Oops. Maybe there is a “consensus” after all:
According to the newly published survey of geoscientists and engineers, merely 36 percent of respondents fit the “Comply with Kyoto” model. The scientists in this group “express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.”
The authors of the survey report, however, note that the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims.
The survey finds that 24 percent of the scientist respondents fit the “Nature Is Overwhelming” model. “In their diagnostic framing, they believe that changes to the climate are natural, normal cycles of the Earth.” Moreover, “they strongly disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal lives.”
Another group of scientists fit the “Fatalists” model. These scientists, comprising 17 percent of the respondents, “diagnose climate change as both human- and naturally caused. ‘Fatalists’ consider climate change to be a smaller public risk with little impact on their personal life. They are skeptical that the scientific debate is settled regarding the IPCC modeling.” These scientists are likely to ask, “How can anyone take action if research is biased?”
The next largest group of scientists, comprising 10 percent of respondents, fit the “Economic Responsibility” model. These scientists “diagnose climate change as being natural or human caused. More than any other group, they underscore that the ‘real’ cause of climate change is unknown as nature is forever changing and uncontrollable. Similar to the ‘nature is overwhelming’ adherents, they disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal life. They are also less likely to believe that the scientific debate is settled and that the IPCC modeling is accurate. In their prognostic framing, they point to the harm the Kyoto Protocol and all regulation will do to the economy.”
The final group of scientists, comprising 5 percent of the respondents, fit the “Regulation Activists” model. These scientists “diagnose climate change as being both human- and naturally caused, posing a moderate public risk, with only slight impact on their personal life.” Moreover, “They are also skeptical with regard to the scientific debate being settled and are the most indecisive whether IPCC modeling is accurate.”
Taken together, these four skeptical groups numerically blow away the 36 percent of scientists who believe global warming is human caused and a serious concern.
One interesting aspect of this new survey is the unmistakably alarmist bent of the survey takers. They frequently use terms such as “denier” to describe scientists who are skeptical of an asserted global warming crisis, and they refer to skeptical scientists as “speaking against climate science” rather than “speaking against asserted climate projections.” Accordingly, alarmists will have a hard time arguing the survey is biased or somehow connected to the ‘vast right-wing climate denial machine.’
Note, whether I agree or not, science isn’t done by polling, or by “consensus.” But I’d place myself in the third of those four groups.
[Late-afternoon update]
Scientists speaking with one voice: Panacea, or pathology?
They’ll also say “but geoscientists aren’t climatologists!”, neglecting that to become a climatologist these past decades you kinda … had to be in the warming camp, eh?
(They have a stronger point against “engineers” in that random engineers won’t have any specialist knowledge of climate.
But they’ll also forget that engineers tend to be more based in Actual Reality than “modelers” and love to pick apart faulty systems.
And engineers are real good at spotting cons and bad data – it’s what working engineers have to deal with when management or customers are trying to sell them a line.)
The article calls them “geoscientists and engineers”, and never mentions that the survey specifically targeted petroleum engineers (APEGA members)? I note this author James Taylor as someone I can’t trust.
Interesting result, nevertheless.
As an APEGA member myself, I would dispute your insinuation. There are lots of APEGA engineers who don’t work in the oil & gas industry. Personally, I’m responsible for control system designs for new and existing oil and gas production facilities.
Lots of our members are on the alarmist side, however there does seem to be a division between younger engineers with little real-world experience, and older engineers. Guess which ones favour the alarmist side?
I don’t think it gets enough attention that so many of the general public who are deeply concerned with climate change are the young, who never lived through the last cycle of warm & cold years, and who have never experience life without the Internet. I remember “The Limits to Growth” and how concerned I was as a teen about the future. Turns out the real problems were elsewhere, as again appears to be happening with this latest eco-doom fad. But this time, the volume has been turned up to eleven.
If you read the original article that was linked to by the link, you’ll see that the survey guys wanted specifically to study Alberta because it has a whole bunch of petroleum industry. I have no problem with that, and no problem with quoting the study. I have a very big problem with quoting the study and giving the impression that it refers to geoscientists and engineers in general. That’s misleading, and it sounds like it was intentional.
There are more than enough PC flacks in climate science, on both sides, without giving them credence.
The debate on public policy has been framed by scientific illiterates who thought quoting “97%” was evidence.
All this will do is stimulate them to claim that the people surveyed are not real climate scientists in some way or other.
Since there’s nothing scientific about their arguments, replying with measurements cannot work.
Went to see Victor Baker give a presentation on megafloods. He is a geologist and has studied Earth’s past climate from a geological perspective. He had a pretty good presentation and I encourage people to go listen to him if they ever get the chance. One of his areas of study covered in the presentation are the megafloods on Mars, so something for space cadets.
A audience member asked his opinion of AGW and he wasn’t very impressed with the claims of knowledge of how climate operates or certainty in predictions. This could make him a bit of a pariah in the academic community but I don’t think he cares for that much as his field of study had pariah status for a long time.
So surveys that report overwhelming support for the AGW hypothesis are bogus, but surveys that report skepticism of the AGW hypothesis are valuable information? Got it.
It’s not about the AGW hypothesis. Few people dispute that. It’s about the CAGW hypothesis. The 97% number for that is utter Bravo Sierra.
Beyond that, “surveys” and “polls” are utterly unscientific. They have zero to do with science. But you’ve made it clear that you don’t understand science, and don’t even want to.
It’s not about the AGW hypothesis. Few people dispute that.
We must have differing definitions of the AGW hypothesis. I’d state it as “Human activities are responsible for most of the recently observed climate change.” But 24% of the people in the survey cited above — far more than a “few” — “believe that changes to the climate are natural, normal cycles of the Earth.”
What is it that you think “few people dispute”?
Pretty clear to me that few people dispute that you live in a world where the sky is bullshit coloured, and the water has the sweet, sweet taste of bureaucracy.
:p
I’d add that I have tried to post on that wikipedia page in the past, including surveys with more relevant results. It is not possible; there is a dedicated team of AGW supporters, starting w William Connolley and Deltoid but with others, who will remove any such reference within minutes. Then they will provide some comment on the Talk page why their links are worth having and this one isn’t. The explanation never matters much; the result was what counted: anything that says 97% is fine, irrelevant or not. Other numbers are unacceptable. They search through each survey or whatever to find information they can add which supports their narrative, and that is all that goes on the page.
Look again there at the Bray/von Storch surveys (unlike most there, they are actual surveys). Then take a look at the survey results.
Don’t trust wikipedia on controversial topics.
Don’t trust wikipedia on controversial topics.
Evergreen words.
At this point, anyone who uses the 97% number unironically is either monumentally ignorant or a liar.
There are no surveys that show 97% support for the IPCC position.
The Anderegg paper concludes:
Apparently the author you link to does not count the Anderegg survey because it’s a survey of literature rather than a direct survey.
That said, the author you link to does find ~80% support for the IPCCC position from direct surveys of climate scientists. For just about any other public policy question that’d be considered more than enough.
Few people dispute that humans contribute to climate change. Many dispute that the contribution is significant, with any high level of certainty, that it will be catastrophic, and that the current data and models support much of the insane policies being promoted in its name.
Wikipedia helpfully lists a number of surveys of scientists and literature reviews. Most seem to ask whether anthropogenic climate change is significant, or alternatively, whether humans are responsible for most climate change (as the IPCCC has reported). That’s the question that gets 97+% support in some of the studies.
Oh. Wikipedia.
Once again, regardless of how desperate you are to believe it (and you seem to be quite so), the 97% number is utter Bravo Sierra.
If you visit the Wikipedia page you’ll find that Cook’s is not the only study to report 97+% support for the IPCCC position. You don’t have to believe Wikipedia — there are links.
There are no surveys that show 97% support for the IPCC position. Look at the details of the ones linked. There never has been even one such survey.
Here are the actual results:
http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/the-climate-science-consensus-is-78-84-percent
” but surveys that report skepticism of the AGW hypothesis are valuable information? ”
This survey made the attempt to identify different positions rather than just lump everyone together into two camps. Shocking that in real life, people have a more nuanced viewpoint than the religious doctrine that rules their environmental movement.
Engineers with experience in computational fluid dynamics (and I are one) are well-qualified to comment on the whole idea of climate modeling. A classic case is calculation of the flow of air over a 2-dimensional wing. The wing has an extremely well-defined contour (and can even have surface roughness). If the air flow is steady, but the wing is rotated at a finite rate, the flow will be unsteady. The best CFD codes will be able to predict the real flow field up to a certain point – that is the point at which the flow separates. No CFD code in existence can predict when that will occur, nor what the evolving flow will look like afterword. In a few seconds of simulated time, no solution will look like a wind-tunnel data set. The reasons for this are myriad, and most of them are pretty well understood. And they are intractable.
Add one more dimension, two more phases, radiant heat transfer, and a scale so large that the smallest-scale turbulence that can be directly simulated is the size of a large hurricane, and one can see without much effort that the solution is absolute bullshit after the first couple of time steps. Climate “scientists” claim that the solution can be relied on for a century of simulated time.
In their freshman year, these people were the ones who wrote down all 15 digits of the answer from their calculator.