2009-01-29

Global Warming: What do the experts say?

Do you agree with the statement "human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures"



The study can be found here.

The second category, "Non-publishers/Non-climatologists", is a survey of scientists in the field of "Earth Science", which includes climatology, but also geology, meteorology, vulcanology, oceanography and others. "Non-publishers" means that this group is not involved in publishing scientific papers and are thus not up-to-date with the latest thinking. In that particular field, non-publishing meteorologists and non-publishing petroleum geologists were the ones most likely to say "no" to the question posed.

And also notice in that second category that although around 75% of them would say "yes" to the question posed, less than 10% would say "no" while 15% would say that they are not sure.

The final category consists of climatologists who are active in publishing papers about climate change. Of this group of the top experts, 97% would say "yes".

And that, dear readers, is what is called "scientific consensus".

It is also obvious from the study that the "controversy" exists only in the minds of the general public and not in the minds of the experts who know the facts.

It would be nice, though, if media reporting on global warming reflected a 97% support of the issue.

Mea Culpa: I have stated in the past that 99.9% of experts believe in anthropogenic global warming. Obviously that was a mistake. I have changed my position accordingly and would encourage others to do the same.

And a very big hat tip to Sam for this. Please read his blog.

2 comments:

BLBeamer said...

I scanned the article on wonderground.com and what I thought was interesting was that it seems to leave the definition of "significant" to the interpretation of the responder.

Roland Hulme said...

EXCELLENT POST OSO!