Promote unity on issue Scientists encouraged to inform public of agreement on causes of global warming
OSLO, Norway (Reuters) — Ninety-seven percent of scientists say global warming is mainly man-made, but a wide public belief that experts are divided is making it harder to gain support for policies to curb climate change, according to a new international study.
The report found an overwhelming view among scientists that human activity, led by the use of fossil fuels, was the main cause of rising temperatures in recent decades.
“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 in Australia, who led the study in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
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“There is a gaping chasm between the actual consensus and the public perception.… When people understand that scientists agree on global warming, they’re more likely to support policies that take action on it.”
Global average surface temperatures have risen by .8 C since the Industrial Revolution.
Experts in Australia, the United States, Britain and Canada studied 4,000 summaries of peer-reviewed papers in journals giving a view about climate change since the early 1990s and found that 97 percent said it was mainly caused by humans.
They also asked authors for their views and found a 97 percent conviction from replies covering 2,000 papers.
The report said it was the biggest review ever conducted of scientific opinion on climate change.
“If people disagree with what we’ve found, we want to know,” said Mark Richardson of the University of Reading in England, one of the authors of the study, which looked at English-language reports in more than 90 nations.
Another co-author, Dana Nuccitelli of Skeptical Science, said she was encouraging scientists to stress the consensus “at every opportunity, particularly in media interviews.”
Opinion polls in some countries show widespread belief that scientists disagree about whether climate change is caused by human activities or is part of natural swings such as in the sun’s output.
A survey by the U.S. Pew Research Center published last October found that 45 percent of Americans said “yes” when asked: “Do scientists agree Earth is getting warmer because of human activity?” Forty-three percent said “No.”
Concentrations of carbon dioxide hit 400 parts per million in the atmosphere earlier this month, the highest in perhaps three million years.
Governments have agreed to work out a deal by the end of 2015 to slow climate change, which a United Nations panel of experts says will cause more floods, droughts and rising sea levels.
