NASA lays it down clearly:
http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
That is, 97% of those who are actively studying and publishing research on climatology support the consensus view on anthropogenic climate change.
About that overwhelming 97-98% number of scientists that say there is a climate consensus…
Larry Bell writes in his weekly Forbes column about that often repeated but less than truthy “98% of all scientists” statistic.
Supposedly, this was such an easy and quick to do survey, it was a no-brainer according to the two University of Illinois researchers who conducted it:
So where did that famous “consensus” claim that “98% of all scientists believe in global warming” come from? It originated from an endlessly reported 2009 American Geophysical Union (AGU) survey consisting of an intentionally brief two-minute, two question online survey sent to 10,257 earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Of the about 3.000 who responded, 82% answered “yes” to the second question, which like the first, most people I know would also have agreed with.
Then of those, only a small subset, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals, were considered in their survey statistic.
That “98% all scientists” referred to a laughably puny number of 75 of those 77 who answered “yes”. -----> SEE PEER REVIEW GRAPH OF SURVEY http://s6.postimg.org/63daf3569/better_graph_98_consensus_false.png
That anything-but-scientific survey asked two questions.
The first: “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” Few would be expected to dispute this…the planet began thawing out of the “Little Ice Age” in the middle 19th century, predating the Industrial Revolution. (That was the coldest period since the last real Ice Age ended roughly 10,000 years ago.)
The second question asked: “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” So what constitutes “significant”? Does “changing” include both cooling and warming… and for both “better” and “worse”? And which contributions…does this include land use changes, such as agriculture and deforestation?
Here’s the survey as it appeared in EOS:
--------> EOS, TRANSACTIONS AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION, VOL. 90, NO. 3, PAGE 22, 2009 doi:10.1029/2009EO030002 <----- PEER REVIEW JOURNAL
Very poor sampling method, very poor question construction, cannot evaluate administration of the survey based upon this info but overall a very poor study to be sure. High probability of sample bias and questions structured to obtain a directed response. My opinion is based upon designing and managing survey research for over 20 years either directly or as a function of departments I managed. Quoting this study is, indeed, meaningless.
THE GRAPH AT LISTED IN THE PEER REVIEW JOURNAL SHOWING HOW FLAW THE SURVEY IS!!!
http://s6.postimg.org/63daf3569/better_graph_98_consensus_false.png
http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
GO SEE MY POST #622 A BETTER NONBIASED PEER REVIEW SURVEY WAS CONDUCTED.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es501998e
AND WITH A LATEST BETTER SURVEY NOT IS NOT BIASED AND FLAW WITH GOOD SAMPLING ....The 97% consensus of climate scientists is only 47%
http://www.pbl.nl/sites/default/fil...ence-survey-questions-and-responses_01731.pdf <----GO TO PAGE 9 AND LOOK AT THE FIGURE Figure 1b Responses to Question 1b. The figure on the left refers to respondents having answered to Question 1a that the GHG-contribution to the warming since mid-20th century is more than 50%, and the figure on the right refers to those having responded that this is less than 50%. IT IS LESS THEN 50% CONSENSUS
