Arguments
The 97% consensus on global warming
What the science says...
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97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming. |
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Climate Myth...
There is no consensus
"[...] And I'll mention that the stat on the 97% of - of scientists is based on one discredited study." (Ted Cruz)
At a glance
What is consensus? In science, it's when the vast majority of specialists agree about a basic principle. Thus, astronomers agree that the Earth orbits around the Sun. Biologists accept that tadpoles hatch out from frog-spawn and grow into adult frogs. Almost all geologists agree that plate tectonics is real and you'd be hard-placed to find a doctor who thinks smoking is harmless.
In each above case, something has been so thoroughly looked into that those who specialise in its study have stopped arguing about its basic explanation. Nevertheless, the above examples were all once argued about, often passionately. That's how progress works.
The reaching of scientific consensus is the product of an often lengthy time-line. It starts with something being observed and ends with it being fully explained. Let's look at a classic and highly relevant example.
In the late 1700s, the Earth-Sun distance was calculated. The value obtained was 149 million kilometres. That's incredibly close to modern measurements. It got French physicist Joseph Fourier thinking. He innocently asked, in the 1820s, something along these lines:
"Why is Planet Earth such a warm place? It should be an ice-ball at this distance from the Sun."
Such fundamental questions about our home planet are as attractive to inquisitive scientists as ripened fruit is to wasps. Fourier's initial query set in motion a process of research. Within a few decades, that research had experimentally shown that carbon dioxide has heat-trapping properties.
Through the twentieth century the effort intensified, particularly during the Cold War. At that time there was great interest in the behaviour of infra-red (IR) radiation in the atmosphere. Why? Because heat-seeking missiles home in on jet exhausts which are IR hotspots. Their invention involved understanding what makes IR tick.
That research led to the publication of a landmark 1956 paper by Gilbert Plass. The paper's title was, “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change”. It explained in detail how CO2 traps heat in our atmosphere. Note in passing that Plass used the term "Climatic Change" all the way back then. That's contrary to the deniers' frequent claim that it is used nowadays because of a recent and motivated change in terminology.
From observation to explanation, this is a classic illustration of the scientific method at work. Fourier gets people thinking, experiments are designed and performed. In time, a hypothesis emerges. That is a proposed explanation. It is made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.
Once a hypothesis is proposed, it becomes subject to rigorous testing within the relevant specialist science groups. Testing ensures that incorrect hypotheses fall by the wayside, because they don't stand up to scrutiny. But some survive such interrogation. As their supporting evidence mounts up over time, they eventually graduate to become theories.
Theories are valid explanations for things that are supported by an expert consensus of specialists. Gravity, jet aviation, electronics, you name it, all are based on solid theories. They are known to work because they have stood the test of time and prolonged scientific inquiry.
In climate science today, there is overwhelming (greater than 97%) expert consensus that CO2 traps heat and adding it to the atmosphere warms the planet. Whatever claims are made to the contrary, that principle has been established for almost seventy years, since the publication of that 1955 landmark paper.
Expert consensus is a powerful thing. None of us have the time or ability to learn about everything/ That's why we frequently defer to experts, such as consulting doctors when we’re ill.
The public often underestimate the degree of expert consensus that our vast greenhouse gas emissions trap heat and warm the planet. That is because alongside information, we have misinformation. Certain sections of the mass-media are as happy to trot out the latter as the former. We saw a very similar problem during the COVID-19 pandemic and it cost many lives.
For those who want to learn more, a much longer detailed account of the history of climate science is available on this website.
Please use this form to provide feedback about this new "At a glance" section. Read a more technical version below or dig deeper via the tabs above!
Further details
We know full well that we don’t have the time or capacity to learn about everything, so we frequently defer to the conclusions of experts. Without experienced people using their expertise to perform many vital tasks – and without new people constantly entering such occupations – society would quickly disintegrate.
The same is true of climate change: we defer to the expert consensus of climate scientists. Indeed, public perception of the scientific consensus with regard to global warming has been found to be an important gateway into other enlightened climate-related attitudes - including policy support.
Let's take a look at summaries of the key studies, featured in the graphic above, into the degree of consensus. These have been based on analyses of large samples of peer-reviewed climate science literature or surveys of climate and Earth scientists. These studies are available online through e.g. Google Scholar. That slightly different methodologies reached very similar conclusions is a strong indicator that those conclusions are robust.
Oreskes 2004
In this pioneering paper, a survey was conducted into all peer-reviewed abstracts on the subject 'global climate change', published between 1993 and 2003. The work showed that not a single paper, out of the 928 examined, rejected the consensus position that global warming is man-made. 75% of the papers agreed with the consensus position while 25% made no comment either way.
Doran & Zimmerman 2009
A survey of 3,146 Earth scientists asked the question, "Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?" Overall, 82% of the scientists answered yes. However, what was most interesting was the type of response compared to the level of expertise in climate science. Of scientists who were non-climatologists and didn't publish research, 77% answered yes. In contrast, 97.5% of actively-publishing climatologists responded yes. As the level of active research and specialization in climate science increases, so does agreement that humans are significantly changing global temperatures. The paper concludes:
"It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely non-existent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes. The challenge, rather, appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact to policy makers and to a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate among scientists."
Anderegg et al. 2010
This study of 1,372 climate science researchers found that (i) 97–98% of the researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) as outlined by the IPCC and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
Cook et al. 2013
A Skeptical Science-based analysis of over 12,000 peer-reviewed abstracts on the subject 'global climate change' and 'global warming', published between 1991 and 2011, found that over 97% of the papers taking a position on the subject agreed with the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of the project, the scientist authors were emailed and rated over 2,000 of their own papers. Once again, over 97% of the papers taking a position on the cause of global warming agreed that humans are causing it.
Verheggen et al. 2014
Results were presented from a survey held among 1868 scientists studying various aspects of climate change, including physical climate, climate impacts, and mitigation. The survey was at the time unique in its size, broadness and level of detail. Consistent with other research, it was found that as the level of expertise in climate science grew, so too did the level of agreement on anthropogenic causation. 90% of respondents with more than 10 climate-related peer-reviewed publications (about half of all respondents), explicitly agreed with anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) being the dominant driver of recent global warming. The respondents’ quantitative estimate of the GHG contribution appeared to strongly depend on their judgement or knowledge of the cooling effect of aerosols.
Stenhouse et al. 2014
In a survey of all 1,854 American Meteorological Society members with known e-mail addresses, achieving a 26.3% response rate, perceived scientific consensus was the strongest predictor of views on global warming, followed by political ideology, climate science expertise, and perceived organisational conflict.
Carlton et al 2015
Commenting that the extent to which non-climate scientists are skeptical of climate science had not so far been studied via direct survey, the authors did just that. They undertook a survey of biophysical scientists across disciplines at universities in the Big 10 Conference. Most respondents (93.6%) stated that mean temperatures have risen. Of the subset that agreed temperatures had risen, the following question was then asked of them: "do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?" The affirmative response to that query was 96.66%.
Cook et al. 2016
In 2015, authors of the above studies joined forces to co-author a paper, “Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming”. Two key conclusions from the paper are as follows:
(i) Depending on exactly how you measure the expert consensus, somewhere between 90% and 100% of climate scientists agree humans are responsible for climate change, with most of our studies finding 97% consensus among publishing climate scientists. (ii) The greater the climate expertise among those surveyed, the higher the consensus on human-caused global warming.
Lynas et al. 2021
In this paper, from a dataset of 88,125 climate-related peer-reviewed papers published since 2012, these authors examined a randomly-selected subset of 3000 such publications. They also used a second sample-weighted approach that was specifically biased with keywords to help identify any sceptical papers in the whole dataset. Twenty-eight sceptical papers were identified within the original dataset using that approach, as evidenced by abstracts that were rated as implicitly or explicitly sceptical of human-caused global warming. It was concluded that the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, expressed as a proportion of the total publications, exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature.
Myers et al. 2021
This study revisited the 2009 consensus among geoscientists, while exploring different ways to define expertise and the level of agreement among them. The authors sent 10,929 invitations to participate in the survey, receiving 2,780 responses. In addition, the number of scientific publications by these self-identified experts in the field of climate change research was quantified and compared to their survey response on questions about climate change. Perhaps not surprisingly, the study found that agreement on anthropogenic global warming was high at 91% to 100% and generally increases with expertise. Out of a group of 153 independently confirmed climate experts, 98.7% of those scientists agreed that the Earth is warming mostly because of human activities such as burning fossil fuels. Among the subset with the highest level of expertise, these being independently-confirmed climate experts who each published 20+ peer-reviewed papers on climate change between 2015 and 2019, there was 100% agreement.
Public Polls and Consensus
Opinion polls are not absolute in the same way as uncontestable scientific evidence but they nevertheless usefully indicate in which way public thinking is heading. So let's look at a couple taken 13 years apart. A 15-nation World Public Opinion Poll in 2009 PDF), with 13,518 respondents, asked, among other questions, “Is it your impression that among scientists, most think the problem is urgent and enough is known to take action?” Out of all responses, just 51% agreed with that. Worse, in six countries only a minority agreed: United States (38%), Russia (23%), Indonesia (33%), Japan (43%), India (48%), and Mexico (48%). Conversely, the two highest “agree” scores were among Vietnamese (69%) and Bangladeshis (70%) - perhaps unsurprisingly.
The two other options people had to choose from were that “views are pretty evenly divided” (24% of total respondents), or “most think the problem is not urgent, and not enough is known to take action“ (15%). American and Japanese respondents scored most highly on “views are pretty evenly divided” (43 and 44% respectively).
How such a pervasive misperception arose, regarding the expert consensus on climate change, is no accident. Regular readers of this website's resources will know that instead, it was another product of deliberate misinformation campaigning by individuals and organizations in the United States and other nations around the world. These are people who campaign against action to reduce carbon emissions because it suits their paymasters if we continue to burn as much as possible.
Step forward to 2022 and the situation has perhaps improved, but there's still some way to go. A recent poll, Public Perceptions on Climate change (PDF), was conducted by the Policy Institute, based at King's College London, UK. It quizzed samples of just over 2,000 people from each of six countries (UK, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Italy and Germany). The survey asked the question: “To the best of your knowledge, what percentage of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening?” The following averages were returned: the UK sample thought 65%, the average of the whole survey was 68% and the highest was Ireland at 71%. Clearly, although public perception of expert consensus is growing, there's still plenty of room for strategies to communicate the reality and to shield people from the constant drip-feed of misinformation.
Expert and Public Consensus
Finally, let's consider the differences between expert and public consensus. Expert consensus is reached among those who have studied complex problems and know how to collect and work with data, to identify what constitutes evidence and evaluate it. This is demanding work requiring specific skill-sets and areas of expertise, preparation for which requires years of study and training.
Public consensus, in contrast, tends to occur only when something is blindingly obvious. For example, a serial misinformer would struggle if they tried running a campaign denying the existence of owls. Everyone already knows that of course there are owls. There is public consensus because we see and hear owls, for real or on the TV or radio. But complex issues are more prone to the antics of misinformers. We saw examples of misinformation during the COVID pandemic, in some cases with lethal outcomes when misinformed people failed to take the risks seriously. There's a strong parallel with climate change: it is imperative we accept the expert consensus and not kick the can down the road until the realisation it is real becomes universal – but utterly inescapable.
Update May 26, 2023: The "At a glance" section was updated to improve readability.
Last updated on 26 May 2023 by John Mason. View Archives
The Forbes story amhartley asked about @650 is rather strong in its assertions. It asserts that Cook et al (2013) involves "egregious misconduct" and was "a deliberate misrepresentation designed to intimidate the public." These claims are backed up by a mis-description of the Cook et al method and the comments of some well-known scientists - Richard Tol, Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta and Dr. Nir Shaviv, this last one being a not-so-well-known climate change denier compared with the other three.
[JH] The author of the Forbes article is Alex Epstein, founder of the Center for Industrial Progress and author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. As a Forbers contributor, Epstein states, "I write about the environmental benefits of industrial progress." I guess we know which side his bread is buttered.
Thanks, MA Rodger & JH, for the input. I had a hunch Epstein was himself misrepresenting things, but as a statistician—rather than a climate scientist--I might not be able to debunk all of his claims. However, if the experts at SKS were to publish, routinely, rebuttals of claims like those, I can imagine those rebuttals could help others like me to both understand the truth & communicate it more widely.
amhartley @652, there are several rebutals of various denier talking points regarding Cook et al 2012. This is the most general, but this one is also worth looking up.
That helps, Tom.
In fairness to Forbes, it is good to see them publishing a pro-environment perspective, too:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/fayeflam/2015/01/09/four-reasons-to-worry-about-anthropogenic-global-warming-independent-of-what-97-of-scientists-believe/
Climathulu?
The Global Warming Petition Project is straight from the department of "Lies, damned lies, and statistics." On second thought, "damned lies" may be laying it on too thick. Their vaunted number of scientific supporters is so pitifully small, it's barely worth calling a silly fib. But since one hears their figure quoted so often by climate change deniers, let's break down the numbers, just for fun.
The signers of the Global Warming Petition number 31,487, all of whom are claimed to hold at least BS "or equivalent" degrees. (GWPP : Qualifications of signers)
9,029 hold PhD degrees
11,615 hold PhD &/or MD or DVM degrees
18,772 hold MS or higher degrees
31,487 hold BS or equivalent &/or higher degrees
The American population at large, aged 25 years or older, is around 203 million. Of these:
3.6 million (1.77%) hold PhD degrees
7.5 million (3.27%) hold PhD &/or professional degrees
25 million (11.8%) hold Master's &/or higher degrees
65 million (32%) hold Bachelor's &/or higher degrees
(Educational attainments of Americans — USCB/Wikipedia)
Thus, the signers of the GWP represent the following percentages of each category:
PhD degrees — 0.25%
PhD &/or professional degrees — 0.15%
Masters &/or higher degrees — 0.08%
Bachelor's &/or higher degrees — 0.05%
Obviously, these levels are vanishingly small. The GWPP’s horizon of expertise recedes even further when we consider that only 3,805 of these people claim any qualifications in Atmosphere, Earth, and Environment sciences. Granting all of them the unlikely distinction of holding doctorates, they would still represent only 0.11% of PhDs. (More realistically, they make up 0.006% of the population with a Bachelor's or better.) But just sticking with PhDs as a whole, I would venture to guess there is not a single area of scientific study, not a single theory, not a single assertion for which one could not muster a level of dissent of 0.25%--not excluding excluding that the Earth orbits the Sun; or that the Moon is composed of rocks, not Roquefort.
Advance apologies if this question has been asked and answered many times. I just discovered the site while searching for the source of the oft-quoted 97% consensus and was disconcerted to read that the consensus refers to 97% of the 33% of authors who stated a position on human-caused warming, while the remainding two-thirds made no finding as to cause. The reality, then, is that twice as many climate researchers do not agree that gw is human-caused, do not know, or are unwilling to take a position. I read one comment here that seemed to say that the 66% didn't need to state an opinion because it is so obviously human-caused - the "everyone knows" argument. This wouldn't be acceptable in a courtroom or a school science project so I hope it is not the case.
Many non-scientists are bewildered by the volume of conflicting information on this subject, by fuzzy numbers and apparently authoritative statements that amount to gobbledegook when subjected to rigorous analysis. Anyone?
"while the remainding two-thirds made no finding as to cause."
That's not quite accurate. Itd be accurate to say that those two-thirds made no statement of attribution in the abstract. That's not surprising, most climate science does not involve quantifying attribution.
wakeup @657.
You say:-
The volume of 'conflicting information' and the 'fuzzy numbers' may be less easy to get you to identify, but please do give your examples of 'apparently authoritative statements that amount to gobbledegook'. It is difficult for anyone to begin to address your question without knowing what you're on about.
wakeup - When you write a paper, you don't waste time rediscovering gravity, or that the sky is blue, or Archimedes Principle. You spend your time on new work and how that relates to previous hypotheses. The more accepted something is as a background fact the less you will see it explicitly discussed in a paper. It would therefore be reasonable to include the 2/3 of papers not bothering to mention GW causes as agreeing with the consensus - not doing so is a conservative choice minimizing actual agreements.
If, on the other hand, your work disagrees with the consensus, with accepted background material, you're going to mention that and state why, whether you consider that background material to your work or central to the paper. Meaning that we should expect a higher percentage of attribution in minority papers on climate, a higher percentage of implicit or explicit claims of dominant natural causes in 'skeptic' papers, an overrepresentation of dissention.
And yet even with that potential overrepresentation, papers arguing against AGW still come in at less than 3% of the papers mentioning causes of climate change.
wakeup, let's consider some different scenarios;
People who are not trying to kill their own capacity for rational thought should be able to see that looking at anything other than the percentage amongst those who actually addressed the issue (i.e. 97%) is meaningless. The only reason to favor a percentage including some pool of data which doesn't even address the subject is to deliberately delude oneself.
The case is actually stronger, if I recall correctly. The 3% of publications addressing the human contribution are not actually comprehensive. If we were to include only studies that determine the contributions of the full range of natural and anthro forcings, feedbacks, and oscillations, the number would not be 97%. It would be 100%.
Hello all,
Is anyone aware of a similar study in which authors were allowed to rate their studies as "inconclusive"? Given that this study asked authors to rate studies without the option to mark as inconclusive, I was just curious.
mav1234,
Read the advanced or intermediate tabs of the OP. All the studies allow the papers to be rated inconclusive. Cook had 7 ratings. Many of the papers were rated inconclusive.
Where did you get the idea that inconclusive was not a choice?? If you believe the "skeptic" blogs you will never understand the issues. Their primary purpose is to put out disinformation.
michael sweet @664, in Cook et al, self raters were not given an "inconclusive" option. Rather they were given a neutral option, without the possibility of distinguishing between "neutral because inconclusive" and "neutral because relevant issues were not addressed". The distinction is important because the former, but not the later, should be included in the denominator in determining the proportion of endorsements.
In the abstract rating section of the paper, a subsample of neutral papers were given a secondary rating to distinguish between "neutral because inconclusive" and "neutral because not addressed". Only 0.1% of neutral papers fell into the former category. Assuming that a similar proportion of papers self rated as neutral were "neutral because inconclusive", then 96.7% of self rated papers that had an opinion on the topic would have been self rated as endorsing AGW. That compares to the 97.2% found in the actual paper without the option of distinguishing reasons for the neutral rating.
Tristan: Thanks for responding. At issue is whether or not global warming is human-caused. If the goal was to find out if a significant majority of scientists publishing in the field support the theory, it's unusual, to say the least, to discard 66% of the subject papers because they "made no statement of attribution" and treat the 34% who do as 100% to reach the conclusion that 97% validate the theory of human causation.
That would be fine if the 97% is declared for what it is: the percentage of the 34% of experts who have reached a conclusion, as it is (if you know to look for it) in the Science Project logo above. Unfortunately it is used daily to convince the public that 97% of climate change scientists agree that gw is human-caused, which, in my view, is not demonstrated by this survey.
wakeup @666, thankyou for opening my eyes. I had not realized the theory that the Earth is not flat was in so much difficulty. However, following your methods, I noted that there is virtually zero endorsement of the proposition that the Earth is a sphere (or oblate spheroid) in scientific papers. It follows, from your impeccable reasoning, that >>99% of scientists do not accept that the Earth is either a sphere or an oblate speroid and that, by inference they consider the theory that the Earth is flat to be at least as viable.
wakeup @666.
If your comment @666 is the substance of your enquiry (although it is more assertion than enquiry), perhaps the example of Whiskas cat food advertising will demonstrate where you are missing the point.
This is not to do with "whether or not global warming is human-caused" as you suggest @666. Rather it is to do with whether climate scientists agree it is human-caused. And they overwhelmingly do agree.
The UK Whiskas cat food advert of the 1980s initially used the phrase "8 out of 10 cat owners said they cat preferred it." This was adjudged to be deceitful because there were many who didn't express a preference and were not included in the "10". Thus the adverts was changed to say "8 out of 10 cat owners who expressed a preference said their cat preferred it."
Yet this still does not give the full story. How many cat owners (or more correctly cat feeders, because they are the ones in a position to know) responded that there was not a jot of difference between these various cat foods? It could be, say, that only a third could see any difference at all between premium cat food Whiskas and some budget moggy-snack.
What you are suggesting @666 is that all the papers reviewed are like cat feeders and so these papers would all allow an answer to the enquiry and that in the majority of cases the papers show a response "Don't know" or in the Whiskas analogy "I see no difference." Yet what that majority( that you wish to include within the results of the analysis) are saying is the equivalent of "I don't know because I don't feed the cat."
This explains why, contrary to your assertion, the 97% figure "is (properly) demonstrated by this survey."
wakeup - By your standards, then, every science paper should also explicitly state that the sky is blue, gravity exists, green is not purple, and in essence recapitulate the entire sum of human knowledge, because otherwise that's all clearly up for debate.
Um, no.
Every bit of science exists within the body of shared knowledge assumed as a background. It's only when a work rests on other assumptions that it's necessary to state those, in a minority opinion - the better accepted a bit of knowledge, the less you need to start it to the readers. Meaning that climate 'skeptic' papers need to establish their (different) assumptions, but mainstream works not so much.
I suspect (personal opinion) you are fully aware of this, and are just looking for some semantic points to dismiss the consensus on AGW. That same argument has been raised before (read back in these threads), and it's still nonsense.
I find the line of reasoning from wakeup so tenuous and the conversation so vacuous that this is coming really close to a DNFTT situation.
Well there are other ways to see whether Cook is on the right track. You can ask the climate scientists directly. That would be Doran 2009, which came up with the same figure. You could also look at all the scientists who contributed research surveyed by the IPCC - ie over 4500. By contrast wikipedia provides this helpful list of dissenters. Taking out the non-climate scientists and industry shills, you are left with a list of mostly scientists who have "gone emeritus" and/or are ideologues.
Frankly, anyone who doesnt believe that a consensus exists is pursuing an elaborate exercise in fooling themselves and I would suspect them to be ideology and/or identity driven.
michael sweet @664: Please re-read Cook et al and check the author survey sent - inconclusive was not a choice given to the authors of papers. I believe it is clear from the methods and the nature of the subset of abstracts receiving a treatment of inconclusive that Cooke et al realized their error late in the process and thus were unable to completely correct for this. I do not doubt that the number of scientists publishing papers indicating they are unconvinced is very low, but I was hoping someone was aware of such a study.
I am trying to find if anyone has quantified this in any way, that was all. I am not attempting to dismiss the consensus on AGW.
wakeup @666: This survey is not the only evidence used "daily" to suggest an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists, and in fact, it references several other studies that support that position. I agree there are limitations of this study (hence my question), but the consensus is pretty clear from other sources as well.
wakeup, so you've moved from 'there is no consensus!' to 'consensus does not matter!'? Should we anticipate that once all the evidence showing the effects of perceived expert consensus on public acceptance is presented you will move on to 'overwhelming agreement amongst experts does not make it true!' and then once all the evidence showing that AGW is true is presented (and denial of each fact countered) to 'all this evidence must be faked by the evil scientist conspiracy!'... or can we just skip to, 'Hey look, there is a complete database of information on this site which gives detailed rebuttals to every nonsensical claim you can come up with. Why don't you read those and get back to us if you find any which haven't already been proven false?'
As to civility, who was it that introduced themselves by throwing around phrases like, "This wouldn't be acceptable in a courtroom or a school science project", "volume of conflicting information", "fuzzy numbers", and "apparently authoritative statements that amount to gobbledegook"?
[JH] wakeup's most recent comment constituted argumentative sloganeering and was therefore deleted.
Wakeup, it isn't beyond the capacity of scientists to explain, but you do have to do some of the work. They're not going to knock on your door. And you do have to learn, because the science gets complicated as we move away from the basics. It took ~850 scientists three years to summarize the existing science. They ended up with a 3000+ page report.
[JH] wakeup's most recent comment constituted argumentative sloganeering and was therefore deleted.