Global Warming Canards: Scientific Consensus -- The Senate Minority Report and the Petition Project

NOTE: This was originally posted in a VERY LONG and unreadable stand-alone blog. I have extracted it and put it in a blog of its own to imporve readability.

Up to this point I have presented plenty of evidence that there IS a scientific consensus concerning global warming, but I have not addressed jackbenimble's evidence that there isn't. His evidence is the Senate Minority Report linked to in a previous blog. jackbenimble says that it includes:

Well first of all there were 604 people on that list not "over 650" as the report claims (some names were counted twice). Second nobody "signed" that report other than Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma. He was the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works while the Republicans held power in Congress. He is now the ranking minority member of that committee. Sen. Inhofe has been very instrumental in blocking all attempts to do anything about global warming but now his power is diminished and perhaps something can be done.

What Sen. Inhofe did was collect statements out of context that appear to indicate dissention over global warming and then claim that they do. This is nothing more than the common creationist ploy of quote-mining in which the quotes do not always accurately reflect a person's intent. For instance:

Here quote puts her remarks about skepticism in context:

Dr. Simpson is not saying global warming science is bunk. She is saying that while she is not fully convinced of its accuracy but it is the best thing we have to go on AND its findings NEED to be acted on.

Inhofe's list is an update from an earlier one claiming "400 prominent scientists" dispute global warming. His quote-mining there prompted one person on that list, Meteorologist George Waldenberger to e-mail this disclaimer to Inhofe:

Guess what ... Waldenberger was never taken off the old list and he is still on the new list (see page 199 of the report). Quote-mining activities like this make me thing that if I called Sen. Inhofe a slimy puddle of elephant diarrhea, I would need to issue a formal apology to puddles of elephant diarrhea throughout the world.

Now, does that mean that no one in Inhofe's list is really a global warming denialist. Nope. There are a lot of them there. Let's take a look at one of the scientists that jackbenimble seems to be especially impressed with, Nobel Prize winner Ivar Giaever.

Dr. Giaever won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973. His research that led to the prize concerned quantum tunneling. Quantum indeterminancy predicts that a small particle like an electron may sometimes tunnel through what one might think is an impenetrable object. Dr. Giaever showed this prediction to be true. All that is very impressive science ... but it has squat to do with global warming. A person may be brilliant in one field but know next to nothing about another field. Does Giaever have any expertise in global warming. Well, let's look a little more about what he says in that speech that Inhofe neglected to quote..

I'll put down the remark about not needing to worry about warming if you are Norwegian to a sense of humor on his part. That means that Dr. Giaever doesn't believe global warming science because acid rain and the ozone hole haven't yet destroyed mankind. ... Er, ... Nobel prize or not, that is a statement from ignorance not expertise. (1) Even if the science behind acid rain and ozone depletion were wholly wrong, that says absolutely nothing about the science behind global warming. (2) The science behind acid rain and ozone WASN'T wrong. The reason those haven't had such a devastating effect is because WE DID SOMETHING ABOUT THEM. Concerning acid rain we quit using high sulfur-content coal. The sulfur given off from those power plants that used it mixed with water molecules in the air forming sulphuric acid. When we quit using that coal the problem diminished. With respect to ozone we outlawed the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's) in refrigerants and aerosol sprays. It was the chlorine from that source that rose into the troposphere and devastated the ozone there. Now that we have quit using it the problem is beginning to get better. With global warming we are INCREASING not decreasing our carbon emissions. Dr. Giaever probably should know better but scientists (even great ones) are no different from regular people. They can certainly talk about things they don't know much about.

A close look at the more than 650 ... er 604 scientists on that list shows that while there are a surprising number of TV weathermen, there is a sparsity of actual climatologists. And even less who publish ... of course this is to be expected from Orestes study (mentioned in an earlier blog) of the scientific literature on global warming. In short there are very few people on that report with ANY real expertise on global warming. Inhofe's report cannot be taken as any indication of what the scientific consensus is.

I suppose I should comment on the "Petition Project" mentioned by jackbenimble. Here is a link to the project. It claims to have 31,072 American scientists of which of which 9,021 have Ph.D.'s. Here is the statement that they signed:

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth's atmosphere and disruption of the earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the earth[/quote]

So if I am understanding this correctly... CO₂ is not only NOT bad, it is good. .... Why hell -- let's go and burn down forests so we can up its atmospheric concentration to a 1000 parts per million. We'll be better off for it.

This is so ... STUPID ... I am not surprised I had never heard of it before. But let's look at it anyway.

While having a Ph.D. is not a requirement to be a scientist, the vast, vast majority of scientists do have Ph.D.'s. Yet, less than 1/3 of the "scientists" signing this petition have them. Of those that do how many are climatologists? According to the website there are 3697 "scientists" who are Atmosphere, Earth, and Environmental scientists. A further breakdown in that category claims that 40 have expertise in climatology. And just who are these "scientists"?

It turns out this petition has been circulating for 10 years. When it first came out notable signees included John Grisham, Perry Mason, Anne Frank, and Spice Girl Geri Halliway, Ph.D. These signatures were hoaxes of course (although Perry Mason and Anne Frank remain on the list). Initially accompanying the petition was a reprint of PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCE USA (PNAS) paper touting the benefits of extra CO₂ in the atmosphere. The problem there is that the PNAS never published such a paper. It was a forgery. There are so many things wrong with this "petition" that it is really not worth considering; it has no credibility what-so-ever.

This ends my series of blogs concerning a scientific consensus on global warming. Where does it leave us? There is a VERY STRONG CONSENSUS that anthropogenic global warming is occurring, that it is potentially devastating, and carbon emissions from human activity is by far the main cause. While there are certainly SOME scientists who do not believe it (and some of them are climatologists), these scientists have done no publishable research that goes against the consensus opinion. That is about as strong of a consensus as anyone should expect to get on almost anything. This does not mean that the science is ruled by consensus. No science is. The importance of a scientific consensus is for those people who either do not have the time, the skill, or the inclination to look at the REAL data. These people must rely on the opiinion of others, and whose opinion should they rely on? There is none better than the consensus opinion of the scientists in the field.