The Global Warming Consensus

There is overwhelming evidence that human activity is largely responsible for climate change.

But where does the scientific consensus that experts talk about come from, and what can people do with this information?

Over 10,000 studies, with one particularly famous one published in 2013 is the source of the, now dated, 97% scientific consensus (current evidence shows it is greater than 99%).

This study was not just any study though, it was a study of studies.

The terms ‘global warming’ and ‘global climate change’ were searched in a massive database, the Web of Science.

The Web of Science is basically a hub of databases that lets people search through millions of scientific publications. This is an oversimplification, but kind of like google but with peer review.

11944 papers from 1991-2011 were analyzed, the researchers only viewed the abstracts in most cases due to the sheer number of papers.

The abstract in a scientific paper is essentially the short summary at the beginning, most people don’t really need to read past an abstract for what they are looking for in a paper.

Usually people read past an abstract if they are trying to reproduce a study, to refute or confirm its findings, or if they are otherwise interested in the details.

On climate change, they found 66.4% of the papers expressed no position, 32.6% took the position of it being human caused, 0.7% rejected the idea humans caused it, and 0.3% were uncertain of the cause.

The difference between having no position and being uncertain is significant, often in science if something is considered to be common knowledge or assumed to be true, it is unmentioned in a paper.

For example, most physics papers do not have specific mention that the theory of gravity is assumed to be true, they just assume it.

It is generally the case in science that as consensus is formed, fewer and fewer papers will state their position on the issue, it is decided, and a waste of valuable space to even mention.

There is always the possibility that this isn’t the case, so to attempt to address this the study got feedback from 1189 authors on 2142 of the papers. 

They asked 8547 people and had to filter out a few papers that were not peer-reviewed, not climate related or had no abstract to help see if the consensus was just being assumed.

Of the 2142 papers, more than half of the ones which were found as ‘no position’ or ‘undecided’ were rated by their authors as taking the position that climate change is human caused, it was just assumed.

Fast forward to 2021 and most of the papers which have rejected the idea of human caused climate change have been found to contain significant issues like cherry picking data or in some cases denying basic physics.

To those who already agreed with the scientific consensus, this information does not really matter much. 

People who have assumed this have already moved on and are discussing how to address the issue and what is practical, an area where there is not consensus.

Those who disagree with the scientific consensus have an interesting problem. The world basically disagrees and there is no authority which is going to give them the time of day in the face of science.

There is very little practical comeback to ‘science disagrees’.

It may be beneficial to spend less effort trying to fight most of society and more effort trying to maximize ones gain.

Even if one does not agree with this, if almost everyone else does, behaviour and trends will shift fairly predictably, there is money to be made.

Disagreeing with scientific consensus is a pretty hard sell. 

Vezina is the CEO of Prepared Canada Corp. He can be reached at info@prepared.ca.