Do you have a degree in a scientific field?

Question

If you have a degree in a science related field, can you please tell me:
-what degree(s) you have and in what field(s)
-what your stance on global warming (ie. unsure, it's a real problem, skeptical, etc)
-summarize what made you come to your conclusion

Thanks in advance for participating in my poll!

Answer 1

Hi MeekaBee,

I think that the global climate change being brought on by the increase in average global temperatures is real, that it is being driven by human activities (i.e. the burning of fossil fuels), and that it is a real problem - although not so much an immediate problem as a future one given that the full impact of the changes will take years to become apparent.

I have reached my conclusions from years of reading/watching about it in the press (newspapers and magazines, TV news like Nightline, documentary TV like Frontline, science TV like Nova and Scientific American Frontiers), and from the scientific literature (Science News digest, and the journals Science and Nature - reading the editorials, the News and Views digest pieces, and sometimes a bit of the actual research articles). I have not seen An Inconvenient Truth.

As for my personal qualifications, I don't like to disclose such info into the wild blue yonder, but would be glad to tell you by e-mail if you drop me a line.

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Beyond what you've asked, may I make some additional comments?

You've asked a question about a politically charged issue. Frankly, I don't understand why some people are so willing to lie in order to further their side of an issue like this - it seems to me that that is an evil perversion of democracy - but if you read the Y!A Politics section, you will find that they are.

That said, I question whether several of the people who answered your poll and don't believe in the danger have misrepresented themselves. Several don't seem to write like they are scientists or even like they have had an undergraduate science education.

Additionally, and I suspect you know this, but the way science works is that there is a professor with a lab, which she/he funds via grants. The grants are reviewed by outside authorites to make sure they are worth pursueing. The work is not done by the professor, but mostly by graduate students who work 50 - 70 hours a week for no benefits and about $25,000/yr. They present their work to their professor and to informal meetings within their department. If it succeeds, they present it at scientific meetings. Eventually, if they have enough good data, they write a paper and send it to a journal, where the editors first decide whether it can be published, and then external reviewers anonymously critique the work, often asking not just for improvements in the writing, but also for more experiments. If all goes well, a paper, usually representing years of work from a highly intelligent and motivated team, comes out.

There are lots of steps where the work is publicly viewed and it is necessary to justify what was done, how it was done, and why the conclusions were reached. It is not a trivial exercise to pass all these hurdles.

So it seems a bit bizarre that someone claiming a science background mentions 'billions of dollars' changing scientists' ethics - as though the underpaid grad students are somehow building gigantic secret Swiss bank accounts out of their research.

It is also odd that someone would ask that experiments be done to verify the 'greenhouse' nature of CO2 - the essential physical chemistry on its heat adsorbing characteristics must be 50, perhaps even 100 or more, years old.

And many of the doubters in your poll clearly have not read the primary research literature, the editorials in the science journals, or the IPCC report when they say things like there is 'no consensus' among climate scientists.

On the one hand, I hope people answered your poll honestly, but then again on the other hand, if they did, and they don't seem to know what they are talking about, why are they so willfully ignorant of how science works and what the research has been showing for probably at least 20 years?

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On a different note, scientists are actually pretty careful about what they say - as you can imagine given the way their work is scrutinized - and so one thing that troubles me is what if the science has been too cautious in its estimations?

For example, the permafrost across the northern reaches of Europe, Asia and N. America is actually made up of an enormous amount of frozen organic matter. As the temperature rises, the permafrost melts, and the organic matter rots - releasing CO2. This is happening in Alaska for sure, but what if the estimates are too low? If that is the case, then the amount of CO2 released will be much greater, and this will lead to faster heating, more melting, and faster CO2 release = it is a cycle that feeds itself. I haven't seen much discussion about this, but it strikes me that there is a serious risk that the problem will get much worse much faster than we are predicting thus far.

Another possible scenario involves methane hydrates in the sea floor. These are more or less water logged crytals of methane, another greenhouse gas. It isn't precisely clear how they form, how abundant they are, or what stablizes them. Again, if they somehow destabilize en masse, as they apparently have in the past, gigantic amounts of methane could be released, accelerating the warming in a way that current models may not accurately predict. I wonder also if bubbling such huge amounts of methane through the ocean might seriously derange the food chain by affecting the lifecycles of the phytoplankton that are at the base of the pyramid? I worry, but simply haven't seen it addressed very thoroughly in the literature.

Perhaps the cautious nature of science - what Carl Sagan termed 'the skeptical protocols of science' - is actually understating these risks and it isn't just the critics who are wrong about the magnitude of global warming, but the climate researchers too?? I find this a scary thought!

I hope this isn't too much for your poll, but it got me thinking. I also hope I wasn't too negative or harsh towards the other respondents.
Good luck.

Answer 2

- BA in Mathematics.
- I am 80% sure that global warming is a very *real* and *serious* problem, and that a lot of it is human-made.
- Besides a *lot* of reading, the IPCC report was a BIG nail ... scientists don't come to agreement like that unless there is some serious evidence. The EPA report was also surprising in that it was pretty concerned, despite strong efforts by the Bush Admin. to influence, and then dismiss its findings. Yes, I also saw Gore's movie, but that wasn't the first, or the last I've heard of it.

Bottom line, while I am always skeptical of any scientific claim ... when the scientists start to agree on something, it's time to listen!

Answer 3

Apparently no one in the last 4 hours thought this poll would be of enough value to answer it.

I have 80% of a BS in physics; a BS and MS in electrical engineering and computer science. I've been reading science for 35 years since then.

It's difficult to get real evidence or even honest scientific evaluations in this emotionally and politically charged field. Here's my evaluation of what I've seen so far:

1. We are in a statistically significant warming trend, but far less than what Al Gore reports.

2. Human activity is almost certainly playing a role.

3. There is a reasonable scientific basis for projecting a continued rise of another few degrees, enough to raise sea level at most 1-2 feet, in the next 100 years or so.

4. Projections more extreme than that are based on computer simulations based on parameters that we set by guessing. They also under-represent the balancing effects of other phenomena which tend to maintain equilibrium.

5. What we know justifies some action, most of which is things which are of value to do anyway. It does not justify destroying our economies or our freedoms by submitting to world government.

Answer 4

MS and PhD in Chemistry

Natural global warming - yes
Gorebal warming - absolutely no

I've reviewed the data from all sources. While there may be a CO2 component, it is very small and not controllable. We would be better wasting our money buying rainforest to preserve it.