From the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society
First Published November 20, 2019 Research Article 
https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467619886266
Abstract
The consensus among research scientists on anthropogenic global warming has grown to 100%, based on a review of 11,602 peer-reviewed articles on “climate change” and “global warming” published in the first 7 months of 2019.
Keywords global warming, climate change, anthropogenic global warming, consensus, climate
We can date the beginning of consensus-building on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) to Manabe and Wetherald (1967). Their pioneering computer modeling showed that doubling atmospheric CO2 would raise global temperature by about 2°C, lower than the present best estimate but not by much. Their finding convinced the late Wallace Broecker that what he named “global warming” was “a thing to worry about” (Broecker, 1975; Weart, 2009).
As computer modeling steadily improved and global temperatures began their erratic but inexorable climb in the 1970s, a consensus grew first among climate scientists and then more broadly that AGW was true and indeed worrisome. Governments became concerned about the damaging potential of AGW, as reflected in the objective of the first United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, held in Rio in June 1992: “To achieve . . . stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” (United Nations, 1992, p. 4).
Because the use of fossil fuels has become so embedded in the world economy, it was clear that “stabilizing” greenhouse gases might require large-scale government intervention and regulation, anathema to some, including some scientists. This recognition gave rise to the repeated claim of global warming denialists: “There’s no consensus.”
Consider as examples two statements 20 years apart from Richard Lindzen of MIT. In 1992, he published an article titled, “Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus” (Lindzen, 1992). It appeared in Regulation, a non–peer-reviewed periodical from the Cato Institute, a libertarian “think-tank.” The article began, “Many aspects of the catastrophic scenario have already been largely discounted by the scientific community [and] fears of massive sea level increases have been steadily reduced by orders of magnitude” (p. 87). In 2012, Lindzen and 15 coauthors published a letter to the Wall Street Journal titled, “No Need to Panic about Global Warming” (Lindzen, 2012). It opened with this paragraph:
A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.
The signatories included not only Lindzen but also a former astronaut and senator, the co-founder of the Journal of Forecasting, the President of the World Federation of Scientists, and a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. This impressive list seemed to show not only that there was no consensus on AGW, but that distinguished scientists thought it might well be false. However, Lindzen was the only one of the 16 who had done climate research.
Scholars responded to the controversy by surveying the opinion of scientists. The results of eight such studies conducted between 2009 and 2015 showed a consensus on AGW ranging from 83.5% to 97% (Cook et al., 2016). But given the ingrained caution of scientists and their reluctance to affirm findings outside their own field, opinion surveys are likely to underestimate the consensus. Moreover, as shown by the controversy over continental drift, even a near-unanimous consensus among scientists can turn out to be wrong. If we look back at the early decades of continental drift, however, we find that there was little peer-reviewed evidence for or against the theory. As a result, early articles on continental drift contained much more opinion than evidence. Thus, we could say that although scientists turned out to be wrong about continental drift, the peer-reviewed literature was not wrong, only thin and inconclusive. This affirms that the most reliable way to gauge a consensus among scientists is to turn to the peer-reviewed literature and the evidence therein. This method also has the advantage of directly showing how likely a theory is to be true.
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From the above article’s second paragraph following the abstract and key words:
“As computer modeling steadily improved . . .”
I hit a massive speed bump right there, and reasonably concluded the rest of the article would be fluff and not worth my time to read. So, I stopped. Did I miss anything other that the unintentional humor from the article’s author? 100% . . . really?
Even if there really is a 100% consensus, this tells you practically nothing. The issue is how much warming and what low carbon technologies upstream will come online. Molten salt small modular reactors seem a sure bet – cheaper than even fossil fuels, inherently safe and with a tiny footprint and no need for cooling water reservoirs, and no high internal reactor pressures all meana that low carbon power is practically at hand (next 6 years) and practical and should be favored by all
This paper has come up a few times on Twitter as I make my rounds and encounter the countless drones who just parrot whatever “climate crisis” related paper the Guardian has misinterpreted and convoluted out for their steady stream of indoctrinated puppets.
“I read the titles, and when it appeared that an article might question AGW, I read the abstract and in some cases the article itself. I found only a handful of articles whose titles left open the possibility that its authors might reject AGW, and on closer inspection none did.”
It’s fairly safe to say that anyone who would take that methodological process seriously is not worth engaging with – they’re either too tightly bound to their forcefed indoctrination to actually think critically, or they lack the capacity to assess how absolutely retarded that analysis is.
Even more pathetic is the compilation of “climate change” articles that he chose to apply his stellar analysis to.
I don’t know about you guys but
“An experimental study on effect of Colloidal Nano-Silica on tetranary blended concrete”
And
“An optimized group formation scheme to promote collaborative problem-based learning”
Don’t really sound very climate related at all.
“This method also has the advantage of directly showing how likely a theory is to be true.”
ROFL!
The authors are confusing voting for your favorite entertainer, song, or movie, with science.
… and the authors are astonishingly ignorant concerning the consequences of unlimited forced spending and green stuff that does not work and legislation to de-carbonized.
Physical theories are either alive or dead or mostly dead (something recoverable).
CAGW should be stone cold dead (stinky, rotten to the core) based on the observational evidence and peer reviewed analysis.
Because of the climate wars the public are not aware of the evidence that kills CAGW or even the difference between CAGW and lukewarm ‘greenhouse’ gas warming which is almost not detectable.
For example, no one talks about the ancient climate because CO2 does not even correlate with temperature in the last 450 million years.
https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/5/4/76/htm
Relationship between Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Global Temperature for the Last 425 Million Years
“This study demonstrates that changes in atmospheric CO 2 concentration did not cause temperature change in the ancient climate.”
Of 68 correlation coefficients (half non-parametric) between CO 2 and T proxies encompassing all known major Phanerozoic climate transitions, 77.9% are non-discernible (p > 0.05) and 60.0% of discernible correlations are negative.
…. Spectral analysis, auto and cross-correlation show that proxies for T, atmospheric CO 2 concentration and ∆RF CO2 oscillate across the Phanerozoic, and cycles of CO 2and ∆RF CO2 are antiphasic.
It would be interesting to use a similar methodology to evaluate the papers which were submitted but not accepted for publication. Because the claim being made is not that 100% of research scientists agree, but rather that 100% of the papers accepted for publication conform to a particular understanding of climate change. And that is a very different, and far more plausible, claim.
How Billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg Corrupted Climate Science
According to my search of academic citations (using Web of Science) about 12,000 academic papers have cited papers that mistakenly refer to RCP8.5 as “business as usual” and many improperly compare RCP scenarios as policy options. Of those 12,000 papers about 2,000 of them (involving just the two Risky Business lead researchers) refer to work originating in the investments of Steyer-Bloomberg-Paulson and continuing at the Climate Impact Lab.
Further, not only has the USNCA adopted the flawed methodology of the Risky Business projects, but so too has the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, most notably in its 2019 Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. There can bee little doubt that climate science has been profoundly influenced by this campaign.
The science could use some work. The consensus is a theory with an evolutionary confidence interval.
11 thousand papers on climate change said climate change is a thing?
Lord a’ mercy!
This calls into question the very definition of scientist.
Must be anybody who publishes anything, anywhere.
But even then…
One of the many annoying things about climate change alarmism is the deliberate vagueness of the theory. We can’t let the Earth warm more than 1.5 degrees C? Try to find out, 1.5 degrees warmer than what temperature, exactly, and you can’t, because that number doesn’t exist. 1.5 is a real number. Why isn’t the base to which it is compared a real number too? Because it isn’t. It’s something known as “pre-industrial levels.” See what I mean? It’s a numerically undefinable figure masked as a numerical absolute.
Remember when it was thought that the elevation of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was believed to become catastrophic at 350 parts per million? We’ve passed that mark, and still no catastrophe. Well, the climate change crowd ain’t making that mistake again. They’re not going to tell us what average global temperature is the red line. It’s a secret.
And blimey, nothing can be inferred about any local climate from the mean global temperature (assuming that such a figure could actually be determined by objective, verifiable means, which it can’t.) If you knew the average per capita annual income of the all the peoples of the world, that would tell you nothing about the state of the economy in the city you live in. Similarly, the mean global temperature is meaningless. It’s just an arbitrary, and indeterminate datum from which it is falsely claimed that all kinds of calamities can be inferred.
I am astonished by people who ask, why don’t more people care about climate change? The answer is, most people aren’t affected by it in any way. In Edmonton, where I have lived since 1971, the climate really has changed. The winters are now shorter and milder, but the summers are not noticeably hotter. So climate change has been a boon. There are wildfires in Australia? Nothing to do with me, and therefore I don’t care. Nor does anyone else I know.
LOL, ROFL, ROFLMAO- 1000% jumping the shark! What a bunch of prostitutes! Wait even prostitutes provide a useful service! Shame on the ” scientists” “agreeing” with the party line!
Posting climate fraud propaganda with no critical analysis is a favor to the fraudsters.
I see a strong reliance on “Mathematics” in this article.
This is obviously a field riddled with “denialists”.
Adherence to the laws of mathematics and logic will lead to only one outcome – rationality!
These people even deny that CO2 can raise temperature 9 months in the past, yet the figures show there is a strong connection!
When will the New Science be accepted by these mathematical Luddites, committed to perpetuating Patriarchal White Male Mathematics?
Seems at least a few of you misunderstand the report here?
From the paper, the trap:
“The results of eight such studies conducted between 2009 and 2015 showed a consensus on AGW ranging from 83.5% to 97% (Cook et al., 2016). ”
We all know Crook et al’s nonsense study, no? 11000 papers of which some 70 was explicit on A being the primary cause of the GW?
The important stuff:
Cook et al. (2013) reviewed 11,944 peer-reviewed articles from 1991 to 2011, using the search terms “global climate change” and “global warming.” They required that to be counted as part of the consensus, an article had to “endorse” AGW by “explicitly stat[ing] that humans are the primary cause of recent global warming” (p. 3). This led them to reject 7,930 articles, after which they calculated a consensus of 97.1%. Had they used rejections of AGW, as Oreskes did, Cook et al. (2013) would have reported a consensus of 99.8%, compared to her 100% (see Cook et al., 2016). Powell (2016) reported that, using rejection as the criterion, literature surveys to date showed an average consensus of 99.94%.
Read that again. The 100% claim is Oreskes claim that she found 100% result with the reverse search term REJECT the claim as compared to ENDORSE it.
Alas I suspect this report to merely be playing-with-statistics sorts of fun facts….
Last sentence, I hope you all agree that we, the Climate Deniers have run out of excuses for not doing more to have Climate Fictionists and Science Deniers retrained and if required, offered electro-shock treatment to rid them of their delusions?
Oddgeir
Lemme guess: except for all the papers talking about climate change but don’t mention AGW because they’re pointing to other, more scientifically backed causes?
You know, the 60% of papers that don’t agree with AGW?
Scientists is one of the ways the devil fools us.
The last sentence from the full article goes: “Denialists have long run out of excuses for inaction and humanity has almost run out of time.”
This is not a research paper. This is nominally a review article, but really an opinion piece, a scaremongering one at that. It’s short, tendentious, conjectural, states no methodology in getting to the percentage of 100%. Written by an old guy whose branch isn’t even climatology. It’s geochemistry.