Climate head count?

Question

I know it's not that important, but is there any way of doing a head count on the scientists who support AGW? I came across a list of 'sceptics' on Wikipedia once, and I heard 60 quoted somewhere. Could you do a head count of scientists in the appropriate fields, and deduct the 60, or however many there are?

Or would it just be easier to take the 98.5% of papers in support, in cojunction with the 60 sceptics. Mental arithmatic gives 4,000 'for' AGW.

What are the appropriate fields?
Any sensible comments?

Answer 1

I read on a University website not so long back that there are approx 60 million scientists in the world. I don't know where this figure comes from but it seems reasonable enough, equating as it does, to one scientist per 110 people. This figure of course, includes all scientific disciplines.

In terms of climatologists, the people who are perhaps best placed to know about AGW, the worldwide total is approx 40,000 (approx one per 160,000 people). This is my particular line of work and as far as I'm aware there are 6 who reject the theory of AGW (0.015%).

It's generally accepted within the scientific community that over 98% of scientists accept AGW and over 99% of those directly involved with AGW support the theory. These figures have been doing the rounds for some time now, I don't know their origins but no-one seems to question them.

Most all scientists are members of one or more professional bodies or scientific organisations. With the exception of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists all such bodies accept the AGW theory.

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One problem in trying to arrive at any figure is that there's no simple distinction between believer and skeptic. If drawn as a line with skeptics on the left and beleivers on the right you'd find the majority of people were right of centre but there would be very few that were at either extreme end. By their nature, scientists are skeptics and whilst I strongly beleive in AGW I am still a skeptic (in the scientific sense of the word).

Answer 2

Galileo was one against a huge consensus that said the Sun revolved around the Earth, but the consensus was wrong. Beware of politically driven consensus like the Leftist GW consensus. Too many scientists give in to political pressure in order to get money, have jobs, prestige, etc. they even lie themselves to promote a politically favoured theory.

It would be better to consider each opinion separately then organise the different opinions and decide which explanation is best upheld by the available and most definitive data. The correctness of a theory is not decided by a vote, but by how well it matches reality. Science is not a popularity contest.

Only non-scientists think numbers should determine who is right rather than provable facts. Yours is not a sensible question.

Answer 3

Sensible comment. It doesn't matter. The following paragraph describes the situation well. Nothing more is needed or useful.

Because of the data, the vast majority of all scientists know that global warming is real, and mostly caused by us. There are a very few "skeptics". Most of them do not argue that man is not causing global warming, just that it won't be as bad as most all scientists say.

"The fact that the community overwhelmingly supports the consensus is evidenced by picking up any copy of Journal of Climate or similar, any scientific program at the meetings, or simply going to talk to scientists. I challenge you, if you think there is some un-reported division, show me the hundreds of abstracts that support your view - you won't be able to. You can argue whether the consensus is correct, or what it really implies, but you can't credibly argue it doesn't exist."

NASA's Gavin Schmidt

Taganan - Galileo was well accepted by scientists, who had already accepted a solar centered system. It was ignorant "skeptics" who refused to accept science that persecuted him.

Answer 4

It's almost impossible to count noses, because most scientists don't seek publicity and don't take public positions on things.

It's much easier to count actual scientific work. For example, Madhav L Khandekar has compiled a bibliography of 68 recent peer-reviewed papers that could be considered to challenge, in some respect, the consensus view on global warming.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/files/documents/Madhav%20bibliography%20SHORT%20VERSION%20Feb%206-07.pdf
By contrast, the latest IPCC report, which represents the consensus view, contains references to 4,617 papers.
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html

By that measure, about 98.5% of the science done recently supports the consensus.

Scientific American puts the number of skeptics worldwide at perhaps 200 (out of thousands of climate scientists worldwide)
http://www.sciam.com/page.cfm?section=sidebar&articleID=0004F43C-DC1A-1C6E-84A9809EC588EF21

... and Wikipedia could find less than 40.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_global_warming_consensus

Answer 5

Many "scientists" who purport climate change is nonesense often have little training or experience in climatology. We can only take the word of the leading authority on this matter, the IPCC. Bogus boat-rockers are insignificant when looking at the bigger picture.

Answer 6

On "An Inconvient Truth" theres a part where Al Gore talks about what people actually think, try renting it to see. It gives all the proper %'s and facts

Answer 7

As usual in this world we follow Numbers rather than quality

Answer 8

The Wikipedia article you are referring to does not list all skeptical scientists, only notable skeptics. A number of notable skeptics are also left off because no quote has been found saying exactly what IPCC conclusions they reject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_global_warming_consensus.

The number of skeptical scientists is growing all the time because recent scientific papers are refuting key claims made about the theory. Before I get into that discussion, let me explain some background. The global warming theory was slow to catch on. In the 1970s, NASA scientists were concerned about global cooling. They knew about greenhouse gases like CO2 but they also knew the warming effect of increased CO2 decreased. It happens in nature a great deal and is known as a logarithmic effect. You can think of it as the "Law of Diminishing Returns" at work in nature.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/173/3992/138

You should also know that meteorologists are far less likely to believe in global warming than are climatologists. They know how difficult it is to forecast weather just a week in advance and they think it is ridiculous for climatologists to claim they can forecast climate a century in the future. There are simply too many positive and negative feedbacks and too many known unknowns and too many unknown unknowns.

Geologists are also less likely to believe in global warming. They have to study the paleoclimatology and they know how significant natural variation of climate is. To many in this group, the claims of the climatologists that greenhouse gases are causing significant climate change is completely unfounded.

Another group that is somewhat unlikely to buy into global warming is the physicists and astrophysicists group. I cannot explain why this group seems to be less likely to buy into AGW but these people seem to be among the more outspoken critics of AGW.

Many of the older meteorologists and climatologists never did buy into global warming theory. These retired (or nearly retired) academics include Hendrik Tennekes (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute), Reid Bryson (University of Wisconsin-Madison), George Kukla (Columbia University), Bob Giegengack (University of Pennsylvania), and Richard Lindzen (MIT).

Lindzen is famous for a number of advances including his hypothesis of a negative feedback in the climate system he called the "infrared iris effect." He did not initially convince many scientists but his hypothesis may have been confirmed by observations of Roy Spencer. Spencer recently published a peer-reviewed paper describing this negative feedback he observed over the tropics.
http://blog.acton.org/uploads/Spencer_07GRL.pdf
http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/08/15/important-new-paper-on-cloud-precipitation-interactions-by-roy-spencer-and-colleagues/

In agreeing with Spencer, Roger Pielke, one of the most respected and prolific climatologists on the planet, points out that the net climate feedbacks must be negative. http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/03/19/climate-feedbacks-must-be-a-negative-effect-on-the-global-average-radiative-imbalance-if-the-ipcc-conclusion-of-anthropogenic-radiative-forcings-are-correct/

Several other scientists have published peer-reviewed papers challenging the beliefs of global warming. One of these is Petr Chylek of Los Alamos National Laboratory. He published a paper showing that Greenland warming in the 1930s was faster than the 1990s. If this is true, there is no reason to believe the majority of present warming is not natural also.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006GeoRL..3311707C

This points up the quality issues with the GHCN. The surface temperature record is not reliable due to UHI effect and microsite issues. Broadcast meteorologist Anthony Watts is currently leading an all voluteer effort to document every weather station to see if it meets the minimum requirements of a quality station. So far, about half of the stations surveyed fail the test. 95% of problem sites have a warm bias. Some of them are built on top of parking lots! Watts presented his preliminary findings at cires/ucar in August 2007 and was very well received by fellow scientists..
http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/pielke/news/Workshop%20Agenda-For%20Posting-v2.pdf

Only 15% of the weather stations sited surveyed were acceptable quality (Class 1 or Class 2). You can view the slideshow Watts presented at UCAR here. See slide 92.
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/UCAR-slides/index.html

If Watts is correct that much of the warming in the temperature record is not real but is an artifact of instrumental error, then climate sensitivity to rising CO2 would necessarily be much lower than previously thought.

Because of the problems with the temperature record, Roger Pielke proposed using a different metric for measuring climate change. Some years ago, ocean heat content began to be used by both skeptics and warmers in their study of climate change.

Recently Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Laboratory published a peer-reviewed paper estimating climate sensitivity to doubling atmospheric CO2 based a combination of surface temp and ocean heat content. His estimates were far less than the IPCC and, if he is correct, show that global warming will not cause any catastrophes.
http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/pubs/HeatCapacity.pdf

The IPCC claims that 2,500 scientists helped to write and review the IPCC report. An unknown number of the scientists who worked on it are skeptics, including John Christy and Stephen McIntyre.
http://climateaudit.org

Several of the scientists publishing research contrary to AGW are new to the scene. And they are convincing other scientists. The list of skeptical scientists is growing.

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The claim Trevor makes below that only six climatologists reject AGW is clearly a ridiculous claim. Perhaps he means only six that he respects. The number of climatologists who think mankind is responsible for some warming is very large. But the group of climatologists who think AGW will be catastrophic is quickly shrinking.