FALSE: SCIENTIST AGREE BY A LARGE MAJORITY THAT HUMAN ACTIVITY IS THE MAIN CAUSE OF THE CURRENT EARTH’S WARMING
Written by Odhiambo Shem on December 8, 2022
A twitter post claiming that scientists do not agree on the cause of climate change is false.
“7- Scientists disagree on the cause of climate change. Scientists disagree that climate change is happening and that it is caused by humans. Various analyses over many years have shown that climate scientists disagree about the main cause of our warming climate,” reads the claim.
So far, several scientific reports as well as fact sheets have been published, providing evidence that the current warming of the earth is as a result of increased heat trapping gasses produced by humans. These publications include, and are not limited to, the National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Environmental Protection Agency, National Research Council and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Based on scientific evidence collected for more than a century, human activities more so burning of fossil fuels have caused earth’s warming and this has impacted negatively on the earth’s climate.
According to a research published on 19th October 2021 by IOP publishing LTD, which examined a total of 3000 climate related papers out of a total of 88125 published between the year 2012 and 2021, there is more than 99% consensus that climate change is caused by human activities in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
Out of the 3000 papers, 282 were found not to be climate related. This was primarily because, despite using climate keywords, they tackled social sciences, education and people’s opinions on climate change and not scientific work. In the remaining 2718, four were found to be skeptical and were rated as implicitly/explicitly skeptical as far as human-caused climate change is concerned. This therefore brought the estimate of the proportion of consensus as; (4/2718) = 99.85%.
Source: IOPSCIENCE
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) through a report released in 2013, affirmed that scientific evidence concerning the earth’s warming is unequivocal and increase in the amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere caused by burning of fossil fuels is the main cause.
According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), through their site ‘What We Know’, states that approximately 97% of scientists agree on the fact that human-caused climate change is real based on evidence.
The American Meteorological Society (AMS) also states that according to scientific evidence, anthropogenic hike in the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gasses in the recent half century is the biggest cause of climate change.
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) on the other hand states that the earth’s climate is changing as a result of human activities and has in turn led to harmful ecological as well as societal impacts.
We looked into this claim stating that scientists do not agree on the causes of climate change and found it to be false.
This fact-check was produced by Sky 106.1 FM with support from Code for Africa’s PesaCheck, International Fact-Checking Network, and African Fact Checking Alliance network.
