13 April 2016, The Guardian, It’s settled: 90–100% of climate experts agree on human-caused global warming. There is an overwhelming expert scientific consensus on human-caused global warming. Authors of seven previous climate consensus studies — including Naomi Oreskes,Peter Doran, William Anderegg, Bart Verheggen, Ed Maibach, J. Stuart Carlton,John Cook, myself, and six of our colleagues — have co-authored a new paper that should settle this question once and for all. The two key conclusions from the paper are:
1) Depending on exactly how you measure the expert consensus, it’s somewhere between 90% and 100% that agree humans are responsible for climate change, with most of our studies finding 97% consensus among publishing climate scientists.
2) The greater the climate expertise among those surveyed, the higher the consensus on human-caused global warming.
Expert consensus is a powerful thing. People know we don’t have the time or capacity to learn about everything, and so we frequently defer to the conclusions of experts. It’s why we visit doctors when we’re ill. The same is true of climate change: most people defer to the expert consensus of climate scientists. Crucially, as we note in our paper: Public perception of the scientific consensus has been found to be a gateway belief, affecting other climate beliefs and attitudes including policy support. Read More here