Over 100 Years of Climate Change Research Compiled into Digital 'Cosmos'

Humanity's understanding of climate change, though relatively recent compared to the long history of knowledge accumulation, has seen significant advancements since the initial discovery of the "greenhouse effect" by American amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote in 1856. The establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 marked a crucial milestone, providing a framework for the rapid development of climate science.

In a significant effort to consolidate this vast body of knowledge, the UK-based nonprofit research organization Carbon Brief launched its "Cosmos" project on August 22. This digital database aims to map the entirety of climate change research, encompassing over 1.8 million papers and 40 million citation relationships. Carbon Brief, with support from the University of Exeter and INRIA, spent 18 months building this comprehensive resource, which visualizes climate knowledge as a vast ecosystem of interconnected papers, akin to stars forming nebulae and galaxies.

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Cosmos encompasses over 1.8 million papers and 40 million citation relationships, representing the most complete and extensive compilation of human knowledge on climate change.

The database primarily draws from the IPCC's assessment reports, published every five to seven years since 1990. Carbon Brief extracted 100,000 references from all IPCC reports to construct the database. The "Cosmos" interface allows users to explore "nebulae" and "galaxies" representing groups of papers with similar citation patterns, thus revealing shared research interests. It serves as a "map of how our understanding of climate change has been built, and by whom."

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It is a map of how our understanding of climate change has been built, and by whom.

In conjunction with the database, Carbon Brief released the "Cosmos 500," a ranking of the most influential literature, authors, and research institutions. French scientist Pierre Friedlingstein, focusing on Earth's carbon cycle, topped the author list. The rankings highlighted a strong U.S. presence, with nearly half of the authors affiliated with U.S. institutions, while developing countries accounted for only 4% and women just 10%. Methodological papers, such as those presenting new statistical methods, programming languages, or datasets, were more frequently selected than those with groundbreaking discoveries. The "Stern Review" on the economics of climate change (2006) was the most cited document in IPCC reports, emphasizing climate change as a severe market failure requiring urgent action.

Regarding institutions, over a third of the top 500 are U.S.-based, with only 30 from developing countries, mostly in China. The French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) was the most cited institution. Carbon Brief plans to update and expand the database annually but will not make it open-source due to the risk of AI misuse. However, they invite collaboration from academia, media, and analysts to explore how interest in various climate science fields has evolved and to identify research gaps and future opportunities.

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Climate change is the greatest and most widely feared market failure of all time.