Climate change paper one of the most talked about in 2013

A researcher from the University of Queensland, who last year published a paper on the scientific consensus on climate change in the journal Environment Research Letters, has had that paper rank 11th in Altmetric’s list of the world’s most talked about academic papers of 2013.

Global Change Institute researcher John Cook led a global team of researchers in a study confirming scientists agree that global warming is a result of human activity and influence. The study examined 11,944 climate abstracts from 1991-2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’ (around 4000 of which expressed a position on human influence), as well as inviting authors to rate their own papers.

“Between 1991 and 2011, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on human-caused global warming marginally increased over time,” said Cook in the paper’s video abstract. “In the abstract ratings, the consensus grew at a rate of 0.1% per year. In the self ratings, it grew by 0.35% per year, in both cases reaching about 98% consensus in 2011.”

After the paper was tweeted by US President Barack Obama, whose Twitter account is followed by more than 31 million people worldwide, Cook says he was “getting calls from all over the world to do media interviews on the study”.

The paper has been downloaded more than 124,000 times - more than any paper published by the Institute of Physics - and, according to Altmetric, the paper also ranks in the top 5% of all articles ever published.

Cook said the public attention surrounding the results of the study “is an important step towards closing the consensus gap and increasing public support for meaningful climate action”. He had noted in his video abstract, “When a US representative sample was asked how many scientists agree that humans are causing global warming, the average answer was around 50%” - a far cry from the actual result of around 97%.

“When people correctly understand that the scientists agree on human-caused global warming, they’re more likely to support policy that mitigates climate change,” he concluded.