It is commonplace to see the assertion that the IPCC represents the consensus of opinion of climate scientists; it is also common to see this view disputed, e.g. SEPP. This page exists to provide evidence from published surveys (and possibly even petitions) of the general current of scientific thought rather than the opinions of individual scientists.

In 1996 a survey of climate scientists on attitudes towards global warming and related matters "Climate Science An empirical example of postnormal science" was undertaken by Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, and subsequently published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol. 80, No. 3, March 1999 439-455. [1] The paper addressed the views of climate science, with a response rate of 40% from a mail survey questionnaire to 1000 scientists in Germany, the USA and Canada. Almost all scientists agreed that the skill of models was limited. Consensus was, however, apparent regarding the utility of the knowledge at that date: climate science provided enough knowledge so that the initiation of abatement measures was warranted.

The survey was extensive, and asked numerous questions on many aspects of climate science, model formulation and utility, and science/public/policy interactions. To pick out some of the more vital topics, from the body of the paper:

The resulting questionnaire, consisting of 74 questions, was pre-tested in a German institution and after revisions, distributed to a total of 1,000 scientists in North America and Germany... The number of completed returns were as follows: USA 149, Canada 35, and Germany 228, a response rate of approximately 40%...

...With a value of 1 indicating the highest level of belief that predictions are possible and a value of 7 expressing the least faith in the predictive capabilities of the current state of climate science knowledge, the mean of the entire sample of 4.6 for the ability to make reasonable predictions of inter-annual variability tends to indicate that scientists feel that reasonable prediction is not yet a possibility... mean of 4.8 for reasonable predictions of 10 years ...mean of 5.2 for periods of 100 years...

...a response of a value of 1 indicates a strong level of agreement with the statement of certainty that global warming is already underway or will occur without modification to human behavior... ...the mean response for the entire sample was 3.3 indicating a slight tendency towards the position that global warming has indeed been detected and is underway. ...Regarding global warming as being a possible future event, there is a higher expression of confidence as indicated by the mean of 2.6.

• Global Environmental Change Report, 1990: GECR climate survey shows strong agreement on action, less so on warming. Global Environmental Change Report 2, No. 9, pp. 1-3

• Stewart, T.R., Mumpower, J.L., and Reagan-Cirincione, P. (1992). Scientists' opinions about global climate change: Summary of the results of a survey. NAEP (National Association of Environmental Professionals) Newsletter, 17(2), 6-7. [2]