97 Percent Consensus on Climate Change? It's Complicated

You may have heard the assertion that 97 percent of climate scientists believe that the earth’s climate is warming and human activity is the most likely cause. I made it in a column a couple of months ago, and learned that it drives some people crazy.

The main problem they seem to have with it is described right there in the abstract of the 2013 Environmental Research Letters paper from which it is derived. Cognitive scientist and skeptic-of-climate-skeptics John Cook -- then of the University of Queensland in Australia, now of George Mason University in Virginia -- and eight co-authors1497535961184 searched the Web of Science database using the terms “global warming” and “global climate change,” then examined the abstracts of the 11,944 peer-reviewed papers they found to determine what position they took on “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW for short).