Hi combjelly; Re: "Geologists are the outlier as to causes of global warming. Chemists, who also are predominately in private industry although not as heavily weighted towards the energy industry, track with the rest of the scientific community on the human causes of global warming.";
Oh really? And by "track with the rest of the scientific community" do you mean that they are more skeptical of global warming than the general public? LOL!!!
Chemistry's Climate of Skepticism
It’s those pesky climate sceptics again, right? Well yes – but these ones read Chemistry & Industry, and are therefore likely to be chemists of some description. When the magazine ran a survey in 2007 on its readers’ attitudes to climate change, it felt compelled to admit that ‘there are still some readers who remain deeply sceptical of the role of carbon dioxide in global warming, or of the need to take action’.
The respondents who felt that ‘the industry should be doing more to help tackle climate change’ were in a clear majority of 72% – but that left 28% who didn’t. This is even more than the one in five members of the general population who, as the IPCC releases its fifth report on climate change, now seem to doubt that global warming is real.
This squares with my subjective impression, on seeing the letters pages of Chemistry World (and its predecessor) over the years. The proportion of this magazine’s readers who are climate sceptics seems rather higher than the 3% of the world’s climate scientists apparently still undecided about the causes (or reality) of global warming. A letter from 2007 complaining about ‘the enormous resources being put into the campaign to bring down carbon emissions on the debatable belief that atmospheric carbon dioxide is the main driver of climate change rather than the result of it’ is fairly representative of this subset.
Could it be that chemists are somehow more prone to climate scepticism than other scientists? I believe there is reason to think so, although I am of course aware that some of you might already be sharpening your quills.
One of the most prominent sceptics has been Jack Barrett, formerly a well-respected chemical spectroscopist at Imperial College London, UK. Barrett now runs the campaigning group Barrett Bellamy Climate with another famous sceptic, naturalist David Bellamy. Several other high-profile merchants of doubt trained as chemists, such as Nicholas Drapela (fired by Oregon State University last year) and Andrew Montford. It’s not clear if there is strong chemical expertise in the Australian climate-sceptic Lavoisier Group, but they choose to identify themselves with Lavoisier’s challenge to the mistaken ‘orthodoxy’ of phlogiston.
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rsc.org |
