Scientific consensus

Color the difference between the consensus among climate scientists and the public perception of man-made climate change

Data sources

Scientific consensus

Cook et al. Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming. 2016. Environmental Research Letters, 11.

From the abstract:

The consensus that humans are causing recent global warming is shared by 90%–100% of publishing climate scientists according to six independent studies by co-authors of this paper. Those results are consistent with the 97% consensus reported by Cook et al (Environ. Res. Lett. 8 024024) based on 11 944 abstracts of research papers, of which 4014 took a position on the cause of recent global warming. A survey of authors of those papers(N = 2412 papers) also supported a 97% consensus… We examine the available studies and conclude that the finding of 97% consensus in published climate research is robust and consistent with other surveys of climate scientists and peer-reviewed studies.

Public perception

Survey conducted May 10-June 6, 2016. The Politics of Climate. Pew Research Center.

How the data was used

The 97% scientific consensus data point and the 48% public perception data point about man-made climate change were used to create two activities to color in 97 out of 100 arrows and 48 out of 100 arrows.

Code

A python script is available in the code repository to generate or extend this activity, and can be run like this:

python consensus.py

Which will simply create an two svg file containing the activities for scientific consensus and public perception of man-made climate change