada, Australia,
France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Persuasive only if you have an open mind.
Again, according to Powell, the results of his study demonstrate
the existence of a hoax targeted on misleading the public about global warming.
A small group of global warming deniers has created the illusion that
scientists disagree about climate change by using a well-funded campaign of
smoke and mirrors and every form of communication except peer-reviewed
scientific papers. But that campaign hasn't succeeded. Source: James Powell. “The
State of Climate Science: A Thorough Review of the Scientific Literature on
Global Warming. Science Progress, Thursday, November 15th, 2012. Found online
at: http://scienceprogress.org/2012/11/27479/
It turns out conservatives have been caught wearing the
Emperor’s New Clothes with their bare asses hanging out for all to see. Readers
who yearn for documentation of the existence of an organized movement on the
part of conservatives to obscure the science of global warming are encouraged
to examine the following peer-reviewed sources. Please note that this list is far from all inclusive.
Aklin, Michael, and Johannes Urpelainen. 2014. Perceptions of scientific dissent undermine public support for environmental policy. Environmental Science & Policy 28: 173-177. Abstract: This article shows that even modest amounts of scientific dissent reduce public support for environmental policy. A survey experiment with 1000 Americans demonstrates that small skeptical scientific minorities can cast significant doubt among the general public on the existence of an environmental problem and reduce support for addressing it. Public support for environmental policy is maximized when the subjects receive no information about the scientific debate, indicating that the general public's default assumption is a very high degree of scientific consensus. Accordingly, a stronger scientific consensus will not generate public support for environmental policy, unless skeptical voices become almost silent.
Anderegg, William R. L., James W. Prall, Jacob Harold, and Stephen H. Schneider. 2010. Expert credibility in climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107: 12107-12109.
Anderegg, William R. L.; and coauthors (December 28, 2010). Reply to Bodenstein: Contextual data about the relative scale of opposing scientific communities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (52): Available online at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3012517/.
Bodenstein, Lawrence (December 28, 2010). Regarding Anderegg et al. and climate change credibility. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (52): Available online at: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/52/E188.short.
Boykoff, M. T., & Boykoff, J. M. (2004). Balance as bias: Global warming and the US prestige press. Global Environmental Change 14(2): 125-136.
Bray, D. 2010. The scientific consensus of climate change revisited. Environmental Science & Policy 13(5): 340-350. Abstract: This paper first reviews previous work undertaken to assess the level of scientific consensus concerning climate change, concluding that studies of scientific consensus concerning climate change have tended to measure different things. Three dimensions of consensus are determined: manifestation, attribution and legitimation. Consensus concerning these dimensions are explored in detail using a time series of data from surveys of climate scientists. In most cases, little difference is discerned between those who have participated in the IPCC process and those who have not. Consensus, however, in both groups does not amount to unanimity. Results also suggest rather than a single group proclaiming the IPCC does not represent consensus, there are now two groups, one claiming the IPCC makes overestimations (a group previously labeled skeptics, deniers, etc.) and a relatively new formation of a group (many of whom have participated in the IPCC process) proclaiming that IPCC tends to underestimate some climate related phenomena.
Cook, John, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce. 2013. Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters 8(2). Available online at: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024.
Cook et al examined 11,944 abstracts from the peer-reviewed scientific literature from 1991–2011 that matched the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. They found that, while 66.4% of them expressed no position on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), of those that did, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. They also invited authors to rate their own papers and found that, while only 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. They concluded that the number of papers actually rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.
The Cook et al. (2013) 97% consensus result is robust. 2014. Skeptical Science. http://www.skepticalscience.com/97-percent-consensus-robust.htm
Doran, Peter T., and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman. 2009. Examining the scientific consensus on climate change. Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union 90(3): 22-23. Abstract: Fifty-two percent of Americans think most climate scientists agree that the Earth has been warming in recent years, and 47% think climate scientists agree (i.e., that there is a scientific consensus) that human activities are a major cause of that warming, according to recent polling (see http://www.pollingreport.com/enviro.htm). However, attempts to quantify the scientific consensus on anthropogenic warming have met with criticism. For instance, Oreskes (2004) reviewed 928 abstracts from peer-reviewed research papers and found that more than 75% either explicitly or implicitly accepted the consensus view that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities. Yet Oreskes’s approach has been criticized for overstating the level of consensus acceptance within the examined abstracts (Peiser 2005) and for not capturing the full diversity of scientific opinion (Pielke 2005). A review of previous attempts at quantifying the consensus and criticisms is provided by Kendall Zimmerman (2008). The objective of our study presented here is to assess the scientific consensus on climate change through an unbiased survey of a large and broad group of Earth scientists.
Dugan, Andrew. 2014. Americans most likely to say global warming is exaggerated. Gallup. Available at: http://www.gallup.com/poll/167960/americans-likely-say-global-warming-exaggerated.aspx
Feygina, Irina, John T. Jost, and Rachel E. Goldsmith. 2010. System justification, the denial of global warming, and the possibility of “system sanctioned change.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36: 326-338.
Fisher, Dana R., Joseph Waggle, and Philip Leifeld. 2013. Where does political polarization come from? Locating polarization within the U.S. climate change debate. American Behavioral Scientist 57(1): 70-92.
Flynn, James, Slovic, Paul, & Mertz, C. K. 1994. Gender, Race, and Perception of Environmental Health Risks. Risk Analysis 14(6): 1101-1108. Abstract: This paper reports the results of a national survey in which perceptions of environmental health risks were measured for 1275 white and 214 nonwhite persons. The results showed that white women perceived risks to be much higher than did white men, a result that is consistent with previous studies. However, this gender difference was not true of nonwhite women and men, whose perceptions of risk were quite similar. Most striking was the finding that white males tended to differ from everyone else in their attitudes and perceptions–on average, they perceived risks as much smaller and much more acceptable than did other people. These results suggest that sociopolitical factors such as power, status, alienation, and trust are strong determiners of people's perception and acceptance of risks.
Freudenburg, William R., and Violetta Muselli. 2013. Reexamining climate change debates: Scientific disagreement or scientific certainty argumentation methods (SCAMs)? American Behavioral Scientist 57(6): 777-795. Abstract: Despite strong scientific consensus that global climate disruption is real and due in significant part to human activities, stories in the U.S. mass media often still present the opposite view, characterizing the issue as being “in dispute.” Even today, the U.S. media devote significant attention to small numbers of denialists, who claim that scientific consensus assessments, such as those by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are “exaggerated” and “political.” Such claims, however, are testable hypotheses—and just the opposite expectation is hypothesized in the small but growing literature on Scientific Certainty Argumentation Methods, or SCAMs. The work on SCAMs suggests that, rather than being a reflection of legitimate scientific disagreement, the intense criticisms of climate science may reflect a predictable pattern that grows out of “the politics of doubt”: If enough doubt can be raised about the relevant scientific findings, regulation can be avoided or delayed for years or even decades. Ironically, though, while such a pattern can lead to a bias in scientific work, the likely bias is expected to be just the opposite of the one usually feared. The underlying reason has to do with the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge, or ASC—so named because certain theories or findings, such as those indicating the significance of climate disruption, are subjected to systematically greater challenges than are those supporting opposing conclusions. As this article shows, available evidence provides significantly more support for SCAM and ASC perspectives than for the concerns that are commonly expressed in the U.S. mass media. These findings suggest that, if current scientific consensus is in error, it is likely because global climate disruption may be even worse than commonly expected to date.
Gauchat, Gordon. 2012. Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010. American Sociological Review 77: 167-187.
Kahan, Dan M., Ellen Peters, Maggie Wittlin, Paul Slovic, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Donald Braman, and Gregory Mandel. 2012. The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks. Nature Climate Change 2: 732-735.
Kahan, Dan M., Hank Jenkins-Smith, and Donald Braman, 2011. Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus. Journal of Risk Research 14: 147-74.
Kalof, Linda, Dietz, Thomas, Guagnano, Gregory, and Stern, Paul C. 2002. Race, gender and environmentalism: The atypical values and beliefs of white men. Race, Gender & Class 9(2): 112-130.
McCright, A. M. 2007. Dealing with climate change contrarians. In: Suzanne. C. Moser, and Lisa Dilling, (Eds.), Creating a climate for change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change (200-212). New York: Cambridge University Press.
McCright, A. M., 2010. The effects of gender on climate change knowledge and concern in the American public. Population and Environment 32: 66-87.
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2000. Challenging global warming as a social problem: an analysis of the conservative movement’s counter claims. Social Problems 47(4): 499-522.
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2003. Defeating Kyoto: the conservative movement’s impact on U.S. climate change policy. Social Problems 50(3): 348-373.
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2010. Anti-Reflexivity: the American conservative movement’s success in undermining climate science and policy. Theory, Culture, and Society 27(2-3): 100-133.
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2011. The politicization of climate change and polarization in the American public’s views of global warming, 2001-2010. The Sociological Quarterly 52: 155-194.
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2011. Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States. Global Environmental Change 21(4): 1163-1172. Abstract: We examine whether conservative white males are more likely than are other adults in the U.S. general public to endorse climate change denial. We draw theoretical and analytical guidance from the identity-protective cognition thesis explaining the white male effect and from recent political psychology scholarship documenting the heightened system-justification tendencies of political conservatives. We utilize public opinion data from ten Gallup surveys from 2001 to 2010, focusing specifically on five indicators of climate change denial. We find that conservative white males are significantly more likely than are other Americans to endorse denialist views on all five items, and that these differences are even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well. Furthermore, the results of our multivariate logistic regression models reveal that the conservative white male effect remains significant when controlling for the direct effects of political ideology, race, and gender as well as the effects of nine control variables. We thus conclude that the unique views of conservative white males contribute significantly to the high level of climate change denial in the United States.
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2013. Bringing ideology in: the conservative white male effect on worry about environmental problems in the USA. Journal of Risk Research 16(2): 211-226. Abstract: Extending existing scholarship on the white male effect in risk perception, we examine whether conservative white males (CWMs) are less worried about the risks of environmental problems than are other adults in the US general public. We draw theoretical and analytical guidance from the identity-protective cognition thesis explaining the white male effect and from recent political psychology scholarship documenting the heightened system-justification tendencies of political conservatives. We utilize public opinion data from nine Gallup surveys between 2001 and 2010, focusing on both a single-item indicator and a composite measure of worry about environmental problems. We find that CWMs indeed have significantly lower worry about environmental problems than do other Americans. Furthermore, the results of our multivariate regression models reveal that this CWMs effect remains significant when controlling for the direct effects of political ideology, race, and gender and the effects of nine social, demographic, and temporal control variables – as well as the effect of individuals generalized (non-environmental) risk perceptions. We conclude that the white male effect is due largely to CWMs, and that the latter’s low level of concern with environmental risks is likely driven by their social commitment to prevent new environmental regulations and repeal existing ones.
Oreskes. Naomi. 2004 (Erratum January 21, 2005). The scientific consensus on climate change (PDF). Science 306 (5702): 1686. doi:10.1126/science.1103618. PMID 15576594
Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
Anderegg, William R. L., James W. Prall, Jacob Harold, and Stephen H. Schneider. 2010. Expert credibility in climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107: 12107-12109.
Anderegg, William R. L.; and coauthors (December 28, 2010). Reply to Bodenstein: Contextual data about the relative scale of opposing scientific communities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (52): Available online at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3012517/.
Bodenstein, Lawrence (December 28, 2010). Regarding Anderegg et al. and climate change credibility. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (52): Available online at: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/52/E188.short.
Boykoff, M. T., & Boykoff, J. M. (2004). Balance as bias: Global warming and the US prestige press. Global Environmental Change 14(2): 125-136.
Bray, D. 2010. The scientific consensus of climate change revisited. Environmental Science & Policy 13(5): 340-350. Abstract: This paper first reviews previous work undertaken to assess the level of scientific consensus concerning climate change, concluding that studies of scientific consensus concerning climate change have tended to measure different things. Three dimensions of consensus are determined: manifestation, attribution and legitimation. Consensus concerning these dimensions are explored in detail using a time series of data from surveys of climate scientists. In most cases, little difference is discerned between those who have participated in the IPCC process and those who have not. Consensus, however, in both groups does not amount to unanimity. Results also suggest rather than a single group proclaiming the IPCC does not represent consensus, there are now two groups, one claiming the IPCC makes overestimations (a group previously labeled skeptics, deniers, etc.) and a relatively new formation of a group (many of whom have participated in the IPCC process) proclaiming that IPCC tends to underestimate some climate related phenomena.
Cook, John, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce. 2013. Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters 8(2). Available online at: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024.
Cook et al examined 11,944 abstracts from the peer-reviewed scientific literature from 1991–2011 that matched the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. They found that, while 66.4% of them expressed no position on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), of those that did, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. They also invited authors to rate their own papers and found that, while only 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. They concluded that the number of papers actually rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.
The Cook et al. (2013) 97% consensus result is robust. 2014. Skeptical Science. http://www.skepticalscience.com/97-percent-consensus-robust.htm
Doran, Peter T., and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman. 2009. Examining the scientific consensus on climate change. Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union 90(3): 22-23. Abstract: Fifty-two percent of Americans think most climate scientists agree that the Earth has been warming in recent years, and 47% think climate scientists agree (i.e., that there is a scientific consensus) that human activities are a major cause of that warming, according to recent polling (see http://www.pollingreport.com/enviro.htm). However, attempts to quantify the scientific consensus on anthropogenic warming have met with criticism. For instance, Oreskes (2004) reviewed 928 abstracts from peer-reviewed research papers and found that more than 75% either explicitly or implicitly accepted the consensus view that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities. Yet Oreskes’s approach has been criticized for overstating the level of consensus acceptance within the examined abstracts (Peiser 2005) and for not capturing the full diversity of scientific opinion (Pielke 2005). A review of previous attempts at quantifying the consensus and criticisms is provided by Kendall Zimmerman (2008). The objective of our study presented here is to assess the scientific consensus on climate change through an unbiased survey of a large and broad group of Earth scientists.
Dugan, Andrew. 2014. Americans most likely to say global warming is exaggerated. Gallup. Available at: http://www.gallup.com/poll/167960/americans-likely-say-global-warming-exaggerated.aspx
Feygina, Irina, John T. Jost, and Rachel E. Goldsmith. 2010. System justification, the denial of global warming, and the possibility of “system sanctioned change.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36: 326-338.
Fisher, Dana R., Joseph Waggle, and Philip Leifeld. 2013. Where does political polarization come from? Locating polarization within the U.S. climate change debate. American Behavioral Scientist 57(1): 70-92.
Flynn, James, Slovic, Paul, & Mertz, C. K. 1994. Gender, Race, and Perception of Environmental Health Risks. Risk Analysis 14(6): 1101-1108. Abstract: This paper reports the results of a national survey in which perceptions of environmental health risks were measured for 1275 white and 214 nonwhite persons. The results showed that white women perceived risks to be much higher than did white men, a result that is consistent with previous studies. However, this gender difference was not true of nonwhite women and men, whose perceptions of risk were quite similar. Most striking was the finding that white males tended to differ from everyone else in their attitudes and perceptions–on average, they perceived risks as much smaller and much more acceptable than did other people. These results suggest that sociopolitical factors such as power, status, alienation, and trust are strong determiners of people's perception and acceptance of risks.
Freudenburg, William R., and Violetta Muselli. 2013. Reexamining climate change debates: Scientific disagreement or scientific certainty argumentation methods (SCAMs)? American Behavioral Scientist 57(6): 777-795. Abstract: Despite strong scientific consensus that global climate disruption is real and due in significant part to human activities, stories in the U.S. mass media often still present the opposite view, characterizing the issue as being “in dispute.” Even today, the U.S. media devote significant attention to small numbers of denialists, who claim that scientific consensus assessments, such as those by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are “exaggerated” and “political.” Such claims, however, are testable hypotheses—and just the opposite expectation is hypothesized in the small but growing literature on Scientific Certainty Argumentation Methods, or SCAMs. The work on SCAMs suggests that, rather than being a reflection of legitimate scientific disagreement, the intense criticisms of climate science may reflect a predictable pattern that grows out of “the politics of doubt”: If enough doubt can be raised about the relevant scientific findings, regulation can be avoided or delayed for years or even decades. Ironically, though, while such a pattern can lead to a bias in scientific work, the likely bias is expected to be just the opposite of the one usually feared. The underlying reason has to do with the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge, or ASC—so named because certain theories or findings, such as those indicating the significance of climate disruption, are subjected to systematically greater challenges than are those supporting opposing conclusions. As this article shows, available evidence provides significantly more support for SCAM and ASC perspectives than for the concerns that are commonly expressed in the U.S. mass media. These findings suggest that, if current scientific consensus is in error, it is likely because global climate disruption may be even worse than commonly expected to date.
Gauchat, Gordon. 2012. Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010. American Sociological Review 77: 167-187.
Kahan, Dan M., Ellen Peters, Maggie Wittlin, Paul Slovic, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Donald Braman, and Gregory Mandel. 2012. The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks. Nature Climate Change 2: 732-735.
Kahan, Dan M., Hank Jenkins-Smith, and Donald Braman, 2011. Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus. Journal of Risk Research 14: 147-74.
Kalof, Linda, Dietz, Thomas, Guagnano, Gregory, and Stern, Paul C. 2002. Race, gender and environmentalism: The atypical values and beliefs of white men. Race, Gender & Class 9(2): 112-130.
McCright, A. M. 2007. Dealing with climate change contrarians. In: Suzanne. C. Moser, and Lisa Dilling, (Eds.), Creating a climate for change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change (200-212). New York: Cambridge University Press.
McCright, A. M., 2010. The effects of gender on climate change knowledge and concern in the American public. Population and Environment 32: 66-87.
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2000. Challenging global warming as a social problem: an analysis of the conservative movement’s counter claims. Social Problems 47(4): 499-522.
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2003. Defeating Kyoto: the conservative movement’s impact on U.S. climate change policy. Social Problems 50(3): 348-373.
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2010. Anti-Reflexivity: the American conservative movement’s success in undermining climate science and policy. Theory, Culture, and Society 27(2-3): 100-133.
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2011. The politicization of climate change and polarization in the American public’s views of global warming, 2001-2010. The Sociological Quarterly 52: 155-194.
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2011. Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States. Global Environmental Change 21(4): 1163-1172. Abstract: We examine whether conservative white males are more likely than are other adults in the U.S. general public to endorse climate change denial. We draw theoretical and analytical guidance from the identity-protective cognition thesis explaining the white male effect and from recent political psychology scholarship documenting the heightened system-justification tendencies of political conservatives. We utilize public opinion data from ten Gallup surveys from 2001 to 2010, focusing specifically on five indicators of climate change denial. We find that conservative white males are significantly more likely than are other Americans to endorse denialist views on all five items, and that these differences are even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well. Furthermore, the results of our multivariate logistic regression models reveal that the conservative white male effect remains significant when controlling for the direct effects of political ideology, race, and gender as well as the effects of nine control variables. We thus conclude that the unique views of conservative white males contribute significantly to the high level of climate change denial in the United States.
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2013. Bringing ideology in: the conservative white male effect on worry about environmental problems in the USA. Journal of Risk Research 16(2): 211-226. Abstract: Extending existing scholarship on the white male effect in risk perception, we examine whether conservative white males (CWMs) are less worried about the risks of environmental problems than are other adults in the US general public. We draw theoretical and analytical guidance from the identity-protective cognition thesis explaining the white male effect and from recent political psychology scholarship documenting the heightened system-justification tendencies of political conservatives. We utilize public opinion data from nine Gallup surveys between 2001 and 2010, focusing on both a single-item indicator and a composite measure of worry about environmental problems. We find that CWMs indeed have significantly lower worry about environmental problems than do other Americans. Furthermore, the results of our multivariate regression models reveal that this CWMs effect remains significant when controlling for the direct effects of political ideology, race, and gender and the effects of nine social, demographic, and temporal control variables – as well as the effect of individuals generalized (non-environmental) risk perceptions. We conclude that the white male effect is due largely to CWMs, and that the latter’s low level of concern with environmental risks is likely driven by their social commitment to prevent new environmental regulations and repeal existing ones.
Oreskes. Naomi. 2004 (Erratum January 21, 2005). The scientific consensus on climate change (PDF). Science 306 (5702): 1686. doi:10.1126/science.1103618. PMID 15576594
Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
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