Sorry for the late reply.
"More than 31,000 scientists have signed a petition denying that man is responsible for global warming."
That list of 31,000+ "scientists" is the one I was thinking of when I wrote this:
"I haven't done a survey of the credentials on each side, but every time I have looked into these claims of thousands of scientists saying it's bunk, I have found the claims for their credentials to be inflated."
I suggest you take a close look at the Web site below, which publishes that petition, and ask yourself if that's really a scientifically valid way to assess the validity of a theory. Ask yourself whether you would accept a petition from the other side if they came up one using similar methods.
petitionproject.org
From that site:
"Signatories are approved for inclusion in the Petition Project list if they have obtained formal educational degrees at the level of Bachelor of Science or higher in appropriate scientific fields. The petition has been circulated only in the United States.
"The current list of 31,072 petition signers includes 9,021 PhD; 6,961 MS; 2,240 MD and DVM; and 12,850 BS or equivalent academic degrees. Most of the MD and DVM signers also have underlying degrees in basic science."
petitionproject.org
So it's actually 31,000 holders of technical and scientific degrees, not 31,000 scientists. And they don't say what percentage of all holders of such degrees that represents. That is a fatal flaw in the argument right there.
Here's another interesting excerpt:
"Atmospheric, environmental, and Earth sciences includes 3,697 scientists trained in specialties directly related to the physical environment of the Earth and the past and current phenomena that affect that environment."
So they padded their numbers by more than a factor of eight with other disciplines.
In determining what the scientific consensus is, what you need to know is not the number of scientists on one side; what you need to know is the number of scientists on both sides, so you can calculate the percentages on each side. And you need some way of determining whether the signatories have done a sufficiently detailed examination of the peer reviewed literature on the subject.
In order to be credible, it needs to be an impartially-conducted survey of scientists who are sufficiently familiar with the evidence, not a petition that deliberately selects scientific and technical degree-holders who adhere to a particular point of view. |
