A new poll of scientists conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that only 59 percent of respondents think global climate change will cause “significant harm” to the “living conditions for people alive today.” That is far short of the “97 percent consensus” narrative pushed by climate alarmists and their media allies across the globe.
The survey, conducted in September and October 2022 by Fairleigh Dickinson University and commissioned by The Heartland Institute, polled only professionals and academics who held at least a bachelor’s degree in the fields of meteorology, climatology, physics, geology, and hydrology.
The key question of the survey asked: “In your judgement, what will be the overall impact of global climate change on living conditions for people alive today, across the globe?” Fifty-nine percent said “significant harm.” Thirty-nine percent said either “significant improvement,” “slight improvement,” “no change,” or “slight harm.” Two percent were not sure.
Among respondents with the most experience – those at least 50-years-old – less than half expect significant harm for people alive today. Scientists 30-years-old and younger were the only age group for which more than 60 percent expect significant harm.
For more information, and to see the poll results, click on the link below.
“….polled only professionals and academics who held at least a bachelor’s degree in the fields of meteorology, climatology, physics, geology, and hydrology…”
What about Engineering ?
Engineers understand how things work and build things of value. They have no place in climate science. They deal in facts, not beliefs.
Imagine asking an engineer if they believed the bridge was strong enough? Everyone with detail knowledge on the design would be able to explain the conditions that result in its failure on the basis it was built to specification. It does not rely on beliefs or how many you poll.
Climate change is constant and there are now clear indications that the northern hemisphere is in the early stages of the current glaciation. The rapidly rising temperature in the high northern latitudes are the first indication it is now underway.
Anybody can build a bridge that is strong enough.
It takes an engineer to build a bridge that is BARELY strong enough!
And sometimes one that isn’t quite strong enough.
Tay Bridge Disaster, stumps of some piers can still be seen.
Although the engineer cannot be blamed for the worst poem in the world commemorating the event.
Well, if you leave out “wind loading” and don’t have any inspection program to ensure the integrity of the steel components, can you really be called a “bridge engineer”?
The real reason the Thirty Something Numpties think CC will be Catastrophic…in a word…Indoctrination
There’s no evidence for it, that’s for sure.
Somebody told them to be very afraid, so they are.
Modern engineering software is able analyse resonance frequencies etc.
Engineering learns a lot from “mistakes”
“Climate science”.. not only ignores their mistakes..
… they worship them….. and build on them. !
Climate seancers don’t make mistakes 😉
In other words- climate “science” needs a reality check! Engineers get it every day. I read somewhere that when an ancient stone arch was being constructed- the architect would have to stand under the lintel being added- so if it failed, he’d be the first to know- a great way to weed out incompetents.
Nope, anybody can do it. They just don’t do it efficiently.
In the end, Engineering is about efficiency. That’s why (real) engineers aren’t asked for climate policy input. (the dipshit from stanford is not a real engineer.)
My uncle was in Iraq in WWII- with the US army which was moving weapons and supplies to Russia. He told me he saw a stone bridge and on it was a monument that said it was built by the army of Alexander the Great. It was still in use and they drove big army trucks over it.
It’s climate “scientists” who need to stay in their lane.
Energy resourcing, power generation, storage & distribution is the specialist field of engineers.
Every time one of the “celebrity” climate “scientists” makes a pronouncement about utility scale electricity requirements, they totally beclown themselves.
Good point!
The “unknowns” on the scientist side of the ledger are orders of magnitude greater than the unknowns on the engineering side.
The engineers can project fairly accurately what would be required to transition the world to a glorious Green future.
The politicians then just ignore the engineers, because there is zero chance that the world could produce enough wind, solar, and battery components to come close to achieving the utopia that the Al Gore’s of the world are envisioning.
They absolutely can, and with what materials are currently being mined with no increase, simply eliminate >90% of the global population.
The law of supply and demand. Increase supply or decrease demand.
Scientists and engineers BOTH need to stay in their lanes!
When it comes to pushing the Climate Apocalypse religion, artists and philosophers are the ne plus ultra; although small, teenage high school dropouts come highly recommended.
The fact that 59% believe that “climate change” will cause significant harm to human living conditions is a only testament to how degraded our education system has become. Not one prediction has come true over the last 40 years, but now they’re gonna get it right!?
The poll question should have been “What level of harm to human living conditions will result from the implementation of the Green Raw Deal and Not Zero policies? Anyone with a functional cerebral cortex would answer “extreme harm!”
The general rule in the MSM is that anyone, from any discipline, gets to call themselves a climate scientist when they espouse the correct opinions.
But when you dare to criticise the edicts of these jack-of all-trades then you are merely just a physicist, chemist, biologist, engineer, etcetera…
Hell, these “climate scientists” are even expert economists too, as if there ever was such a thing.
Some of us engineers have learned to uncover BS in experts claims.
While I dont doubt the validity of the poll, and as a geophysicist/geologist /physicist, I agree with the results and would have voted in accordance with the quoted results, I would like to know more about the sample size, method of selection etc.
I am sure that the results are valid but the climate paragons of Penn State U, George Mason U, and James cook U will immediately, given half a chance, holler “cherry picking Fossil fuel shills” in order to shout down or ignore the survey
On the link at the foot of the article there’s a link to the Heartland Institute. There is a 26 page PDF download which will probably answer most, if not all of your question
I believe the “PARAGONS” will immediately dismiss the survey because it was commissioned by the Heartland Institute claiming ‘Fossil Fuel Shills”. Sorry, I doubt they will even get to “Cherry Picking”
I’d like to see a breakdown of the 39%. I’d also like to see an update, aksing the question(s) that resulted in the 97% consensus. Since they aren’t these, what got debunked…
Most, maybe all, of the 97% studies are not polls. They are goofy literature analyses.
There weren’t ANY questions asked for the 97% consensus!
The original version was just data mining of article abstracts.
At least this questionnaire actually qualifies as data. (Albeit of limited utility for addressing a scientific problem.)
There was a poll many years back (at least 20). The questions were basic stuff like
Has it warmed since the end of the little ice age?
Did man play any role in this warming?
Is CO2 a greenhouse gas?
The claim was that answering yes to these questions proved that you wanted CO2 emissions to cease.
The other problem was that they e-mailed something like 11,000 surveys, but ended up including only around 77 surveys in the final total.
Looks like you’re referring to Doran-Zimmerman. IIRC there were only 2 questions and they excluded certain fields from the initial request.
Doran & Zimmerman – who at the start of their effort indicated they were going to prove Oreske’s guess in an opinion piece about the “consensus”. Activists and politicians (BHO) took the benign agreement that warming has occurred since the Ice (and humans made a contribution to the increase) and added the notion that the warming was “dangerous” and “immediate”.
There were other studies that were said to confirm the 97% scientists agree (about what?) that were equally easily debunked. E.g. John Cook et al who used “volunteers” at the very unskeptical Skeptical Science blog to review thousands of abstracts of science papers – if the abstract did not contain an outright denial of global warming the paper was considered supporting the consensus.
The bottom line is this poll and the other studies that were supposed to support the narrative are apples and oranges; they are not asking the same question!
Only a total non-scientist would think any sort of “consensus” percentage had any meaning….
So, no benefit to knowing what the most informed folks think? Mr. Watts seems to think so….
What matters is not what they think, what matters is what they can prove.
Secondly, why do you assume that just because someone is educated, that they know everything about everything?
Blob thinks he is educated..
Yet knows very little about anything !
The usual hyperbolicity. I don’t think they know “everything about everything”. But they do know more about more. If I caught cancer, I would consult several cancer specialists, as opposed to the island educated Chiropractor with a Watts Up With Cancer blog and a front office full of homeopathic fruits and nuts cures.
As for “proof”, you conveniently require a Planet B with different conditions. Got me there….
showing your true colors there bob.
stick to the oil people bad shtick rather than careening over into co2 & warming or you will lose your shill credentials
Since I’ve been Oilfield Trash* from my mid teens, pulling slips over the Sooner Trend (under age), I don’t really do “oil people bad”….
*Chill. It’s a term of endearment….
https://isotokc.com/
a good part of your comments are about the bad oil companies.
companies are made up of people.
Poor lob.. no coherent argument to put forward.. as usual.
Consensus is NOT part of real science.. so get over it !!
Stick to “social sciences” if you want consensus to mean anything.
More your level.
Doran & Zimmerman 2009 didn’t ask if climate change will cause “significant harm” to the “living conditions for people alive today.”
If those 77 respondents answered that 2009 survey honestly, they would have answered, “Yes” to the questions. It’s a wonder it wasn’t 100%. In other words, it was meaningless. But pointing that out to your average reporter is unproductive.
I want to see the result of a poll asking “Is CO2 the controller of the temperature of the Earth?”
I would like to see your poll question, with the responses broken down for scientists versus non-scientists.
I suspect the non-scientists would support the CO2 control know theory to a much greater degree.
Physics can never be determined by a ‘democratic polling’.
CO2 has never been the controller of the temperature of the Earth … that role lies with water vapour.
41% diversity. One voice, with hypothesis, observation, and experiment, would be sufficient in the scientific domain.
Einstein said essentially the same, when confronted by 100 hostile authors: “If I was wrong, one would be enough.”
Einstein, 41%+1.
Feynman, 41%+1
Science, a minority of 1.
Isn’t diversity beautiful?
OK, a change from 97% doomsday to “only” 59%. The real take-away here is what a large segment of the, at least educated, population has been brainwashed and conscripted into the Greenie nonsense.
In this arena, propaganda clearly trumps science.
(I am sure that is also true in many other scientific fields, but this is the only field that gets tens of billions of dollars of propaganda generated for the cause every year.)
I would certainly hope that all the geologists (except one, of course) were in the 41%. 59% of people with any training in science is way too high.
Which geologist is NOT in the 41%? (I am sure I am missing an obvious point.)
Naomi Oreskes.
Thanks.
I had no idea she was a geologist.
Does she know that when you run up to examine a new outcrop, that you stop BEFORE your face impacts the rocks?
The arrogance of youth we know best >60% versus the experience of age <50%?
Yup, still groupthink, just a smaller group. The challenge to climate alarmists is to describe what sort of experiment or observation would test their claim and an outcome that would falsify it. So far the predictions that they’ve made have not agreed with observations so as Prof. Feynman said, the theory is wrong.
In nearly any other field it would by many years ago be a falsified hypothesis
A cargo consensus… cult.
This is nutz.
All of those “polled” would have responded based on their view of “climate change” filtered through their information providers which project their view filtered through their information providers…
Got that?
GIGO?
Too vague and pointless IMO ‘global climate change’ can mean anything, the single most harmful climate event in history by death toll was the Yangtze–Huai River floods in 1931 that as far is known was not ‘Man-made’.
As a result ‘Man’ or more specifically the Chinese built the hydroelectric Three Gorges Dam “the world’s largest power station in terms of installed capacity” (Wiki).
It’s a Western fantasy that the pre-industrial-revolution world was somehow idyllic, it’s pathetic.
Natural disasters have always occurred and always will paraphrasing Alex Epstein: ‘ fossil fuels don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous, they take a dangerous climate and make it safe’; the same argument can be extended to all post-industrial-revolution science and engineering capabilities.
For example how the Japanese deal with two natural risks floods and earthquakes.
This is one where the French language is quite useful.
Because they have 2 quite separate and distinct words to differentiate between ‘thinking’ and ‘believing’
Do (genuinely) think about it (ponder might be the right word): because in actuality they are diametric opposites.
Especially that religious types believe and scientists think
Yet inside Anglo-American the 2 are relentlessly confused.
IOW: ‘think’ is a Weasel Word that can mean any thing to any body
How many people know that and use it as such, how many people don’t even realise what they’re even actually saying, or worse, even talking about in the first place?
e.g. I think the energy is re-emitted in all directions or I believe the energy is blah blah blah – and I leave it to you to think/believe whatever you like.
C’est la vie et bonjoor monsewer, Je sweez unn rok star.
OK. Now what do you ‘think’?
The 97% study debunked itself for anyone who read it.
This study doesn’t do a single thing for further debunking it.
Wake me up again when you have something that hits the mainstream news.
Indeed.
There NEVER WAS A BONA FIDE 97% “CONSENSUS.”
I “yelled” because this is the second time WUWT has pushed this piece of junk.
This effort does not debunk the 97% (already, by the way, soundly debunked by scores of papers — see poptech list)
it RESURRECTS it.
The summary report actually says:
Overall, 96 percent believe that global climate change, or global warming is occurring. Those aged 30 and younger (99%) are significantly more likely to believe it to be true than do those 50 years and older (88%).
Respondents who believe that climate change/global warming is occurring attribute, on average, 75 percent of that change to human activity.
Just over half (59%) say that global climate change will have a significant harm on living conditions for those a live today. Thirty percent say it will have a slight harm, and about 8 percent believe living conditions will improve or remain unchanged due to climate change.
Did anybody ask the oceans in the survey?
59% is very depressing
The 97% surveys are different. The questions are worded differently, or the data are interpreted differently, so that any ne who believes humans have some (any) effect on the climate are in the 97%. I’m in the 97%. Most of you would be too.
I’m surprised the 97% is not 99% or more. The results are spun so the 97% is assumed to be an agreement with IPCC climate predictions. Which we now know is more like 59%, not 97% and the 59% is WAY too high. That’s a 59% belief in CAGW, that has never before happened on our planet (nor has CGW ever happened).
I would have used “dangerous” rather than “significant for the questions.
The key is not “some” effect.
The key is a meaningful/measurable effect.
So, no. Nowhere NEAR 97% of honest, bona fide, scientists would agree with that.
As Tom Halla or Tom Abbott said on the other WUWT thread about this junk,
“Consensus is not science”
It would appear to me that NOTHING can decline by more than a 100%.
??
Wonderful video!
What if we did a poll of life on this planet, asking life if it prefers the current level of ambient atmospheric CO2 or did it prefer the one a century ago that was more than 100 parts per million lower?
We’d likely get at least 97% agreement from life that the level in 2022 is much better than in 1922.
And the same response when asking life about increasing CO2 even more, since the optimal level for much of life is around double the current level of CO2.
This wouldn’t be a survey about real pollution or natural resources being over consumed or environmental issues or habitat destruction from humans that are for real.
Just a poll on CO2.
Was sub 300 ppm optimal for life?
Is the current 420 ppm optimal for life?
Is 500 ppm better or worse for life?
The planet has been giving us the answer loud and clear for 4 decades now.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
https://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-co2.html
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146296/global-green-up-slows-warming
The law of photosynthesis has not be repealed!
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146296/global-green-up-slows-warming
All these polls do is measure the success or failure of the propaganda machines operating over the period.
For instance: in this Poll the younger so called scientists probably know full well that voting ‘yes’ to the question ‘Is it harmless?’ would have serious negative consequences on their career prospects. They also suffer from their recent brain washing in the educational system; the older and more established scientists being more circumspect.
From the article: “The key question of the survey asked: “In your judgement, what will be the overall impact of global climate change on living conditions for people alive today, across the globe?” Fifty-nine percent said “significant harm.”
My next question would be: “Based on what?”
There is no evidence CO2 is harmful. So, “based on what?” How did you reach this concluslion?
I don’t think the 59 percent can answer this question adequately.
Based on if I don’t agree that is causes harm, I’ll be out of a job.. harm.
There’s that. 🙂
The survey shows that 96% of respondents think that global warming is occurring, with 91% of those thinking that humans have caused >75% of the observed change.
The study also shows that 90% of the respondents think that global warming will cause at least “slight” harm to living generations (60% think it will cause significant harm), with no mention of its impacts on future generations.
I’m not sure this is a win for skeptics.
It *has* been warming for the last few decades, but that doesn’t mean it is caused by CO2. There was similar warming in the Early Twentieth Century when CO2 levels were much lower.
And those claiming 75 percent of current warming is caused by CO2 are just guessing. They have no idea what that percentage really is.
This is not a win for the promoters of CO2/Human-caused Global Warming. They still have no evidence to back up their CO2 claims. They just hope if they repeat this lie enough, then people will believe them. And they are correct.
The question should be:
What percentage of present day warming, if any, is caused by CO2?
The answers should be enlightening!
The 97% figure has allways been merely that modern global warming is mostly manmade, not also that it will be catastrophic, let alone be harmful to those who are alive today. I remember past objections to the 97% figure in WUWT claiming this is an incorrect figure for consensus of merely “mostly manmade”, sometimes with a claim of the “correct” figure being .3% or .5%. (These fraction of a percent figures are based on bad math, by counting study abstracts that say neither that global warming is mostly manmade nor is not mostly manmade along with study abstracts saying it is not mostly manmade.)