Annie
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- Nov 22, 2003
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So who are those climate scientists?
Lawrence Solomon: 75 climate scientists think humans contribute to global warming | Full Comment | National Post
Lawrence Solomon: 75 climate scientists think humans contribute to global warming | Full Comment | National Post
Lawrence Solomon: 75 climate scientists think humans contribute to global warming
December 30, 2010 2:35 pm
...To their embarrassment, most of the pundits and press discovered that they were mistaken those 2500 scientists hadnt endorsed the IPCCs conclusions, they had merely reviewed some part or other of the IPCCs mammoth studies. To add to their embarrassment, many of those reviewers from within the IPCC establishment actually disagreed with the IPCCs conclusions, sometimes vehemently.
The upshot? The punditry looked for and recently found an alternate number to tout 97% of the worlds climate scientists accept the consensus, articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere have begun to claim.
This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout.
The two researchers started by altogether excluding from their survey the thousands of scientists most likely to think that the Sun, or planetary movements, might have something to do with climate on Earth out were the solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists and astronomers. That left the 10,257 scientists in disciplines like geology, oceanography, paleontology, and geochemistry that were somehow deemed more worthy of being included in the consensus. The two researchers also decided that scientific accomplishment should not be a factor in who could answer those surveyed were determined by their place of employment (an academic or a governmental institution). Neither was academic qualification a factor about 1,000 of those surveyed did not have a PhD, some didnt even have a masters diploma.
To encourage a high participation among these remaining disciplines, the two researchers decided on a quickie survey that would take less than two minutes to complete, and would be done online, saving the respondents the hassle of mailing a reply. Nevertheless, most didnt consider the quickie survey worthy of response just 3146, or 30.7%, answered the two questions on the survey:
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?
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