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sex dwarf
Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 17,860
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Fire
What I find really amusing is that these "scientist" who claim that man made global warming is occurring because the climate is warming faster than predicted are totally loony. I am supposed to believe that their predictions for 15-20 yrs out are accurate and that variations cause a problem. Yet they can't tell me with any accuracy what the weather will be like in 3 days. Case in point, a few months ago the weekend was supposed to be abysmal. Tons of rain and wind. Yet when the weekend came is was sunny for 4 days and no breeze anywhere. So when the climate is different from what these guys predict I am supposed to think we caused it? How about they just guessed wrong!
Also, scientific consensus doesn't equal scientific fact. Consensus is just a word you global warming buffoons started to throw around to make it sound like you know what you are talking about. Has anyone actually polled every scientist out there to see what there opinion is?
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Scientists have in fact been polled:
http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
Quote:
Examining the Scientific Consensus
on Climate Change
Fifty-two percent of Americans think most climate scientists agree that the Earth has been warming in recent years, and 47% think climate scientists agree (i.e., that there is a scientific consensus) that human activities are a major cause of that warming, according to recent polling. However, attempts to quantify the scientific consensus on anthropogenic warming have met with criticism. For instance, Oreskes [2004] reviewed 928 abstracts from peer-reviewed research papers and found that more than 75% either explicitly or implicitly accepted the consensus view that Earth?s climate is being affected by human activities. Yet Oreskes?s approach has been criticized for overstating the level of consensus acceptance within the examined abstracts [Peiser, 2005] and for not capturing the full diversity of scientific opinion [Pielke, 2005]. A review of previous attempts at quantifying the consensus and criticisms is provided by Kendall Zimmerman [2008]. 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 scientists. The database was built from Keane and Martinez [2007], which lists all geosciences faculty at reporting academic institutions, along with researchers at state geologic surveys associated with local universities, and researchers at U.S. federal research facilities (e.g., U.S. Geological Survey, NASA, and NOAA (U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) facilities; U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories; 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 professional online survey site 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 levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
With 3146 individuals completing the survey, the participant response rate for the survey was 30.7%. This is a typical response rate for Web-based surveys [Cook et al., 2000; Kaplowitz et al., 2004]. Of our survey participants, 90% were from U.S. institutions and 6% were from Canadian institutions; the remaining 4% were from institutions in 21 other nations. More than 90% of participants had Ph.D.s, and 7% had master?s degrees. With survey participants asked to select a single category, the most common areas of expertise reported were geochemistry (15.5%), geophysics (12%), and oceanography (10.5%). General geology, hydrology/hydrogeology, and paleontology each accounted for 5?7% of the total respondents. Approximately 5% of the respondents were climate scientists, and 8.5% of the respondents indicated that more than 50% of their peer-reviewed publications in the past 5 years have been on the subject of climate change. While respondents? names are kept private, the authors noted that the survey included participants with well-documented dissenting opinions on global warming theory.
Results show that overall, 90% of participants answered ?risen? to question 1 and 82% answered yes to question 2. In general, as the level of active research and specialization in climate science increases, so does agreement with the two primary questions (Figure 1). In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered ?risen? to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2. This is in contrast to results of a recent Gallup poll suggests that only 58% of the general public would answer yes to our question 2. The two areas of expertise in the survey with the smallest percentage of participants answering yes to question 2 were economic geology with 47% (48 of 103) and meteorology with 64% (23 of 36).
It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes. The challenge, rather, appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact to policy makers and to a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate among scientists.
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Yes, there is a consensus.
And (how surprising!) the area of expertise with the smallest percentage of scientists agreeing with the consensus is economic geology - which is primarily concerned with digging up oil, coal and ore. The area of expertise with the largest percentage of scientists agreeing with the consensus, on the other hand, is climate science.
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