Virtually 100 percent of full-time, actively publishing climate scientists agree the planet is warming up, with people playing a major role.
A 2010 survey found that 90 percent of 3,146 earth scientists surveyed around the world believe average global temperatures have risen over the past two centuries, and 82 percent agreed that greenhouse gas emissions from human activity have been a significant driver of the sizzle.
Many other studies repeatedly demonstrate this same overwhelming consensus among researchers: There is no widespread scientific "debate" over the reality of global warming. Even one of the most outspoken scientific skeptics now agrees the planet has heated up.
And yet, about half of all Americans don't buy it.
Influenced by what some call a "disinformation campaign" on the climate issue, 45 percent of Americans now believe that most scientists remain embroiled in a broad disagreement over the reality of global warming. Some 5 percent go further and think scientists actually deny climate change exists.
And these doubters -- whose assumptions about the state of climate science are mostly false -- are much less open to public policies that might reduce greenhouse gas production or mitigate global warming, according to new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change.
"Misunderstanding the extent of scientific agreement about climate change is important because it undermines people's certainty that climate change is happening, which in turn reduces their conviction that America should find ways to deal with the problem," said co-author Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, in this story about the project.
"It is no accident that so many Americans misunderstand the widespread scientific agreement about human-caused climate change. A well-financed disinformation campaign deliberately created a myth about there being lack of agreement. The climate science community should take all reasonable measures to put this myth to rest."
Such notions may have such staying power, partly, because the broad consensus over climate warming has never been unanimous.
The original 2010 survey, for example, found that only 47 percent of petroleum geologists and 64 percent of professional meteorologists endorse the link between human activity and climate change -- compared with 97 percent of climate scientists.
"The petroleum geologist response is not too surprising, but the meteorologists' is very interesting," said survey co-author Peter Doran, from the University of Illinois at Chicago, in this story about the survey. "Most members of the public think meteorologists know climate, but most of them actually study very short-term phenomena."
The authors of the new Nature paper say mainstream media have often fed the myth by featuring "dueling scientists" when covering the climate issues, presenting a "false balance ... inadvertently suggesting that the climate science community remained strongly divided."
Another factor: an ongoing red-state, right-wing war on environmental and climate science has become an element in GOP campaign rhetoric.
"Scientific skepticism, the engine that propels intellectual inquiry, has morphed into skepticism of science fueled by religious certitude," wrote Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker in a piece titled The Palinization of the GOP. "In this strange world, it is heresy to express concern about, for example, climate change -- or even to suggest that human behavior may be a contributing factor."
Maibach and his co-authors argue that scientists should confront climate change misperceptions with a campaign of their own.
"The myth of widespread disagreement among climate scientists over whether global warming is happening has little to no basis in truth, and it emerged, at least in part, as the result of a concerted effort to deceive the public," the authors concluded in their paper.
"Efforts to 'debias' audiences should repeatedly assert the correct information -- for example, 'the vast majority of climate scientists agree that human-caused global warming is happening' -- because repeated assertions, in time, become more familiar and therefore more likely to be deemed true."
Contact Doug O'Harra at doug(at)alaskadispatch.com.