![HistoryOfSettledScience-big1[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/historyofsettledscience-big11.jpg?quality=83)
From the “Cooking up another 97% consensus” department and Purdue University:
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A Purdue University-led survey of nearly 700 scientists from non-climate disciplines shows that more than 90 percent believe that average global temperatures are higher than pre-1800s levels and that human activity has significantly contributed to the rise.
The study is the first to show that consensus on human-caused climate change extends beyond climate scientists to the broader scientific community, said Linda Prokopy, a professor of natural resource social science.
“Our survey indicates that an overwhelming majority of scientists across disciplines believe in anthropogenic climate change, are highly certain of these beliefs and find climate science to be credible,” Prokopy said. “Our results also suggest that scientists who are climate change skeptics are well in the minority.”
Previous studies have shown that about 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists believe in human-caused climate change, and a review of scientific literature on the existence of climate change indicated that about 97 percent of studies affirm climate change is happening.
However, no direct surveys had assessed whether the general agreement on the impact of human activities on the Earth’s climate extended to scientists in other disciplines.
Prokopy and fellow researchers conducted a 2014 survey of scientists from more than 10 non-climate disciplines at Big Ten universities to determine the relative prevalence of belief in, and skepticism of, climate change in the scientific community.
Of 698 respondents, about 94 percent said they believe average global temperatures have “generally risen” compared with pre-1800 levels, and 92 percent said they believe “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.”
CREDIT (Environmental Research Letters image/J. Stuart Carlton)
Nearly 79 percent said they “strongly agree” and about 15 percent “moderately agree” that climate science is credible. About 64 percent said climate science is a mature science compared with their own field, and about 63 percent rated climate science as “about equally trustworthy” compared to their discipline.
Disagreement about climate change is rarely a simple dispute about facts, Prokopy said. People’s interpretation of information can also be influenced by their cultural and political values, worldview, and personal identity. Prokopy’s research team found that division over climate change was linked to disagreement over science – such as the potential effects of carbon dioxide on the Earth’s climate – but also differing cultural and political values, which the survey gauged in a section of questions on respondents’ general worldviews.
While cultural values did not appear to influence scientists as much as previous studies have shown they influence the general public on a variety of issues, including climate change, the survey indicated that “when it comes to climate change, scientists are people, too,” said lead author Stuart Carlton, a former postdoctoral research assistant in Prokopy’s lab.
“While our study shows that a large majority of scientists believe in human-caused climate change, it also shows that their beliefs are influenced by the same types of things that influence the beliefs of regular people: cultural values, political ideologies and personal identity,” he said.
Prokopy said she was “quite surprised to find cultural values influencing scientists as much as they are. This shows how strong these values are and how hard they are to change.”
Respondents’ certainty in their beliefs on climate change appeared to be linked to the source of their climate information. Certainty was correlated to how much of respondents’ climate information came from scientific literature or mainstream media, Prokopy said. The more respondents relied on scientific studies for information on climate change, the greater their certainty that human activity is causing the Earth’s temperatures to rise.
“Climate literature is very compelling and convincing,” she said. “Scientists are not fabricating their data.”
Nearly 60 percent of those who believe in climate change said they were “extremely sure” and about 31 percent said they were “very sure” average global temperatures have risen. Respondents who said they believe global temperatures have fallen or remained constant were “significantly less certain” in their beliefs, Prokopy said.
Carlton said the tendency of some media to portray climate change as more controversial among scientists than it actually is could decrease people’s certainty in whether climate change is occurring and its potential causes.
“The media probably do this for good reasons: They want to give each side of a story to try to be balanced,” said Carlton, now the healthy coastal ecosystems and social science specialist at Texas Sea Grant. “However, our study shows that there is very little disagreement among climate scientists or other scientists about the existence of climate change or the quality of climate science as a discipline. There are important questions about what we should do about climate change, but those are policy controversies, not science controversies.”
The survey results did not reveal many strikingly different responses by discipline, Prokopy said, though among the fields of study represented, natural resource scientists showed the highest amount of skepticism that global temperatures have risen.
Respondents across disciplines nearly unanimously agreed that climate science is credible, but views on its maturity and trustworthiness compared with their own discipline varied. Physicists and chemists, for example, rated climate science as a highly credible discipline but gave it lower marks in trustworthiness and overall maturity compared with their own fields. Prokopy said this was “not surprising given that physics and chemistry are some of the oldest, most established scientific disciplines.”
While previous studies showed that many prominent climate science skeptics were physicists, Carlton said this survey did not show similar evidence.
“The proportion of physicists and chemists who believed in climate change was right around average.”
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The paper was published Thursday (Sept. 24) in Environmental Research Letters and is available at http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/10/9/094025.
AW: Comment:
It seems curious to me that if man-made climate change is so certain, why do some people feel the need to prove that a majority of their peers believe in it and that anyone who doesn’t is simply wrong?
I would wonder what a similar survey of scientists might have shown around 1912 when Alfred Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift. Would 90 to 97% of them say that the Earth’s crust was static? Probably so. It took another 40-50 years and new discovery in science before Wegener’s ideas became accepted as the facts as we know them today, that the Earth’s crust does in fact move in plates. But back then, scientists were so certain of their consensus, that they dismissed Wegener’s ideas:
Except for a few converts, and those like Cloos who couldn’t accept the concept but was clearly fascinated by it, the international geological community’s reaction to Wegener’s theory was militantly hostile. American geologist Frank Taylor had published a similar theory in 1910, but most of his colleagues had simply ignored it. Wegener’s more cogent and comprehensive work, however, was impossible to ignore and ignited a firestorm of rage and rancor. Moreover, most of the blistering attacks were aimed at Wegener himself, an outsider who seemed to be attacking the very foundations of geology.
Because of this abuse,Wegener could not get a professorship at any German university. Fortunately, the University of Graz in Austria was more tolerant of controversy, and in 1924 it appointed him professor of meteorology and geophysics.
In 1926 Wegener was invited to an international symposium in New York called to discuss his theory. Though he found some supporters, many speakers were sarcastic to the point of insult. Wegener said little. He just sat smoking his pipe and listening. His attitude seems to have mirrored that of Galileo who, forced to recant Copernicus’ theory that the Earth moves around the sun, is said to have murmured, “Nevertheless, it moves!”
Source: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Wegener/wegener_5.php
Sound familiar? The point here is that a perceived consensus doesn’t necessarily indicate factual certainty for any idea, and consensus in science can be overturned easily with new information.
Note: this article was updated shortly after publication to include a a URL for the source of the Wegener story
“quite surprised to find cultural values influencing scientists” just like adherence to certain political partis, grant money, believes, mass media, and ignorance influence scientists; these are all cofounders that should have been included in the “study”.
With all the credence the CAGW crowd gives the rising temperatures since the 1800’s, what is the perfect average global temperature? Where is the temperature where the annual averages never rise and fall and prove that we have “conquered” climate change? Or is this something that needs to be measured in dollars expended on the effort?
I would like to see us get back to the temperatures we had during the Minoan Warm period. Which means we gotta dump a whole lot more CO2 into the atmosphere to get those temperatures up another 3 to 5C.
Another “consensus” scientific theory in the past, believed for over 50 years, was that you could revive a victim of drowning by blowing smoke up their ass. But we shouldn’t argue with scientific consensus, should we?
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_literal_origins_of_the_phrase_dont_blow_smoke_up_my_ass
“glysters” !!!
Thanks, I needed that laugh.
Statement : “Human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures” .
I would even answer “yes” to that –but in the literal sense, which is not , I’m sure, what they meant when the question was asked.
We know for a fact that human ( GISS, etc.) activity IS “changing mean global temperature” , by constant surface temperature data manipulation and poorly maintained surface stations (thanks Anthony 🙂 .
90 percent believe that average global temperatures are higher than pre-1800s levels and that human activity has significantly contributed to the rise.
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90 percent of scientists from non-climate disciplines…have never heard of the LIA
What would we do without social science?
Here in Canada, we just had a candidate for our national government (running for the NDP, which would be left-wing Democrats in the US or Labour in the UK), and who is the board chair of a school board (god help us), who admitted that she had never heard of the Holocaust before this week.
Seriously.
She, of course, has a Masters…
I thought it was merely that she hadn’t heard of Auschwitz??
What I’ve read is:
1) someone trolled through the interwebs on a data dredge and found a 7 year old comment making light of Auschwitz
2) she apologized, then said that until this week, she hadn’t heard of the Holocaust
http://www.thespec.com/news-story/5927450-hamilton-ndp-s-alex-johnstone-didn-t-know-what-auschwitz-was/
So I’m sorry I misread “Holocaust” for “Auschwitz”, but I think we are splitting hairs here: she’s a university graduate, with a Masters, and had never heard of Auschwitz. I don’t credit her with much book learnin’ in general.
The cartoon was enjoyable, but he left out another good example :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
“Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis’s observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings. Semmelweis’s practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory and Joseph Lister, acting on the French microbiologist’s research, practiced and operated, using hygienic methods, with great success. In 1865, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum, where he died at age 47 of pyaemia, after being beaten by the guards, only 14 days after he was committed.”
Look out folks, the “consensus” mob can get really ugly.
The history of science is rife with such examples. There would have been too many panels to the cartoon if all false consensuses were included, such as the young age of the earth, immutable species, fixed continents and no giant catastrophic floods.
And what about Mendel? It took more than 40 years before his research was recognized.
Welcome to the conflationary domain. Where circumstance, correlation, inference, estimate, and consensus establish a synthesis of logical domains.
It sounds a bit like a cult.
The funniest of the claims is that 2/3rds believe that climate science is a mature science.
The other stupidity is the claim that scientists from other disciplines have an opinion that means anything.
Worst of all is that the study id vague , claiming that human activity has had a “significant” effect on climate.
They shouldhave asked whether global warming is still happening.
“Mature sciences” have theories that can actually make predictions.
BTW, We are at the Center of the visible Universe, and while I am fine that the universe could be 1,000 times bigger still (or infinite) and we could be anywhere in it, we still can’t see any of that.
In all directions, the universe is expanding away from us. Doesn’t that prove that we are at the center of the universe? /sarc
It may also prove that the rest of the universe, having got a good look at some of our scientists, is trying it’s best to get away from us.
I think most climate doubters would agree the earth is about a degree warmer than a hundred years ago and man-made CO2 is probably the cause. What climate doubters doubt is that this is anything to be concerned about.
In December 1995, the “observed” warming since 1860 was estimated at 0.55 degree C (Lean, et al, Geophysical Research Letters). I doubt that earth has warmed 0.45 degree C in the past 20 years, especially since it has not warmed at all for over 18 years.
The difference is literally man-made, invented by mad climate scientists.
So, it would be more accurate to say the world has warmed about a degree F since the end of the LIA rather than a degree C.
yep…..but first you would have to claim the LIA ended in 1850
right off the bat….they cheated
And even in 1995, there had already been unjustified “adjustments” to the “data”.
I don’t know any skeptic who believes that CO2 is the probably cause of all the warming over the last few hundred years.
That’s just all part of the slander.
When I encounter someone who says I’m denying climate, I point out how stupid that statement is, and give them another shot at it.
When they say, “Ok, I meant you deny climate change”, I tell them that I don’t, as it would be a very weird climate that didn’t change.
“Ok” they’ll drone on (and they always seem to be droning, don’t they?), “you don’t believe man is causing climate change”.
I point out that I believe the science is truly settled in that when we release sequestered CO2, we can’t help but add it to the atmosphere, which should cause some effect on climate, yes.
Of course, many are confused by the word “sequestered”, but I let that pass.
“So…what do you believe in?”, I will be asked.
I’ll point out my lukewarmist thoughts, coupled with some historic bits about proxies, how we can’t really trust them to within a few degree then add them to truly scientific sattelite readings that go to two decimals, point out that even the Sacred UN doesn’t believe their models work, etc. Standard stuff to WUWT readers.
I show them that there is a very large and continuing drop off in confidence between what the headline they’ve clicked on says, what the story actually says, what the spokesperson for the press release said actually meant (because too much journalism these days is an unpaid intern editing a press release from Big Green), all down through what the scientific paper actually said (using words like “might”, “could”, and a whole bunch of “maybes” that were not found in the article of course), and finally into the actual data, with all its caveats, asterisks and statistic torture.
Yeah, I usually use them around that first drop…
They surveyed Big 10 University employees for God’s sake and it shows that Big 10 academics believe in AGW? Wow! Call the press! If someone wants to do a real survey, they should survey Scientists/PhD’s in academia and in private industry. I work in a large corporation and I know a lot of scientists here who don’t believe in AGW but believe that CO2 will cause some rise in temperature. The way they phrase the questions can be considered proper but the way they trumpet the results will not be!
As spotty as our data actually is, and the fact warming is nowhere near estimated levels nor close to claimed dangerous levels makes such a survey speak very poorly of the state of science if this poll is legit and a true representation.
Only thirty percent of respondents believed climate models inaccurate.
Read Ben Pile – Consensus without a subject.
Damned hippies. Nixon should’ve declared an open hunting season on the nasty critters.
aw that hurts – we were just doing good dope and enjoying free love, with some great music while trying not to get gassed for protesting carpet bombing of Cambodia (instead of going to classes)
Here’s something I posted in the past. I’m reposting it because this George Mason survey asked the right questions and used the right survey techniques. I suggested in the past that it should be rerun. Why hasn’t it been? (Maybe because Pew, the sponsor, didn’t like the results.)
————–
This George Mason poll http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html surveyed 489 randomly selected members of either the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union. It did not cherry pick the respondants who gave them the answer they wanted, and it asked more sophisticated questions, below. Under its “Major Findings” are these paragraphs:
IOW, 59% doubt the “catastrophic” potential of AGW. I suspect that number would be higher now, after
six</strike seven more flat years.Thanks.
A better survey, but still with problematic methodology.
In any case, whatever warming has actually occurred or not over the past 150 years or so, it is well within normal, natural limits.
PS: Here’s RGB on that Mason survey:
Wow! Big Ten biophysical faculty were surveyed. Think about that. That’s an echo chamber right there. It sounds like the survey was taken at a badminton tea-party tailgate session. Tea, crumpets, and a little weed to go along with the dainty tea cups. A better survey would have been to see how many of these non-scientists were vaping their THC.
The survey questions are available at the IOPscience link provided above. Absent was a question similar to the following:
Qxx: What percentage of your annual funding would vanish if “climate change” were to become a non-issue?
“Climate literature is very compelling and convincing,” she said. “Scientists are not fabricating their data.”
If it all came out of models it was fabricated. Even the imperial data has been adjusted to the point of torture.
I work with ~400 hard-science PhDs, which works out to about 250 actual people. Not a one of them is, by virtue of their science, more qualified to have an opinion on the climate than the janitorial staff — for every last one of them, an entire molecule is too large-scale (usually) for them to consider, let alone a whole world’s climate. You really have to worship at the altar of Scientism (where anyone in a white lab coat is a high priest of Certainty) to care what non-climatologists believe (and I use that word with prejudice) about climate.
And Carly Fiorina leads Trump in New Hampshire.
Both are skeptics, along with most other GOP candidates.
In science, significant is the opposite of insignificant and it is quantified depending on the discipline, but in Biology and many other disciplines it is >2%. A factor is said to be non-significant if it contributes less than 2%.
I would say 97% of skeptics of AGW would readily accept that mankind is responsible for >2% of global warming, so those polls are meaningless, because clearly mankind is responsible for a significant part of global warming if the scientific meaning of significant is used.
When polls are made that ask the right question, ¿is mankind responsible for the majority of global warming?, only 66% of climatologists answer yes, with the rest saying no or we don’t know. That percentage goes down when scientists from different disciplines are polled. These numbers are typical for a dominant theory since scientists removed from the specific issue simply accept the dominant theory without taking the time to delve into the the evidence, and say nothing of said theory being right or wrong.
Anybody kind enough to tell me how to link an image?
[Reply: One easy way is to copy the link from your address bar and paste it into your comment. Make sure there’s a space before and after the link. No need for an img tag or anything else. If the link ends with .jpg, .png, or .gif, the image will appear. Otherwise, readers can click on the link. ~mod.]
“Copy image location”, then paste.
Dollars to donuts, next time I want to post an image, I will have forgotten that again.
http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/rankia/images/valoraciones/0020/7623/master.img-004.png
Source: Verheggen et al. 2014 Scientists’ Views about Attribution of Global Warming. Environ. Sci. Technol., 48 (16), pp 8963–8971.
Thanks!
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es501998e
Forgot link.
In my view the important controversy is over the degree of climate sensitivity to CO2 forcing. I get a little suspicious that the big kerfuffle over “denier” is designed to avoid acknowledging this controversy. We are supposed to leap to the conclusion that climate change means imminent catastrophe.