At 05:24 AM 12/5/2012, Robert Lynn wrote:
J
And despite what you might believe there are very large numbers of
professional scientists who doubt the validity of the IPCC CO2
driven thermageddon thesis eg 30000+ including 9000+ PhD's in this
one petition:
<http://www.petitionproject.org/>http://www.petitionproject.org/
You could do a petition like that on cold fusion and might still find
a majority of "professional scientists" who think that cold fusion
was rejected long ago. Answers that you get can depend on the
questions asked, and asking people for opinions outside their areas
of expertise is asking for garbage.
That petition is actually outrageous. It incorporates a preposterous
claim, i.e., "no convincing scientific evidence." I have to see the
petition as being purely political. It is not an expression of
science, but of a politcal view, and it's remarkable that the
petition shown is that of Edward Teller, who is a person I'd not
expect to know much, if anything, about climate science. Teller died
in 2003 at age 95. His politics were such that support for the
petition might be expected, without necessarily a lot of caution.
The Petition Project began in 1998. The dates of signing are not
given. Yet the petition is worded in the present tense.
The wording is political polemic, not a scientific judgment.
While there is a classification of signers by specialty, even in the
most related specialties, there is no way to judge the collective
qualifications of signers. It would be possible to parse the
specialty lists to see if PhDs are more common in the climate-related
specialties, or less common, but one can even have a degree in a
seemingly related field, but not have actually worked in that field,
and be unfamiliar with research in it.
Scientific consensus is understood by publication in journals under
peer review. For Wikipedia purposes, in theory, the golden source is
peer-reviewed reviews of a field. A pile of scientists with opinions
who cannot get a review published means practically nothing.
It was possible, with the cold fusion cascade, to set up a barrier to
publication in the field of cold fusion in certain mainstream
journals, but not in all. (that barrier has also afflicted Shanahan,
the last remaining skeptic who has actually gotten his views
published, he has complained about it).
A field like cold fusion -- or climate science -- can be enormously
complex, with raging controversies. Judging consensus in the field is
not really a job for amateurs, as Jed has pointed out. As outsiders,
we can see some factors, but not all.
Hence the best sign as to scientific consensus on cold fusion is the
most recent peer-reviewed review of the field, i.e., Storms (2010).
That was merely the latest in about 16 peer-reviewed reviews in
publications of lesser impact. It's all been positive for a long
time, and skeptics are not being published under peer review,
Shanahan only managed to get a Letter in the Journal of Environmental
Monitoring. Last gasp of the skeptics.
So if someone wants to claim, at this point, on anthropogenic global
warming, that "there is no convincing evidence," not merely that the
issue is controversial, perhaps "unproven," it would be incumbent on
them to point to peer-reviewed reviews covering this. The IPCC
reports were also quite cautions in how they presented conclusions,
using carefully-defined terms to indicate the degree of uncertainty
in conclusions. That was so the last time I look, anyway, probably in
2008-2009.
There is a review of the field published on the petition web site. It
was published in The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons,
i.e., far outside the topic of the journal. Under those conditions,
failure of careful peer review by experts is common. (It happens with
cold fusion, too. The pseudoskeptics have claimed that
Naturwissenschaften is a "biology journal," in order to imply such
failure. NW is a very different situation, it has access to the best
peer review resources in any of the natural sciences, including physics.)
The language in this review is polemic, it's blatantly obvious. One
would not see this kind of language in a professional climate
journal. This was written for an audience of non-experts, that's clear.
example language:
The temperature of the Earth is continuing its process of
fluctuation in correlation with variations in natural phenomena.
Mankind, meanwhile, is moving some of the carbon in coal, oil, and
natural gas from below ground to the atmosphere and surface, where
it is available for conversion into living things. We are living in
an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result.
This is an unexpected and wonderful gift from the Industrial Revolution.
As to the facts in this review, it would require weeks of study for
me to even begin to assess them. That's why we depend on expert reviews!
