After more than twenty years of research, a study takes stock of what scientists around the world maintain about global warming and climate change. For almost all of them, the cause is the increase in CO2 emissions produced by human activities.

All in agreement
Researcher John Cook of the University of Queensland, in Australia, and founder of the website skepticalscience.com, decided to gather, together with a group of volunteers, the more than 12,000 studies that addressed the topic of "global warming" and "global climate change" from 1991 to 2011, in order to determine whether genuine uncertainty about the causes of climate change truly exists within the scientific community.

The conclusion, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, is that 97.1 per cent of the studies analysed reach the same conclusion: global warming is caused by human activities. Only 24 papers (0.7 per cent) explicitly rejected this thesis, while the remaining 2.2 per cent took a neutral position.

Citizens are confused

A result that makes the position of American citizens all the more inexplicable: 43 per cent (source: Pew Research Center) believe that scientists disagree on whether the Earth is warming because of us. A similar figure was also recorded in Australia, according to a survey conducted by Cook himself, which led him to conclude that governments are not doing enough to spread awareness and bridge the gap between perception and reality.

An effort that, by contrast, the energy and oil lobbies are consistently pursuing through investments in communication campaigns and the constant presence of their representatives in television debates, despite having no weight of facts behind them.