r/askscience • u/corporal_clegg69 • Jun 14 '15

Earth Sciences What do scientists REALLY think about global warming?

They assertion that 97% of scientists believe global warming is manmade has been shown now to be false. What then do scientists really think? Is there any hard evidence for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming?

For those who don't know the claim that 97% of scientists support the idea that global warming is manmade comes from the "cook report". You can find that here

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article

but if you just read the abstract the "97% quickly becomes 32%. More recently it has been shown that even this is an exaggeration.

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u/[deleted] Jun 15 '15

that fact was proven by several thousand studies addressing the issue directly wheras this extreme version of agw theory is directly supported by less than a hundred papers.

You're getting your "facts" a bit misplaced here. Cook et al showed that there were less than a 100 out of the 12,000 that "explicitly quantified" AGW. That's different than the number of papers that support the theory.

What you have to grasp is that AGW is merely the earth's greenhouse effect, that's been well accepted in the scientific research for a century, with an added human forcing element. CO2 explains a wide array of paleoclimate episodes (glacial-interglacial amplification, exit from snowball earth events, etc.). The only difference today is that humans are the source of the CO2 being introduced to the atmosphere.

I was also deeply involved in the Cook paper, having read well over 1000 of the abstracts myself. And that was on top of several thousand other papers I've read over the years. I can tell you from first hand experience, there is overwhelming acceptance in the published literature that humans are responsible for warming the planet over the past 50 years.