Summary/Abstract
While controls over the Earth’s climate system have undergone rigorous hypothesis-testing since the 1800s, questions over the scientific consensus of the role of human activities in modern climate change continue to arise in public settings. We update previous efforts to quantify the scientific consensus on climate change by searching the recent literature for papers skeptical of anthropogenic-caused global warming. From a dataset of 88125 climate-related papers published since 2012, when this question was last addressed comprehensively, we examine a randomized subset of 3000 such publications. We also use a second sample-weighted approach that was specifically biased with keywords to help identify any skeptical peer-reviewed papers in the whole dataset. We identify four skeptical papers out of the sub-set of 3000, as evidenced by abstracts that were rated as implicitly or explicitly skeptical of human-caused global warming. In our sample utilizing pre-identified skeptical keywords we found 28 papers that were implicitly or explicitly skeptical. We conclude with high statistical confidence that the scientific consensus on human-caused contemporary climate change—expressed as a proportion of the total publications—exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature.