Majority of the studies and scientific papers (about 99.9 percent) agree that climate change is mainly caused by Human beings. A new survey by a group of researchers said this after analysing scores of research materials.
A similar survey in 2013 found that 97 per cent of studies published between 1991 and 2012 supported the idea that human activities are altering Earth’s climate. The present survey analysed publications between 2012 and November 2020.
Studies first author Mark Lynas (visiting fellow at the Alliance for Science at Cornell University) said that they were certain that the consensus was well over 99 per cent.
Co-author Benjamin Houlton (Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell) said: “it is critical to acknowledge the principal role of greenhouse gas emissions so that we can rapidly mobilize new solutions, since we are already witnessing in real time the devastating impacts of climate related disasters on businesses, people and the economy.”
Their study was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
OPINIONS
The study also points out that public opinion polls as well as opinions of politicians and public representatives point to false beliefs and claims that a significant debate still exists among scientists over the true cause of climate change. The researchers noted that the Pew Research Center in 2016 found that only 27 per cent of US adults believe that “almost all” scientists agreed that climate change is due to human activity. A 2021 Gallup poll pointed to a deepening partisan divide in American politics on whether Earth’s rising observed temperatures since the Industrial Revolution were primarily caused by humans.
In the study, the researchers began by examining a random sample of 3,000 studies from the dataset of 88,125 English-language climate papers published between 2012 and 2020. They found only four out of the 3,000 papers were skeptical of human-caused climate change.
Co-author Simon Perry, a United Kingdom based software engineer and volunteer at the Alliance for Science, created an algorithm that searched out keywords from papers the team knew were skeptical, such as “solar,” “cosmic rays” and “natural cycles.” Overall, the search yielded 28 papers that were implicitly or explicitly skeptical, all published in minor journals.
