…is crumbling:
I am a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and a Certified Consulting Meteorologist. To the best of my memory I never had a chance to respond to this poll of the AMS membership.
That said, the fact that 70% of scientists say that humans affect the climate is utterly unsurprising. That has been known scientifically since Changnon’s METROMEX study in the early 70′s. The fact that 9 out of ten that publish on the subject of climate believe humans affect the climate is also utterly unsurprising.
For me, the money question was #6, “How worried are you about global warming?” Only 30% answered “very worried.” This would make 70% of the respondents “deniers” since that perjorative term seems to be applied to anyone who does not accept the “IPCC consensus” of catastrophic global warming. A statistically similar number (28%) is not worried or “not very worried” about global warming.
So, you can spin the results any way you want but this survey of a small number of AMS members doesn’t reveal any great concern about global warming.
Yup. All of this talk about consensus is just an attempt to bully people into their socialist “solutions” to a non-existent problem.
Hmmm, 30% does sound a lot less than 97%. I wonder if I should dredge up those old Transterrestrial posts where certain people were telling me that the 97% consensus was for a call to action rather than just that humans had a measurable influence on the climate.
“I wonder if I should dredge up those old Transterrestrial posts where certain people were telling me that the 97% consensus was for a call to action rather than just that humans had a measurable influence on the climate.”
Old? Baghdad Jim made this pronouncement (for the zillionth time – as if repetition makes it true) just a few days ago.
1) It isn’t happening – the physics is freshman level, and the complex Earth is graduate level
2) It would not be a bad thing if it were – carbon is the stuff of life itself, and it thrives in warmth
3) Even if it were a bad thing, there is no way to get still-poor and developing countries like India and China to do anything about it
4) Even if we could get them on board, the proposed solution would be economically ruinous – like amputating one’s head to deal with a headache
5) Even if all the above were not true, enslaving humankind under a global tyrannic government with power to order every aspect of peoples’ lives is worse than death itself
So, to the authoritarian types who would impose this calamity upon us, I give you fair notice that you will only take away my CO2 when you pump it from my cold, dead lungs.
When the survey came out, I decided to kill a few hours adding to the Wikipedia article on scientific consensus on global warming. Here’s the Talk page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change#AMS_Survey
You will see what I knew would happen: William Connolley and his minyons will make sure that nothing goes on the page that doesn’t support their 97% claim. They have plenty of reasons why anything that doesn’t shouldn’t be on the page, however accurate, and anything that does support the claim should be there, however foolish.
I think it is clear that a considerable majority of climate scientists believe in the consensus. A somewhat smaller majority as you move into related fields. Not 97%, even on the most basic issues. Certainly not if you include believing in very harmful impacts, and the urgent need for worldwide political action. And if all those climate scientists did believe that, so what? Very few of them are expert in any particular piece of that logical chain; most of them are taking someone else’s word for it.
For me personally, the money question is, What are the changes of disastrous impacts? If they aren’t disastrous, I’d rather try to adapt if they happen. If they are disastrous, we all would have to do whatever needs to be done. But the IPCC doesn’t give disastrous impacts high probability at all. If you trust them. I know Judith Curry thinks that current climate science is not really in a position to rule out Black Swans. I don’t like doing huge experiments with earth atmosphere, but so far no one has convinced me that undoing industrial civilization or political freedom are wise alternatives.
The extremism on Wikipedia is the very reason why I won’t even donate three bucks.
If you don’t like Wikipedia, you could write the article on Conservapedia. or even
write your own on rand-o-pedia.
The Wiki code is available open source.
I personally think you should write it on conservapedia. The article can index between “Kenya, Birth state of Obama” and ” Creationism: revealed truth fo God”
And, you can put one in Liberapedia among the entries on “The Perils of GM Crops”, “The Fracking Holocaust”, “Deadly Atoms”, “The Healing Power of Crystals”, and “Pump Priming for a Robust Economy”.
Sorry, that’s “*chances of disastrous impacts”
It’s funny that hours after insisting that surveys of scientists shouldn’t matter, Rand is trumpeting a selective reading of just such a survey.
For me, the money question was #6, “How worried are you about global warming?”
72% were “very worried” or “somewhat worried”. And that’s over the entire sample, most of whom aren’t climate scientists.
There have been a bunch of these surveys. They tell us that climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that the earth has been warming, that sea levels have been rising, that human actions are the cause of some of that warming, and that warming is harmful. The questions that they actually argue about are subtler: how fast is (and will) the planet warm, how quickly will sea levels rise, how much warming is due to human actions (and which ones), how harmful will warming be.
You didn’t read that closely enough. The question was only asked if the respondent had already answered “yes” to question 1, dropping your “overwhelming consensus” of worry to 64%, while only 52% agreed that mankind is mostly responsible anyway.
Interestingly, in the study about the AMS survey, the authors explicitly said that the main predictor of agreement wasn’t climate expertise, but the belief that there was a consensus, and that climate expertise definitely did not correlate strongly to belief in AGW. A lot of the skeptics are climate experts, and a lot of the climate experts are skeptics, which they pointed out to refute the warmists’ idea that skepticism just shows the lack of sufficient educating on the subject.
I think this misses the point. There are two types of questions in science. (1) Settled science, and (2) Open questions. Open questions are any issue where _real practicing scientists in the field_ are still arguing over it. Settled science is an issue where no one argues about any more except fringe lunatics.
That is the point of the “97%” meme. That side has been trying to claim forever that there is no scientific debate on this question, that all skeptics are not really scientists at all. “Look – they can’t even get their nonsense published in peer-reviewed journals! What, we’re trying to suppress them? – How absurd! They aren’t scientists at all, they’re clowns. We don’t have to suppress them, all us real scientists just laugh at them.”
So many people don’t understand what the main point of Climategate was. Not malpractice, or scientific fraud, or whatever all those inquiries acquitted them of. It was that Climategate proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that this entire meme was a media public relations ploy by a group of scientists trying to suppress their opponents, trying to simultaneously block them from peer-reviewed journals at the same time as they quoted that fact as proof that the other side wasn’t qualified, etc.
With 97% you can claim that it’s settled science. 72% is an open question. That’s all there is to it. Science doesn’t work by majority rule. 72% means no one really knows yet.
And note my Wikipedia attempt from above. William Connolley’s minions will never let 72% get into Wikipedia – it would ruin their narrative. They absolutely must have near-unanimity.
Not only is Jim not reading the survey correctly; he’s intentionally misreading Rand’s comments. Rand’s note of this new survey is not to claim it is science. The post simply points out that even the level of consensus is a lie. Alas, Jim keeps lying because it’s what he does to define who he is.