... The objective of our study presented here is to assess the scientific consensus on climate change through
an unbiased survey of a large and broad
group of Earth scientists.
An invitation to participate in the
survey was sent to 10,257 Earth sci-
entists. The database was built from
Keane and Martinez [2007], which lists
all geosciences faculty at reporting aca-
demic institutions, along with research-
ers at state geologic surveys associated
with local universities, and research-
ers at U.S. federal research facilities
(e.g., U.S. Geological Survey, NASA, and
NOAA (U.S. National Oceanic and Atmo-
spheric Administration) facilities; U.S.
Department of Energy national labora-
tories; and so forth). To maximize the
response rate, the survey was designed
to take less than 2 minutes to complete,
and it was administered by a profes-
sional online survey site (
http://www
.questionpro.com) that allowed one-time
participation by those who received the
invitation.
This brief report addresses the two
primary questions of the survey, which
contained up to nine questions (the full
study is given by Kendall Zimmerman
[2008]):
1. When compared with pre-1800s lev-
els, do you think that mean global tem-
peratures have generally risen, fallen, or
remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a sig-
nificant contributing factor in changing
mean global temperatures?
