Back in November, the National Registry of Environmental Professionals asked 793 of their members from 47 states some questions about global warming; its existence and causes, public policy response, and how it affects their jobs. Here’s the existence and causes section.
The existence of global warming today
- 82 percent of professionals report they think global warming is a real, measurable, climatic trend currently in effect.
- 66 percent respond that the rate at which global warming may be occurring is a serious problem facing the planet.
- 64 percent attribute certain phenomenon such as rising ocean levels, increased storm activity, severe drought, massive habitat loss, depletion of the Earth’s oxygen sinks, i.e. rain forests and ocean plankton, to the effects of global warming.
- 68 percent agree that global warming is a trend that must be addressed as soon as possible.
The causes of global warming
- 59 percent respond that current climactic activity exceeding norms calibrated by over 100 years of weather data collection can be, in large part, attributed to human activity.
- 71 percent of environmental professionals, however, do consider the recent increase in hurricane activity in the Atlantic through 2005 and the Pacific through 2006, to be part of a larger natural cycle and not, for the most part, attributable to human activity.
82% is a pretty good number for considering the idea that global warming is happening. But beyond that, you can only get about two-thirds to agree on its affects and its urgency.
But it’s the causes that really show how little consensus there is. Only 59% believe that the warming that exceeds 100-year norms is caused largely by humans. Put another way, 41% of environmental professionals either disagree or are not sure that humans are a significant contributor to warming. Thus, skepticism of it is hardly in the same league as Holocaust deniers.
The Weather Channel’s most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. This latest call to silence skeptics follows a year (2006) in which skeptics were compared to “Holocaust Deniers” and Nuremberg-style war crimes trials were advocated by several climate alarmists.
The Weather Channel’s (TWC) Heidi Cullen, who hosts the weekly global warming program “The Climate Code,” is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their “Seal of Approval” for any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe.
Further, 71% think that the heavy 2005/2006 hurricane season was generally just part of the normal, natural cycle of weather. The NOAA said that and they got targeted by environmentalists. Now, all this does not mean that a former Vice President, in the movie poster for his Oscar-nominated film, can’t try to draw a direct line between factories and hurricanes. It just means he’s bucking the consensus. [Irony alert!]
So when somebody says to you that the debate about human-induced global warming is over, just have them ask the professionals, not the politicians.
Doug Payton blogs at Considerettes.
7 users commented in " Scientific “Consensus” "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackWell it’s fine if you want to dispute the possible effects that global warming will have on the world and the exact time in which it might have those effects (the study cited, however, should be placed alongside others showing different results, and it should be kept in mind that people who really are qualified to speak with expertise on global warming are those who directly study the phenomenon and publish peer-reviewed articles and papers in that area…like the people in the 2004 study by Naomi Oreskes http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686). But really, what is the objection to working to stop the undeniable harm to the natural environment that Western ‘progress’ necessitates? “The economy?” It’s always about “the economy”. But everyone understands the ridiculousness of that argument on some level, including those who keep repeating it. The existence of slavery, for instance, which is still around in many forms today and practiced by many well-known American corporations, has the same justification…it’s good for “the economy”. It was ‘good’ for the economy to work thousands of African and Native Americans to death in mines, and to keep people in bondage on plantations harvesting cotton. Our nation was largely built on free labor, and hasn’t come that far in many ways, because it’s our corporations who hold third world peoples and children behind barbed wire working for 12+ hours for a few cents an hour. That’s disgusting and a violation of human rights, but it’s ‘good for the economy’. Everyone now pretty much agrees that economies should serve humanity in that respect at least though. Why not in every respect? Why ever put profit over people? It’s not going to be that bad to use less fuel, conserve, and work towards a sustainable world; in the long run it’s going to be good for nearly everyone, wherever they live and whatever their political persuasion happens to be. I just don’t understand what the real objection to better environmental practice is. It seems to me to have more to do with the short-terms gains of a few already-rich companies to the detriment of humanity and other living creatures of the earth. Tell me how I’m wrong here, man. I’m listening.
I’m all for looking for ways to clean up the environment. Going to all fluorescent bulbs in the house, for example, and encourage other to do so. I’m all for the market-driven push by President Bush to wean us off of oil. I think your assumptions got the better of you.
In the meantime, environmentalists from Gore on down keep trying to convince us that only nutjobs on par with Holocaust deniers think that global warming isn’t largely man-made, and always talk about scientific consensus. I was just noting that said consensus isn’t what they claim it is.
Good god…can the president do no wrong in your eyes? Do you really think he and his advisors understand the environment better than people like Al Gore? Whatever one may think of Gore as a politician, he undoubtedly understands environmental issues, especially global warming, better than Bush or quite possibly anyone in this adminstration. That’s not a partisan statement, just recognizing that Gore has been concerned with and actively involved in studying the phenomenon for decades and Bush hasn’t. In fact, Bush really can’t honestly be said to have shown much substantive understanding of scientific issues. Scientists and other intellectuals are pretty much unanimous on this point: that Bush might be the most anti-intellectual president in recent memory. I don’t see how this can be denied. He supports teaching “intelligent design”, for goodness sake. Even his own science advisor rebuked him on that.
Careful about assuming consensus there. *grin* Especially if/when it lines up with your preconceived notions.
I am quite familiar with real conservative intellectuals, and the conservative intellectual tradition. I have read some Milton Friedman and other economists, and conservative philosophers where they can be found (there are libertarians, and a libertarian research program, but no real conservative philosophy as such). My point is not that Bush is anti-intellectual in the sense that he doesn’t like the ideas of favored contemporary liberal theorists (Rawls, Dworkin, etc.); it’s that he is just against any kind of nuanced or careful thinking, and the open discussion that characterizes all vibrant and useful intellectual and scientific pursuits. He said his favorite political philosopher is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was not a philosopher, in any sense of the word ever used by anyone (and “philosophers” include diverse people like Confucius, Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Russell, Quine, Chomsky…what all these people have in common is hard to ascertain, except careful reflection). Also, the number of respected intellectuals who support things like “intelligent design” are few and far between. They exist in other fields (none of the proponents of this theory are actually trained or acknowledged experts in the field in question, which isn’t so different in the case of global warming…can you find one expert actively engaged in research on climate change who supports Bush’s understandings or policies?). It is in precisely this sense that Bush is anti-intellectual, and I think he is intentionally so (it has surely been pointed out to him that “nu-cu-lar” is the wrong pronunciation, for instance, and that creationism is not scientific…and I would guess that he personally knows this but recognizes, like so many politicians since Jimmy Carter must, the potential political usefulness of appearing simple and religious).
Also, while I of course try to be aware of my pre-conceptions and how they shape my understanding (actually I have read extensively on this very question in psychology and philosophy of science since reading Thomas Kuhn and others), I disagree in one sense that it is my “pre-conceptions” that lead me to believe what I do. In reality, my life has been made a lot harder by many of the ideas I have been convinced of, especially those regarding the environment and U.S. history and foreign policy. I don’t know why anyone would want to believe that they are contributing to destroying the earth or that their government has been one of the leading sponsors and perpetrators of international terrorism (by it’s own definition) in the world. That is awful, but in many specifiable ways it is true.
Here’s something else I alluded to earlier, but which is a really an important point when talking about scientific consensus. Science, since there is so much of it now, has branced off into disciplines and subdisciplines, with every researcher only able to have one or a few areas of expertise, many of them without even working knowledge of other fields or even subfields within their field. So when you take a poll of environmental scientists or environmental professionals, you get all sorts of people, many of whom may have no experience and/or little training in many subfields of the environmental sciences. I doubt that most of the people polled would consider themselves “experts” on global climate change. There are some of these around, though, and some effort has been made to get an idea of what their consensus is. The paper I mentioned earlier by Oreskes is one such attempt…it reviewed papers on global warming, for instance, not just people who qualify as environmental professionals.
Even if you accept the numbers you cite as representing the views of relevant experts, however, it doesn’t support current policies or really challenge most of Gore’s views as far as I am aware (I have seen Gore’s film, and thought well of it, but as a general rule I don’t get my scientific information from politicians of any sort, even former candidates who seem to have done their homework)
Thanks.
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