When former Vice President Al Gore launched the movie An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 to explain the science behind climate change to the American public, surveys showed that many Americans didn’t believe in climate change, even though scientific data was building that humans actions were causing global warming.
Since then, both scientific data and public consensus have been building. A research paper published in 2013 found that 97 percent of studies on climate change published between 1991 and 2012 supported the idea that human activities are altering the Earth’s climate.
And last month, a new scientific review concluded that more than 99% of peer-reviewed scientific papers published between 2012 and 2020 find that climate change is mainly caused by humans.
For the latest study, researchers began by selecting a random set of 3,000 scientific studies related to climate change published since 2012. They combed through those studies and found four that were skeptical of climate change.
Analyzing the skeptical papers, the authors identified keywords related to skepticism. Then they created an algorithm that looked for those skeptical keywords in all of the scientific studies published about climate change since 2012—a total of 88,125 papers. The algorithm ranked the studies from most to least skeptical.
In the 88,125 papers, the researchers found a total of 28 that were implicitly or explicitly skeptical of the idea that humans are causing climate change. The skeptical studies were all published in what the authors call “minor” journals.
“Our results confirm, as has been found in numerous other previous studies of this question, that there is no significant scientific debate among experts about whether or not climate change is human-caused,” the authors wrote. “This issue has been comprehensively settled, and the reality of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is no more in contention among scientists than is plate tectonics or evolution.”
According to a nationally-representative Gallup poll, public opinion on climate change in the U.S. has remained fairly steady over the past 20 years, with about 60 percent of adults believing that humans are the leading cause of global warming.
In addition, the poll has identified a political divergence. Over the past two decades, Democrats have become more likely to believe that climate change is a serious issue that will affect their lives, while Republicans have become less likely to believe climate change is a serious problem.
The take-home message: Over the past decade, scientific consensus has built around the notion that humans are causing climate change. At the same time, public opinion about climate change is dividing along political lines, with more Democrats and fewer Republicans believing climate change is a serious problem.
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