The results are conclusive. Of more than 4,000 peer reviewed papers published over a period of 20 years, 97.1 percent agree that climate change is man-made.

Of those 4,000-plus papers, only 0.7 percent, or 83 of the thousands of academic articles, disputed the scientific consensus that global warming is the result of human activity. The remaining 2.2 percent were unclear. The study described the dissenting view as a “vanishingly small proportion” of the published research.

“Our findings prove that there is a strong scientific agreement about the cause of climate change, despite public perceptions to the contrary,” said John Cook of the University of Queensland, who led the review.

The public remains out of step with the science. A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last fall showed a majority of Americans accept that the climate is changing, but just 42 percent believe humans are the main driver. “There is a gaping chasm between the actual consensus and the public perception,” Cook said in a statement.

The study blamed industry lobbyists for the discrepancy between the public’s view and the science behind climate change, with the result being inaction on the grave problem.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

The Guardian: The survey was the most ambitious effort to date to demonstrate the broad agreement on the causes of climate change, covering 20 years of academic publications from 1991-2011. In 2004, Naomi Oreskes, an historian at the University of California, San Diego,surveyed published literature, releasing her results in the journal Science. She too came up with a similar finding that 97% of climate scientists agreed on the causes of climate change. She wrote of the new survey in an email: “It is a nice, independent confirmation, using a somewhat different methodology than I used, that comes to the same result. It also refutes the claim, sometimes made by contrarians, that the consensus has broken down, much less ‘shattered’.” Read more

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