The papers were assessed by volunteers collected via the website skepticalscience.com, which is run by Mr John Cook of the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute. Two-thirds of the abstracts did not refer to the causes of climate change, but of those that did just 2% rejected human activities as the main cause while 1% expressed uncertainty.
Cook also contacted 8000 authors to ask if they thought their paper as a whole shed light on the attribution of warming trends. Of the 1200 who responded, 65% said their paper took a position, but again only 3% said this position involved a rejection of the consensus view that climate change is human-induced. “The respondents appear to be fairly representative of the authors,” Cook says.
The papers examined were published between 1991 and 2011. The consensus has strengthened over that time, with the number of papers rejecting human involvement in climate change broadly stable while publications on the topic have risen substantially in recent years.
The fact that the majority of abstracts did not express an opinion on human involvement is not surprising, says Cook. The study was done on all papers that mentioned “global climate change” or “global warming”, and he thinks many looking at effects would not have “wanted to waste valuable space in their abstract” discussing attribution.
The paper...
