There is an overwhelming consensus among expert scientists studying climate change that man-made pollution is the main cause of global warming. But the media may be skewing its coverage of the issue by persistently seeking out the views of a contrarian minority, according to a new study.
In an opinion survey of nearly 1,900 scientists, 90 percent of the respondents with more than 10 peer-reviewed articles to their name “explicitly agreed with anthropogenic greenhouse gases being the dominant driver of recent global warming,” the study found.
It was written by scientists in the Netherlands and Australia, and published in Environmental Science and Technology.
The degree of the consensus was not surprising, as scientists said they basically agreed with findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which has itself generated exhaustive consensus documents. Surveys of published literature have likewise demonstrated the breadth of the scientific consensus on man-made climate change.
“We are confident that most of the main players in climate science were invited” to respond to the survey, the authors said. And “it is likely that viewpoints that run counter to the prevailing consensus are somewhat magnified in our results” because, while a distinct minority, these contrarians were more likely to respond.
Conversely, it appears that press coverage about climate science may be overweighting the views of the minority.
Asked how often they have been covered in the media, those who reported the most contact with the press were those who most doubted the evidence for man-made global warming.
“These differences are statistically significant (n equals 0.01 and p equals 0.04, respectively, using the ‘Fisher’s exact test’),” the authors wrote, “and indicate that those who most strongly disagree with the discernible influence of anthropogenic GHGs [greenhouse gases] on climate are overrepresented in the media.”
Clarification: The authors’ full quote on their study’s statistically significant conclusions was added in the final paragraph of this story for clarification.
About This Story
Perhaps you noticed: This story, like all the news we publish, is free to read. That’s because Inside Climate News is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We do not charge a subscription fee, lock our news behind a paywall, or clutter our website with ads. We make our news on climate and the environment freely available to you and anyone who wants it.
That’s not all. We also share our news for free with scores of other media organizations around the country. Many of them can’t afford to do environmental journalism of their own. We’ve built bureaus from coast to coast to report local stories, collaborate with local newsrooms and co-publish articles so that this vital work is shared as widely as possible.
Two of us launched ICN in 2007. Six years later we earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and now we run the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. We tell the story in all its complexity. We hold polluters accountable. We expose environmental injustice. We debunk misinformation. We scrutinize solutions and inspire action.
Donations from readers like you fund every aspect of what we do. If you don’t already, will you support our ongoing work, our reporting on the biggest crisis facing our planet, and help us reach even more readers in more places?
Please take a moment to make a tax-deductible donation. Every one of them makes a difference.
Thank you,
