Summary

This 2012 chart created by user Dragons flight was based on data from 2011. There are more recent studies including Climate Change: An Information Statement of the American Meteorological Society (Adopted by AMS Council 20 August 2012)

Summary of the opinions from climate / earth scientists regarding climate change.

The Doran & Zimmerman 2009 study archive copy at the Wayback Machine was done for a master's thesis and involved a 9-question survey. The 2009 peer reviewed publication that followed the study reported on 2 of the 9 questions. The study found, in part, that 96.4% of "climatologists who are active publishers on climate change" agree that mean global temperatures have risen "compared with pre-1800s levels", and that 97.4% (75 of 77) agree that human activity "is a significant contributing factor" in temperature change. The study concludes the distribution of answers to those survey questions implies that debate on the "role played by human activity is largely nonexistent" amongst climate experts.

The Anderegg et al 2010 source defined a scientist's expertise as determined by his or her number of climate publications. The top 50 scientists considered CE ("convinced by the evidence" in the terminology of the authors) wrote an average of 408 articles each which were submitted to and successfully published by climate journals. Scientists were counted as UE ("unconvinced by the evidence") if having signed a public "statement strongly dissenting from the views of the IPCC." That resulted in a list of 472 UE scientists, of whom 5 were among the 200 most-published scientists in the study's sample, amounting to 2.5% when the other 195 (97.5%) were counted as CE.

That study's sample included 903 scientists counted as CE ("convinced by the evidence"). Scientists were assumed to be CE when in the list of those credited by the IPCC as having done research utilized by AR4 Working Group I. Such an assumption resulted in a list of 619 names, which, after adjusting for duplication, became a total of 903 when also adding in those who signed one of several statements supporting the IPCC.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2010 http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2010/06/07/1003187107.DCSupplemental/pnas.201003187SI.pdf

Author of chart: User:Dragons flight, March 2012

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Update on December 7 2014

Expansion of comments re upload done today. (A) Change top line to "Opinions of Climate and Earth Scientists on Human Role in Global Warming". (B) Change "Significant human impact" to "Significant" and change "Little or no human effect" to "Little or none". (C) Adjust the Bray + Storch bar so it's 84%/16% rather than 94%/6%. These changes were discussed on the talk page for the Wikipedia article "Surveys_of_scientists'_views_on_climate_change". Changes (A) and (B) are as per agreement on that talk page as of December 7 2014. The adjustment (C) was suggested by user Tillman; user Dragons flight -- the original author of the graphic -- acknowledged that the 94%/6% bar appeared to be an error. As of December 7 2014 the URL of the talk page discussion was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Surveys_of_scientists%27_views_on_climate_change#Revised_graphic. Original attribution of course remains with Dragons flight; user Peter Gulutzan (the person doing this upload) made the above changes and hereby grants all permissions to publish these changes under free licence.