The expert consensus on global warming is 97%±1%

I have observed that people are fully capable of believing things that go against their own personal experience, even when the belief is to their own detriment.

http://skepticalscience.com/why-we-care-about-97-percent-consensus.html

Why we care about the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming

Posted on 24 June 2014 by dana1981

Three distinct studies using four different methods have independently shown that the expert consensus on human-caused global warming is 97 ± 1%. The result is the same whether we ask the experts’ opinions, look at their public reports and statements, or examine their peer-reviewed science. Even studies that quibble about the precise percentage have accidentally reinforced the 97 ± 1% consensus.

The evidence is crystal clear that humans are the main cause of the current global warming, and the expert consensus reflects the strength of that body of evidence. It’s not easy to convince 97% of scientific experts about anything – that requires some powerful scientific evidence.

And yet public opinion is a very different story. Americans think experts are evenly split on the causes of global warming. The public is likewise split on the cause of global warming, with just over half understanding that humans are primarily responsible. As a result, Americans don’t see global warming as an urgent issue, putting climate policy low on the list of priorities.

The sources of this disparity and how it can be corrected are the subjects of an intense debate amongst social scientists. One school of thought says that we have a problem with ‘information deficit’ as well as what climate scientist Michael Mann calls ‘misinformation surplus.’

For example, experimental evidence shows that if people are presented with a basic explanation of how global warming works, they’re more likely to accept the reality of human-caused global warming. Other research has shown that if people are told about the expert consensus, they’re also more likely to accept the science. In both cases, presenting people with certain pieces of information trims the gap between what the scientific evidence and experts say, and what the public believes.

The other school of thought, led by Dan Kahan at Yale, argues that the problem boils down to cultural biases. In essence, liberals feel as though they’re on Team ‘global warming is a problem caused by humans’ while conservatives identify with Team ‘no it’s not.’ Kahan feels that people will take any new information and pass it through their cultural filter; if it conforms to their cultural identity, they’ll accept it, or otherwise they’ll just reject it. In fact, Kahan argues that giving people information that doesn’t conform to their cultural identity (like the 97% consensus) may just act to polarize them further.

In a recent editorial for The Guardian, Adam Corner made a similar argument, asking 'who cares about the climate change consensus?'. Corner suggested that climate information is ineffective if it’s not coming from “communicators whose cultural credentials are congruent with the audience they are speaking to.” Both Kahan and Corner have also argued that if consensus messaging could work, then it should have worked by now, whereas American public acceptance of human-caused global warming in 2014 is lower than in 2003.