A comprehensive assessment of climate change research has found...

A comprehensive assessment of climate change research has found an overwhelming consensus among scientists that recent warming is human-induced.

The study looked at 12,000 climate research papers from the last two decades, and identified 4,000 that stated a position on the cause of recent global warming.

Those papers, which were all published between 1991 and 2011, were written by more than 10,000 scientists.

Just over 97 per cent of the scientists agreed that man-made warming was a reality.

The assessment's lead author, John Cook from the University of Queensland, says the public perception is that the science is divided.

But he says he hopes this analysis will set the record straight.

"We wanted to measure how much climate scientists agreed on human-caused global warming through the peer-reviewed literature," he said.

"Climate scientists can have their own opinion, but they have to back it up with evidence that they can publish in peer-reviewed journals. So that's why we focussed on what scientists were saying in the public research.

"And among those papers 97 per cent of them endorsed the consensus that humans were causing global warming".

The paper, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, took two years to complete.

"An accurate perception of the degree of scientific consensus is an essential element to public support for climate policy," the study's authors wrote.

"Communicating the scientific consensus also increases people's acceptance that climate change is happening."

The United Nations' chief science body, the IPCC, is expected to say in its next report that it is now virtually certain that human greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global warming.


http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-16/overwhelming-consensus-for-manmade-warming-says-review/4693016