What emperical evidence is there that 99% of all scientist support AGW theory of catastrophic warming.?

Question

The closest I can think of is Oreskes, but she has been debunked by Shulte and Peisner and no one, that I am aware of, has been able to replicate her study.

Polls taken by two German scientists also do not support the 99% theory. It says something like 60%. While criticism of the polls has been given, the scholar way is that after the criticism, you conduct another poll with a new and improved technique that shows different results. has such a poll been conducted?

If an organization supports the theory, is it because 99% of its members support it, or 51%? Can anyone show me the polls taken of its members to arrive at the conclusion that catastrophic AGW is real

Answer 1

Hmmm... I wasn't even aware that such a number was being thrown around and I doubt it's veracity although I am an AGW proponent.



Why? Well, number one, who has ever managed to collate all the names of all the scientists in the world? I doubt that there is a central registry, especially as there isn't even a universally accepted definition of a "scientist". For example, can a scientist only be such if they have a degree recognised by Western academics? What if a person rigourously follows the scientific method but lacks the piece of paper? Does someone with a BSc in political science count? What about someone from the University of Pyongyang?



In other words, if we cannot define the total, how can we define a percentage thereof?



If you then say that you are only talking about a percentage of a group that can be exactly defined (e.g. a faculty or an association) then I am no longer interested in whether they agree in whole, in part, as a majority or a minority...

Again, why? Because any predefined group will, by necessity, be pre-qualified (e.g. all English speakers) which will come with their own biases.



In other words, any such statement can be considred a red herring and not germane to the issue at hand.

The way to judge these things is to use your own critical capacities:



What are the hypotheses? Have they been tested in a number of ways? Have the people who did the testing respected the scientific method? Do they have the experience and/or knowledge to do these investigations appropriately? Have others tried to duplicate, corroborate or refute the findings? Did those others follow the same rigorous process? How successful were they in corrobating or refuting? What do I, as a thinking, intelligent, person think of the results (before people draw conclusions, I should be capable of drawing my own)? What conclusions are drawn (and there will always be multiple and sometimes conflicting)?

How do all of these conclusions, including my own, stack up to real life experience (in other words, dlo they make sense)?

etc, etc.



You will note that nowhere in there do I think it relevant whether 9, 19 or 90% of this group or that agree or disagree. I do think it important that if a group wishes to make a statement or issue a report that they do so as a group but I accept that they are the only ones able to judge what percentage of their group have to agree before it can be deemed a "consensus" - it is not for outsiders to impose our rules on them.



Short answer:

I don't think it is possible to have empirical data regarding the opinion of ALL scientists.

I think different organisations will have different definitions, by-laws, regulations or whatever that determine when they, as a group can issue a group statement or opinion. Thus the second question is also unanswerable.

Answer 2

Well, since neither Oerskes nor even Peisner (when pressed; see http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptics/BPeiser.html) can actually point to a single peer-reviewed study (out of ordmag 1000 each) that denies AGW, that's a pretty good sample.



However, noted skeptic Madhav Khandekar has published a bibliography of 67 peer-reviewed studies, published between 1999 and 2007, which (he claims) do not support the consensus view.



The number of peer-reviewed studies published in the same period which support the consensus view is in the tens of thousands; for example, the IPCC report alone has over 6000 citations, and they only covered the most important stuff.

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm



So there's your 99% right there.



(Khandekar's list, btw, does not include anything by Spencer, Christy, or Veiser; nor have you provided any links to any allegedly skeptical papers. So I'm going out on a limb here and say that you've been misinformed by an untrustworthy website.)

Answer 3

They don't support "catastrophy". This is the position of 99+% of scientists.



"The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to begin taking steps to prepare for climate change and to slow it. Human actions over the next few decades will have a major influence on the magnitude and rate of future warming. Large, disruptive changes are much more likely if greenhouse gasesare allowed to continue building up in the atmosphere at their present rate. However, reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require strong national and international commitments, technological innovation, and human willpower."



Peisner retracted his claims about what articles doubted global warming, until he was left with only one letter to the editor.



"The fact that the community overwhelmingly supports the consensus is evidenced by picking up any copy of Journal of Climate or similar, any scientific program at the meetings, or simply going to talk to scientists. I challenge you, if you think there is some un-reported division, show me the hundreds of abstracts that support your view - you won't be able to. You can argue whether the consensus is correct, or what it really implies, but you can't credibly argue it doesn't exist."



NASA's Gavin Schmidt

Answer 4

I don't think it's 99%. It's more like 95% of those in the relevant fields. If you choose scientists in other fields, such as medicine or geology, I'm sure your numbers could go down. If you pick atmospheric/climate scientists/oceanographers, though, the numbers are going to be way up there in favor.



My "empirical" data is that of somebody that goes to conferences (American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society), meets people, listens to talks, reads journals, etc.



To be honest, the exact numbers don't matter. Even if it were just half the scientists telling you that something catastrophic was going to happen if we don't change the way we do business, isn't that enough to get your attention?

Answer 5

While I will concede that you can define most people's opinion as a form of faith, I will not simply accept AGW because someone says I should. The data, more specifically, their modeling habits and time projections, do not connect in a manner that would allow me to just outright agree with their statements. Quite simply, the reason why I see it as religious is not because I disagree with the tenet that the world is warming, but more because the AGW people proselytize the same way a baptist church might (and furthermore, the denouncing of us carbon "sinners" is also annoying).

Answer 6

There is no real stat showing how many scientists agree or disagree. The alarmists will misinform the public by stating that 99% agree with the theory, when in reality, it is LESS than 50%. They get their statistics from polls, which are informal surveys. "We asked 200 people if they believed in GW and 99% said yes". Do those 200 people represent the billions of people on Earth? No. Stats are so easy to manipulate. It's like Crest stating that 4 out of 5 dentists recommend Crest. They can't say 5 out of 5, so they go with 4 out of 5. If you did an independent survey, you will find that 4 out of 5 dentists don't recommend Crest. So using surveys as a basis to determine the percentage of scientists who agree with the theory is unjustifiable.



I just interviewed 50 scientists and they all believe GW is just hype. While they do agree with helping to clean up the planet, they stated the evidence to conclude that global warming is man's fault does not exist. Using correlation to come to a conclusion has always been the wrong way to prove a theory.

Answer 7

Peiser confirmed Oreskes' findings. So did Peter Norvig in a smaller, informal survey. See the 'Consensus' section here:



http://greenhome.huddler.com/wiki/global-warming-skepticism



Or discussion of the Peiser study here:



http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptics/BPeiser.html



It's pretty amusing - Peiser was clearly trying to disprove Oreskes' findings, and instead ended up confirming them.



"Only [a] few abstracts explicitly reject or doubt the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) consensus which is why I have publicly withdrawn this point of my critique." -- Email from Benny Peiser to Media Watch



Then there's every scientific organization which has an official position on the issue (again, see link above). The only exception was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which rejected the consensus officially. Except its members disagreed with this position, voiced their opinions and/or quit the association, and so it changed its position. That's what happens when scientists don't agree with the position of the groups in which they're members. They don't just sit idly by and let the group misrepresent them.

Answer 8

People who do not follow the mob are eliminated from the total. This is how one can make base less claims like 99% of all "scientist" believe global warming.



From the data I'm collecting, I'm betting the number is actually less than 50%. Scientist say one thing in public, and other things when they are off the record.

Answer 9

Consensus is a political concept, not a scientific one.



Even if every scientist in the world, except one, says that X is true, that doesn't make it so. All it takes is that single scientist to prove that it's not true. (Ask Galileo about the value of "consensus" in science.)

Answer 10

Oreskes was debunked and her results have NEVER been duplicated.

Answer 11

absolutely nothing.