It is clear that the atmospheric temperature is extensively rising. The breaking up of ice on lakes that cause floods in many parts of the world, the existence of droughts and heat waves, and many other effects can be evidence for the existence of climate change. Though we don’t doubt the existence of global warming, scientists don’t reach an agreement on what causes the global warming. In the article “The 97% Solution” by Ian Tuttle, Kendall Zimmerman, a master student at the University of Illinois, and her advisor, Peter Doran, studied on the scientific consensus on climate change through an online survey including a group of earth scientists. The participants in this unbiased survey were asked to complete two questions focusing on the existence of climate change since 1800 and whether it is basically due to human activities. From 3146 participants who completed the online survey, 5% of participants were climate scientists. Among the 5% climate scientists, the 79 respondents had published more than 50% of their papers about climate change. From those respondents, 97.4% agreed on the anthropogenic impacts of climate change. Since the well-informed participants in the survey were climate scientists who actively published more than 50% of their papers focusing on climate change, it is reasonable to conclude that 97% climate scientists agree on …show more content…
In his study, Cook assessed a large sample size of 12, 000 abstracts of research papers published in between 1991 and 2011, which improved d the Zimmerman and Doran’s sample size. From the papers Cook examined, only 34%, approximately 4014 abstracts took a position on human caused climate change. Among papers taking a position, 97.1% endorsed the anthropogenic global warming. In addition to Cook’s evaluation of the abstracts, the authors of the research papers rated their own papers based on the content of their paper. From the 1381 self-rated papers that took a position on the anthropogenic global warming, 97.2% agreed that human activity is a dominant cause in changing the mean global temperature. Cook’s study provides the most comprehensive result by assessing a large number of peer-reviewed papers that focused on the climate change. It is quite right to conclude that 97% of the world climate scientists concur with the reality of climate change and anthropogenic