New peer reviewed paper shows only 36% of geoscientists and engineers believe in AGW

But then again, who really cares about consensus? Show me that your theory makes correct predictions and I will listen, no matter how many other “scientists” believe you.

You can’t put physical heat into water through its surface. The heat seems to be blocked by surface tension, don’t ask me how, but a hot day does not mean a warmer ocean. Thats why there is heat missing all over the place. The only energy that goes into the ocean is sun’s radiation. Quiet sun= cold planet. AGW is a shot duck.

Of course, Obama and the CNBC, CNN, ABC, BBC, and the ususal “sky is falling” hysterical alarmist media outlets will completely ignore this and rely on the repeatedly debunked, falsified and incoherant Cook paper instead. the 97% meme must not be denied by anyone in the corporatist media. Facts be damned, Climate Scientists (who make a very good living from alarmism) agree that 97% agree about carbon dioxide being a “greenhouse” gas. (and little else) and those amateurs who call themselves engineers are not real scientists. I mean what happens when an engineer does not make certain of his facts? Bridges fall down, buildings collapse, people die. When a Climate scientist is wrong, their funding could be in peril, unless they can invent a reason why them being wrong proves them to be right. (warming makes the weather drier, except when it makes it wetter, except when it makes it colder…. no warmer… no colder and wetter….no no no snowier, no dryer… etc. )
Climate “Scientists”… What a waste of carbon they are.

Reblogged this on makeaneffort and commented:
Someone sat CNN should get on the air and brief the President!

Oil workers don’t believe their work is going to harm civilization. Quelle surprise.
Next study will show that only a tiny minority of coal executives believe that coal is dirty.

Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.

numerobis says:
August 13, 2013 at 8:48 amg
So, you suggest that engineers and geologists are no less biased than what you call “coal executives?” Where does that bias come from? Is it in the training? Or maybe you think that engineers and geologists just inherit the bias? Is there anything that could cause you to reject your belief in this bias? Do you believe that you have a well rounded view of engineers or geologists? Why?

I have been aware of this article for a while now, and received comments from warming extremists about the paper. Since one of the authors is Lianne M. Lefsrud, University of Alberta, Canada, and since Alberta is oil sands territory, she poisons the study with her geographical location. Therefore, this article has no credibility with the warmists. However, it may have been this very paper that inspired Mr. Cooke to get his 97% consensus study, and he obviously markets himself better than Ms Lianne M. Lefsrud.

If you have the stomach for it, interview with mann http://www.theskepticsguide.org/

Geoscientists and engineers recognize that climatology has become contaminated by politics and near-religious fervor. That is what I suspect is behind this poll result.

numerobis, Professors are highly biased. If climate change is a scary problem, the billions in grant money will keep moving within their grasp. Besides, professors live in the world of words, where strong rhetoric and consensus is truth.

The paper is pretty interesting. It would be nice to see the same methodology used in the study of some technological experts who are not oil company employees. Of course the groupings that they arrive at are not as secure as blood types, but they are well-described and documented, I think a finding that 36% of oil company employees endorse AGW is significant. Would it be higher in academic geology departments? Would it be lower among Chinese, Russian, Brazilian or Indonesian oil company technical experts?

It’s interesting that no mention is made in this post, nor in the Forbes article, of the fact that the survey was done in Alberta, the oil sands capital of the world. So would a survey of, say, solar and wind turbine engineers that came to the opposite conclusion be regarded as valid and accepted here on WUWT? I think not, I’m sure there would be cries of survey bias and “cherry picking” respondents.

Geoscientists? To hardcore activists this will only strengthen their belief in a Big Oil conspiracy.

1077 professional engineers and geoscientists…
Engineers and geoscientists are not known for being hysterical bedwetters

Rud Istvan: The amazing result was that 36% of them still thought CAGW was a problem!
!, indeed. I don’t agree with you that their language was dreck, but I am glad that at least one other person besides myself actually read the paper. The bias of the authors was clearly stated at the outset: a study of organizational defensiveness. And still they found 36% of the respondents support AGW. That’s larger than the “nature is overwhelming” group.

Q: What do the following have in common?
2+2 = 4
F = MA
Planck’s constant
Ohm’s Law
Germ transmission of disease
E = MC squared
A: They all care not one whit how many people believe them.

Astrophysicists, strangely unconsulted about the issue, generally agree that AGW is entirely unproven and likely is nonexistent at this time, for the attributed cause, CO2.

Numerobis, a failed Egyptian architect from the 1965 French comic Asterix and Cleopatra… Do read it, is fun and you may understand the distorted logic.

Rattus Norvegicus says:

August 13, 2013 at 9:59 am
They appear to have surveyed a bunch of people employed in the oil sands industry. You were expecting something different?

Well, Dana Nuticelli works for Big Oil and you don’t see him minimizing AGW like that.
:p

Numerobis
What an itiotic statement. As a geologist I have dedicated 40+ years of my life being a professional geologist and an educator at university level. You can’t dedicate your life to something and NOT care deeply about it. But your innane statement seems to imply that a bunch of neo-socialist, ex-hippie eco-terrorists care more about the Earth than geologists and engineers. (We are related disciplines by the way: geologists provide the understanding of Earth systems and engineers figure out how we can best have a modern society within the confines of those systems).

97% of people that are paid for saying so agree that man is causing cagw

You can’t put physical heat into water through its surface. The heat seems to be blocked by surface tension, don’t ask me how, but a hot day does not mean a warmer ocean. Thats why there is heat missing all over the place. The only energy that goes into the ocean is sun’s radiation. Quiet sun= cold planet. AGW is a shot duck.
Only rarely do I read a comment that actually shocks me. This statement is, sadly, not only categorically untrue, it is the opposite of true. The first law of thermodynamics, correctly framed, states quite clearly that the only way to add or remove energy into any bounded system is through its surface. This is knows as the Law of Conservation of Energy (as well as the first law of thermodynamics). If the statement above were true, the energy content of every body of water would be a constant.
Heat is not blocked by surface tension, whether or not you are asked how. Indeed, not one thing in this paragraph is correct.
The thermodynamics of water aren’t all that difficult. Heating water from above is not terribly efficient because — as is the case with most fluids — warmer water is usually less dense than colder water (water is indeed exceptional in that it is “usually” instead of “all the time” — water achieves its greatest density at 4 degrees centigrade which is why almost the entire volume of the ocean is at 4 degrees centigrade, plus or minus a degree. This, in turn, is enormously fortunate because it is why the ocean freezes from the top down instead of the bottom up. If it froze from the bottom up, the Earth would be an unredeemable ball of ice all where at best surface lakes formed on top of the ice near the equator.
Water above the thermocline is thus typically stratified, gradually warming and becoming less dense as one rises to the surface. Heat from both sunlight and the atmosphere most definitely are transferred to the surface layer BUT as it does several things happen. One is that water has a very high latent heat of evaporation, and the heat, instead of JUST warming the surface, causes additional evaporation of the surface water and much less cooling than one might expect. The evaporative water cycle is chemically quite complicated — how likely water is to cool via surface evaporation depends on the relative humidity right over the surface as well as things like the speed of air movement across the surface and the relative temperature of the water and the air. The surface layer of the ocean is constantly warming from sunlight and contact with warmer air (when and where the air is warmer!), from falling rain (when it is warmer), from condensation at the surface, and sometimes from heat transport up from underneath (when the ocean thermally inverts so that the surface is cooler and more dense than water underneath it). It is constantly cooling from outgoing thermal radiation, from contact with cooler air (when and where the air above is cooler!), from falling rain or snow (when it is cooler!), from evaporation at the surface, and from the transport of cooler waters underneath up to the surface.
Note that every process that warms the surface can also cool it, depending on the DETAILS of the reservoir being coupled to it by physical convective transport, by latent heat, by radiation, by direct contact. Generally warmer things warm cooler things, cooler things cool warmer things and the ocean is not an exception although warmer and cooler things can also affect the RATES at which things happen and hence affect temperature indirectly in cases where many things are contributing to heating and cooling towards some state of approximate balance.
So no, that’s not why there is heat “missing” all over the place — there really is no missing heat. What there is is an inconsistency in a theoretical explanation, a discrepancy between what it naively predicted and what was observed. We cannot directly measure the total energy received by the Earth in a day or a year; at best we infer it on the basis of a few observations and a whole lot of interpolation and extrapolation. We cannot directly measure the total energy lost by the Earth in a day or a year; at best we infer it on the basis of a few observations and a whole lot of interpolation and extrapolation. We lack the data to be able to make any sort of assertion such as “there is missing heat” or to be able to positively identify where the missing heat has gone.
It has been asserted that the ocean itself has warmed a tiny — truly tiny — bit and, because it is so vast, that this warming out at the absolute limits of our ability to measure it at all is heat that was supposed to turn up in the atmosphere as increased atmospheric and surface temperatures (according to GCMs) and hence is in some sense “missing” from their predictions. But the reality is that the GCMs suck, everybody knows it, and that every year that is passing they suck worse because they unambiguously predict aggressive warming where the Earth has been essentially neutral in temperature change for almost the entire period they have tried to predict. The question then is WHY they suck.
Perhaps they suck because the ocean is buffering a real energy imbalance, reducing the rate of global warming to a tiny fraction of what has been predicted (and likely to continue to reduce it in this way into the indefinite future, as there is a whole lot of ocean and almost all of it is so cold that it would kill you in a matter of minutes if you were immersed in it thermally unprotected but able to breathe). In that case, fixing the GCMs to account for this might improve the quality of their predictions. OTOH, it could be that they suck because they are getting some part of the physics wrong and the Earth is not, in fact, in a state of energy imbalance and has not been in a state of imbalance for the last decade and a half while temperatures have been more or less stagnant. In that case one would have to fix the physics in the models in much more difficult ways. It might be both.
The problem with the ocean buffering answer is that BECAUSE the ocean is thermally stratified with the warmest water on top, thermal transport from the top to the bottom is very, very slow. We don’t try to boil water by heating it on the top because we can get the surface to boil and still have quite cold water on the bottom. If we heat from the bottom, the warmer water continually displaces the colder water on the top and all of the water mixes as it heats so that it all reaches boiling at the same time. Indeed, we achieve what is called a “rolling boil” because the heat added the bottom is actively transported to the top, released there (as latent heat of evaporation) cooling the water at the surface, which then sinks down to the bottom to be heated again in turbulent rolls.
One cannot achieve a rolling boil by heating the water at the top! Ever!
There is always SOME transport of heat and mixing within the ocean, caused by differentially moving water currents and turbulence at the boundaries between them, but this process, too, is dominant only near the surface and not so important below the thermocline. At the moment it is not clear that the observed mixing is capable of transporting as much heat as is supposedly “missing”, making this a somewhat unproven explanation. I don’t know (quite literally) how seriously to take the claims that the ocean above the thermocline is warming, given the total number of sampling buoys in ARGO as of now, their probable error and the density of their sampling, and the terribly short time that they’ve been sampling even at this probably inadequate density. The (claimed) observed warming is very, very small — hundredths of a degree Centigrade, IIRC — which is out there were I have to be very, very dubious that we are capable of resolving it from probable error and natural noise.
I don’t think I could measure the mean temperature of my own back yard, or the state of North Carolina, to a hundredth of a degree, let alone the entire ocean in depth. I don’t think that we know the “mean SST” to within a hundredth of a degree. I don’t think that we know the global surface temperature or the lower troposphere temperature (both of which are much better measured, for a much longer time) than the bulk ocean. So I have to doubt that we actually have reliable knowledge that there is additional heat built up in the ocean over the last decade, or century. That doesn’t meant that I doubt that there is — the Earth itself has been warming since the LIA, and the ocean is part of the Earth, it stands to reason that it has been warming — only that we are able to either measure that warming on a decadal time scale or attribute it to any particular anthropogenic cause.
Finally, you assert that quiet sun = cold planet, and that AGW is “dead”. You could be correct, of course, on either or both counts, but you could be incorrect as well. So why do you state this as a (presumably) proven fact? You acknowledge (and accidentally reveal) your own ignorance about thermodynamics in general and the dynamics of oceanic heat transport in particular, and then make statements that you cannot possibly prove or make more than a very tenuous argument for. It is possible that a quiet sun favors a cooler planet and an active one a warmer one, but the differences in mean insolation are really, really small between the two — they are dwarfed by the natural annual variation in insolation caused by the Earth’s elliptical orbit, they are probably dwarfed by the variations in the Earth’s albedo due to pure noise in atmospheric heat transport and cloud formation and volcanic activity. If one accepts the current line broadening, DALR varying version of CO_2 linked greenhouse gas theory (which is actually not exactly proven and not even all physicists agree with the theory itself) then it is dwarfed by the probable change in the GHE due to increased CO_2.
So far no completely convincing explanation for HOW a quiet sun might lead to a cooler planet has been forthcoming — variation of albedo due to modulation of cloud nucleating cosmic radiation is probably the best of I’ve heard so far, and has at least SOME empirical basis, but it is still far from proven and may not even be provable given our current ability to measure and observe what goes on in the atmosphere. It could also be true some other way — variation in stratospheric ozone that through several stages of intermediation and redirection modulates cloud formation or stratospheric water vapor content. Or it might be something else entirely. It might even be that no such explanation is necessary — the Earth is quite capable of cooling or warming just from minor variations in the patterns of atmospheric and oceanic heat transport. Divert the Gulf Stream so it hits Europe 500 miles further south than it does now, and it could trigger a period of explosive NH glacier growth right into the teeth of increased CO_2 even if the current GHE theory is dead accurate. Since melting freshwater sea ice and glacial ice is less dense than the salty cold water it displaces, it could even be the case that a few more years of north polar warming could TRIGGER a displacement of the oceanic “global conveyor belt” that moves heat around via a complex system of variation of salinity, temperature, and density interacting with the shapes of the continents and the slowly changing contour of the ocean floor, driven in part by coriolis forces that arise because the Earth is a spinning ball and not an inertial refrerence frame.
In other words, global warming could nonlinearly trigger a glacial era. This isn’t a completely crazy hypothesis. It is one explanation offered for the Younger Dryas — a period of abrupt cooling that interrupted the start of the Holocene interglacial for around a thousand years of return to glaciation. It is supposed that an enormous freshwater lake of glacial melt accumulated in North America, that was blocked by an glacial ice dam from the ocean. At some point the dam melted, “suddenly” dumped a small ocean’s worth of freshwater into the northern polar regions, which caused an immediate and rather long lived rearrangement of oceanic currents that favored a return to glaciation, at least until the continuing progression of the Earth’s orbit overwhelmed it.
I do not claim that this explanation is correct — we don’t really know what caused the Younger Dryas, and this is only one of several competing explanations (all of which could be incorrect — it could be something we haven’t thought of yet or do not understand yet well enough TO think of).
Ultimately, our ignorance of climate science is profound. We persist in trying to explain the variation of the climate “anomaly” — deviation from some presumed stable mean behavior that is a sort of all-things-being-equal background on which local and global climate causes proceed. That is, we linearize the hell out of our descriptions of the climate system about the present and hope that linear extrapolation works in a highly nonlinear system with a historical record of nonlinear and unexplained natural variation on a scale that dwarfs the observed anomaly.
Good luck with that.
In the meantime, it is just as incorrect to assert that AGW is definitely wrong as it is to assert that it is definitely right. It is unproven either way. There is some evidence and some reasonable arguments that suggest that humans have impacted the climate in a variety of ways (such as introducing goatherding into North Africa to creat vast deserts as they ate the plants that bound the moisture). There is some evidence that human “caused” variations are unresolvable noise compared to natural variations — that the Sahara might have formed anyway without the help of goats as moved to warmer drier times in the Holocene. It is difficult to prove either hypothesis at this time, and indeed it may NEVER be provable either way as in a chaotic system both are quite possibly true — and false — at the same time.
A sensible public course of action might be to take such small and inexpensive steps as prudence dictates that might help us cope with climate changes of ALL sorts, human caused or not, while maintaining an open mind either way on this and many other issues. Hurricane Sandy was very destructive whether or not it was “our fault”, and the measures that should be taken against future occurrences of similar storms are wise measures even if humans have nothing whatsoever to do with them (as is, IMO, probably the case). Burning of carbon to get energy is fine for now in the specific sense that it the lives saved now with certainty by bringing civilization to the (energy) impoverished outweigh the expectation value of lives lost in some indeterminate future from AGW, but it isn’t a long term sustainable base for human civilization and we would be foolish to squander it all now while we can afford to search systematically for more sustainable and ultimately cheaper alternatives so either way we should hedge our bets and work on alternatives even while not demonizing carbon for personal gain or for alternative unstated reasons such as saving this or that or attacking oil companies etc.
rgb
P.S. — LOVE the preview button. About time!

Butt Mann is creating a Global Warming Hysteria

Climate modelers and atmospheric physicists working in the climate industry may be very competent and intelligent.
But, in their climate and ENSO models they ignore the most important factors which are changes in solar activity, cycle of the oceans and tidal forcing.
They are either ignorant, very naïve or they are good at gaming the system.

“Discursive construction”.
That’s gotta be real science. Normal people don’t talk like that.

jorgekafkazar says:
August 13, 2013 at 10:29 am
——
Go back and read again. RGB was arguing what you’re arguing because somebody else upthread threw that theory out there. He was quoting somebody else, and then disputing it.
Hazard of a long comment; people often get confused about what you’re actually arguing.

This is not new, and was reported on WUWT back on February 17th. See…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/13/new-peer-reviewed-paper-shows-only-36-of-geoscientists-and-engineers-believe-in-agw/#more-91548
My response back in February was…
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/science-or-science-fiction-professionals-discursive-construction-of-climate-change/
This paper is greatly misrepresented. The thrust of Lefsrud’s paper “Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change” is that the the engineers in the oil industry are not objective enough to see the truth about global warming.
The important part of the paper, from the author’s perspective, is about “Framing experts’ identities,” where they try to figure out why these experts think the way they do. That is the type of approach that social scientists take – they want to see what makes you tick. That is why the social sciences probably should not be called sciences at all. It is easier for them to make up stories about why people think the way they do based on their “identities” and “relative positioning” rather than examining the scientific merits of their arguments. If you really think that this paper supports your (and my) view on expert opinion concerning global warming, I suggest you re-read the ”discussion and conclusion.” Here are some highlights…
“Nor is this merely a binary debate of whether climate change is ‘science or science fiction’. There are more nuanced intermediary frames that are constructed by these professionals. Indeed, by differing in their normalization and rationalization of nature, they vary in their identification with and defensiveness against others, and in their mobilization of action.”
That is, the “deniers” (the word Lefsrud uses, not me) are “rationalizing” and “defensive.”
What can be done about this defensiveness they ask? Here is their answer…
“Our findings give greater granularity in understanding which professionals are more likely to resist…an interest-based discourse coalition may be formed that has the potential to overcome the defensiveness.”
If you want to get an idea what Lefsrud is all about take a look at here CV. Here is one of my favorite entries…
Lefsrud, L.M. Graves, H. & Phillips, N. Dirty Oil, Snake Oil: The Categorical Illegitimacy of Alberta’s Oil Sands. Targeting Administrative Science Quarterly, Fall 2012.
I don’t think Lefsrud is an objective source or has much respect for us.
By the way, I like the new comment preview feature;-)
REPLY: Yep, I go a tip this AM, and didn’t remember that I’d previously covered it. My mistake. – Anthony

I’m a CAGW skeptic. But I think that this article is no good. I posted this link and received a response from a thoughtful guy, whose claims I verified. I reproduce those points below.
1. This is a survey of engineers and scientists working *in the oil industry* in Alberta Canada. Not only is it a fairly unrepresentative sample, but a deliberately biased one. The authors of the survey were interested in how working for natural resource extraction companies affected one’s views. Unsurprisingly the most hostile group towards global warming was made up of older white men in upper management positions of these oil companies.
2. Not only were many scientists not even remotely climate scientists, but a whopping 84% of respondents were engineers, not scientists at all. This included all sorts of specialties – from pipe maintenance engineers to mechanical engineers – with no special knowledge whatsoever of climate issues. It also brings to mind a list of “thousands” of scientists promoted years ago that was dominated by engineers with bachelor’s degrees. These are equivocation fallacies – one credible group is aggregated with a less credible and much larger group to create the impression that the first group
3. The “36%” number refers to the plurality of respondents who were the “most concerned” and who were fully supportive of the Kyoto Protocol. On top of them were numerous other categories of respondents who were not skeptical that global warming is happening, but expressed some other variance or reservation about it.

Consensus is irrelevant. All that matters is who is right. [Look up quasicrystals and helicobacter pylori].

Are you still regurgitating this biased study,
from the report:
To address this, we reconstruct the frames of one group of experts who have not received much attention in previous research and yet play a central role in understanding industry responses – professional experts in petroleum and related industries. Not only are we interested in the positions they take towards climate change and in the recommendations for policy development and organizational decision-making that they derive from their framings, but also in how they construct and attempt to safeguard their expert status against others.
. . .maybe you should change the title of the blog to
“New peer reviewed paper shows only 36% of geoscientists and engineers employed at the Alberta tar sands believe in AGW

***
TimTheToolMan says:
August 13, 2013 at 8:05 pm
You missed an important one.and that is downward longwave radiation which cant penetrate the ocean beyond a few microns but is absorbed right at the very surface. Hence more DLR means more evaporation with everything else being equal.
So in fact the very effect global warming enthusiasts say is warming the surface is also cooling about 70% of it through increased evaporation.
***
Evaporation is a cooling process of liquid water given a static heat input. The cooler surface water + added latent heat in the above atmosphere balances to zero. If you add heat (say from CO2 backradiation), the total energy (thin water-surface + latent water vapor heat) increases by that amount. The total has to equal the added heat — 1st Law of Thermo.
I agree that increased CO2 backradiation can’t be “stored” like increased SW solar radiation (which can penetrate the water surface significantly). This means even the long-term equilibrium for CO2 effects are very short — days at most, IMO. One wonders if this effect is properly modeled in the GCMs. If they did, the equilibrium climate response time from CO2 effects would be essentially zero. If one wants to postulate that increased CO2 increases SW radiation, they better have extraordinary evidence…

Anthony says:
From Forbes writer James Taylor:
Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.
While James Taylor (who is a Forbes contributor, not a writer – he works for Heartland) said this, it’s not what the study said.
From the authors of the study:
Dear Mr. Taylor –
….In addition, even within the confines of our non-representative data set, the interpretation that a majority of the respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of global warming is simply not correct. To the contrary: the majority believes that humans do have their hands in climate change, even if many of them believe that humans are not the only cause…..
But once again: This is not a representative survey and should not be used as such!
We trust that this clarifies our findings. Thank you again for your attention.
Best regards,
Lianne Lefsrud and Renate Meyer