We generally complain that action on climate change is mired in polarized partisan politics and thus nothing can be done. True to an extent, but lets hold on a bit.
In terms of generating important discussion about the clarity that exists around the conclusion that the scientific debate over climate change as an anthropogenic process is over, the political bully pulpit can be incredibly powerful.
A case in point is the paper published last week in Environmental Research Letters, where I am the Editor-in-Chief, “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature” (Cook, et al., 2013) with the abstract:
We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors’ self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.
Cook, et al., 2013
The paper came out, and President Barack Obama then tweeted:
@BarackObama: Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous. Read more: http://OFA.BO/gJsdFp
Follow-on tweets came from Vice-President Al Gore and U. S. Congressman Henry Waxman. Television coverage followed in: ABC Lateline, Al Jazeera (Inside Story), CNN International, Democracy Now, and NRK. At last count there were over 200 newspaper and magazine pieces, and a number of radio segments. At last count there were several hundred blog posts on the findings of this paper and the Obama Tweet.
A link to the ever-growing set of media coverage is: http://sks.to/tcpmedia. The article has been downloaded over 21,600 article downloads in just a few days of having the paper published online. What this story highlights – beyond the excellent data collection, analysis and scholarship in the paper itself – is the value of thoughtful comments and recognition of these findings.
References:
John Cook, 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). http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article