Question

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what assessment he has made of (a) the implication for his Department's policies of the paper Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature and (b) allegations of fraud in that paper.

The 2013, peer-reviewed paper Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature analysed the abstracts of around 12,000 scientific papers and found that, of the third which expressed a view on the cause of global warming, 97% considered it to be man-made. We are not aware of any evidence of fraud relating to this paper.

The main conclusion of the paper is consistent with findings from all other such studies, and as is evident from the recent Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that recent global warming is largely caused by human activity.