Stunning Rebuke of AGW by Scientific American Readers

First, if 98% of people believed in the flat earth, it wouldn't make it so. If the "poll" is correct is just shows the effectiveness of the denial campaign.

Second, please consider that a huge percentage of "Alberta Earth Scientists" are petroleum geologists and engineers, who are invested in both conventional and tar sands oil. No bias there. Give me a list of atmospheric or climate scientists any time as a bench mark. I read that petroleum geologists were (as scientists) the least likely to accept AGW.

 

ROTFL. The article on the Canadian scientists won't even cite what poll they're infering from. Who were the Earth scientists and engineers polled, and what were the questions?

But the random poll from Scientific American, and your other thread about how just one satellite failure somehow discredits all observed climate data....not to mention all your sources originating from the climate change dispatch and (the second) science and public policy sites....well that just convinces me. Earth scientists are funded by the man, and Friederick Seitz was right that extra CO2 levels actually help the environment. Of course...how could I have been so blind!!

Whatever you do, don't look at these links from respected universities. What do they know, they're corrupt scientists!!

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/glob-warm.html
Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements - Harvard - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

 

Do you just google links from the climate change dispatch, but never bother to read their tennants?? They're trying to deny AGW, or say there's not enough evidence to claim that there will be a noticable global temperature mean difference. They cloud the issue by saying there are "feedbacks" that man is incapable of factoring, so "we'll" just assume that they're all negative...so maybe the Earth won't go up 2 degrees in 100 years. They then go on an internet hunt to find any irrelevant data that might prove whatever point they try to make (which is not make a point, but just discredit AGW theory). That's pretty unscientific, and pretty ideological if you ask me.

Climate Change Dispatch - Global Warming 101

 

So, this was an open online poll on a blog?

Like no interest group has ever posted poll links to its members to let them dog-pile and heavily skew the results. Yeah, I've never seen that happen in any interest group in I've been involved with.

 

Alberta is like the Texas of Canada. It has the bible belt, most of the oil industry, and all of the rednecks.

 

You're not calling an online poll a "serious rebuke" and expecting anyone to continue taking you seriously, are you?

 

Oh, yeah.

The OP misstates it. This was not a poll of Scientific American readers. It's an internet poll, open to all. Which, as anybody who actually does polls tells you, is not worth squat.

Observations: Taking the temperature: Climate change poll

Even then, just take a look at the actual questions to see just how serious the poll was, e.g.

"a dupe"
"corrupt organization"
"fate of human civilization"

As opposed, I guess, to alien civilization?

Maybe they can be forgiven for the wording, as this was just a puff piece that followed up an article on Judith Curry. But nobody should confuse this with a real survey.

If you actually want to know what the average US citizen thinks, then you have to pay for a real survey, done properly (e.g., random-digit dialing, multiple languages available, the whole nine yards). Ideally, you ask the same set of questions at several points in time to see how much temporal variation there is.

There are enough reliable surveys on this topic -- both for US citizens and internationally -- that you can get a good feeling for what actual public opinion is. Without paying attention to the "fate of human civilization" nonsense.

Here's one conducted jointly by George Mason University and Yale. Sample of 1000 randomly-chosen adults. Neutrally-worded questions. They've repeated it annually for the past three years. Last issued in early 2010.

Poll: American Opinion on Climate Change Warms Up

Result: 77 percent (of US adults) support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

Pew Charitable Trust does both national and international surveys. While they are an advocacy organization, they too know how to do a straight survey.

Voters Support Congressional Action on Comprehensive Energy and Global Warming Legislation - The Pew Charitable Trusts

Result: 77% of voters favor action to reduce global warming emissions

Hmm, something of a pattern seems to be developing.

Third time's the charm.

Here's one funded by the National Science Foundation, run by Roper poll, overseen by researchers at Stanford University. Same deal: 1000 randomly chosen US adults.

Large Majority of Americans Still Believe in Global Warming - Woods Institute

Result: 76 percent favored government limitations on greenhouse gas emissions generated by businesses.

OK, that seems to be pretty solid information. But the Stanford survey really gets to the heart of the matter with a couple more questions:

78 percent opposed taxes on electricity to reduce consumption, and 72 percent opposed taxes on gasoline

So, yeah, protect me from this problem, as long as it doesn't cost me a nickel.

Recap: Three real surveys, run by responsible organizations, using traditional survey techniques to minimize selection bias (random-digit dialing). Three different sets of questions. All the results cluster around 75% of Americans think "The Government" should do something.

And nobody wants to pay for it.

That sounds like an accurate characterization of the American public, to me.

 

Oh, and that second poll, the Alberta poll? I've seen that one before. The kickers there are that:

1) Most of the members of the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta work for the oil and gas industry.

2) Although the sent out the survey to their 51,000 members, vie their newsletter, they only had about 1000 responses.

Here, read the original:

http://www.apegga.org/Environment/reports/ClimateChangesurveyreport.pdf

Basically, they asked a bunch of (mostly) petroleum engineers whether or not they thought that burning fossil fuels was a bad thing. Of the 2% who responded, guess what, a lot of them thought that it wasn't such a bad thing.

 

Mojo might want to read what SciAm has to say about AGW:

Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense: Scientific American

 

So, let me get this straight: That baloney on-line poll, mis-represented as a poll of Scientific American readers, that was "a stunning rebuke". But simply showing what average US public opinion actually is merely proves "brainwashing".

Fine. If you want a straight, actual, high-quality survey of people who actually know something about climate, then why not cite any of the many such surveys available, as summarized here:

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change"]Scientific opinion on climate change - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

Just breeze through the results. The overall pattern is clear: The closer you get to a population that really knows their stuff in this area (e.g., climatologists), the closer you get to 100% agreeing that AGW exists and is a problem. The further afield you go, the lower that number gets.

The obvious conclusion is that understanding of the topic is strongly positively correlated with agreement that AGW is a problem. And as a matter of simple logic, the converse is true: On average, within the subsets of persons surveyed, denying that AGW is a problem is strongly positively correlated with ignorance about the underlying science.

They said it nicer in the recently published (PNAS) paper on the topic, cited in the Wikipedia article:

Anderegg, Prall, Harold, and Schneider, 2010

A 2010 paper in the [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proceedings_of_the_National_Academy_of_Sciences"]Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States[/ame] reviewed publication and citation data for 1,372 climate researchers and resulted in the following two conclusions:

(i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC (Anthropogenic Climate Change) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.


Oh, and among earth scientists, who has the most doubts about global warming? Hey, guess what -petroleum geologists. But even among that profession, where their livelihood depends on the continued burning of fossil fuels, almost half agreed that mankind is causing the warming.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090119210532.htm
​

 

This is like polling a self-selected group of Albertans about their belief in evolution by natural selection. The percentage of people who believe in something has no bearing on whether or not it is supported by the evidence. All they did was measure the cultural meme of this group.

 

Sorry MoJo, but you have just gone down a notch (or twenty) in my credibility book with statements (and threads) like this. You are begining to remind me of a old poster here (NVPrius) who started out very reasonably with a statement "I am a great believer in Global warming" only to quite quickly reveal his complete and total bias.

Sorry

 

I think Mojo is just trying to ruffle feathers a bit, but his attempts are so so lame he just comes off as being ignorant and not a little pathetic.

Whatever floats his boat.

As for 'the inconvenient truth:' IF ONLY americans had that level of education. Kind of like saying "americans can only solve ODEs," when the reality is closer to addition and subtraction -- if they have a calculator.

 

hear i was thinking the OP was talking about "Actual Gold Weight" but realize he thinks "man made global warming" is not facts. surprised anyone would have that concusion after watching the tropical weather in the last 5 to 10 years. Or the dracmatic weather changes over the last 10 years. :target:

 

Me thinks that Skandor Akbar is a nom de guerre:
[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skandor_Akbar]Skandor Akbar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

And he is yanking our chain(s)

 

Just to put it in perspective, the number of responses in this poll amounts to less than 1% of Scientific American's subscribers.

And even then only 7% of the 1% said global warming wasn't real.

Finally, as was noted earlier, science is not a matter of popular opinion. Blame the Church for persecuting Galileo if you like. It wasn't like popular opinion was on his side.
It doesn't matter if 99.99% of Europeans thought the sun revolved around the earth- it doesn't. Same for GW and AGW. The only question is whether we are willing to make changes in our lifestyle to save fossil fuels for future generations if AGW isn't true? There are lots of reasons to end our dependence on fossil fuel asap even if AGW is someday proven false.