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- "Settled science"? 31,072 American scientists just say NO to AGW "concensus"
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The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine - an organization poo poo’ed by AGW proponents as insignificant, ties to “big oil”… the usual mantra - has released the results of their petition drive to American scientists. 31,072 of them who reject the assertation that global warming is a crisis, or that it is caused by human activity.
The release of the list has managed to elude most MSM outlets, but can be found reported in Heartland Organization’s July 2008 newsletter, Environment & Climate News.
Tho SourceWatch has a less than complimentary review of both the OISM and it’s head, Arthur Robinson, the petition has garnered the support of credible scholars.
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.
All of the listed signers have formal educations in fields of specialization that suitably qualify them to evaluate the research data related to the petition statement. Many of the signers currently work in climatological, meteorological, atmospheric, environmental, geophysical, astronomical, and biological fields directly involved in the climate change controversy.
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Outlined below are the numbers of Petition Project signatories, subdivided by educational specialties. These have been combined, as indicated, into seven categories.
1. 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.
2. Computer and mathematical sciences includes 903 scientists trained in computer and mathematical methods. Since the human-caused global warming hypothesis rests entirely upon mathematical computer projections and not upon experimental observations, these sciences are especially important in evaluating this hypothesis.
3. Physics and aerospace sciences include 5,691 scientists trained in the fundamental physical and molecular properties of gases, liquids, and solids, which are essential to understanding the physical properties of the atmosphere and Earth.
4. Chemistry includes 4,796 scientists trained in the molecular interactions and behaviors of the substances of which the atmosphere and Earth are composed.
5. Biology and agriculture includes 2,924 scientists trained in the functional and environmental requirements of living things on the Earth.
6. Medicine includes 3,069 scientists trained in the functional and environmental requirements of human beings on the Earth.
7. Engineering and general science includes 9,992 scientists trained primarily in the many engineering specialties required to maintain modern civilization and the prosperity required for all human actions, including environmental programs.
The following outline gives a more detailed analysis of the signers’ educations.
(continue reading the qualifications here…)
The Salem-News weighed in on the petition’s progress back in June, saying:
As the Senate prepares for floor debate on global warming legislation, the list of scientist signatories to the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine’s petition against global warming alarmism is growing by about 35 signatures every day, announced OISM’s Art Robinson.
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Signatories include such luminaries as theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, MIT’s atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen and first National Academy of Sciences president Frederick Seitz. More than 40 signatories are members of the prestigious national Academy of Sciences.
The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists. As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a very large number of American scientists reject this hypothesis.
The petition was mailed out, along with a cover letter from Professor Frederick Seitz - former President of the Nat’l Academy of Sciences.
Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1951, Seitz served as president on a part-time basis for three years before assuming full-time responsibilities in 1965. Among his numerous honors and awards, Seitz received the Franklin Medal in 1965; Stanford University's Herbert Hoover Medal in 1968; the United States Department of Defense Distinguished Service Award in 1968; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Distinguished Public Service Award in 1969 and 1979; the Compton Award, the highest award of the American Institute of Physics, in 1970; and the James Madison Medal of Princeton University in 1978. Rockefeller University awarded him an honorary doctor of science degree in 1981 and the David Rockefeller Award for Extraordinary Service to The Rockefeller University in 2000. In addition to Rockefeller, 31 universities in the United States and abroad awarded him honorary degrees.
Seitz was a member of numerous scientific organizations, including the American Physical Society (president, 1961), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Society for Metals, the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum Engineers, the American Crystallographic Society, the Optical Society of America, the Washington Academy of Science and a number of European scientific academies. From 1978 to 1983 he served as vice chairman of the board of trustees of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Robinson, himself a biochemist specialist, is described by SourceWatch as an eccentric scientist who has a long history of controversial entanglements with figures on the fringe of accepted research. OISM also markets a home-schooling kit for “parents concerned about socialism in the public schools” and publishes books on how to survive nuclear war. The entire history by the site offers the usual progressive “snear” in flavor, but provides a career overview that reveals a man with a more than interesting past.
SourceWatch’s dated commentary on the petition, states:
When questioned in 1998, OISM’s Arthur Robinson admitted that only 2,100 signers of the Oregon Petition had identified themselves as physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, or meteorologists, “and of those the greatest number are physicists.” This grouping of fields concealed the fact that only a few dozen, at most, of the signatories were drawn from the core disciplines of climate science - such as meteorology, oceanography, and glaciology - and almost none were climate specialists. The names of the signers are available on the OISM’s website, but without listing any institutional affiliations or even city of residence, making it very difficult to determine their credentials or even whether they exist at all.
What a difference a decade makes, along with the AGW religion shoved down the world’s throats. A settled science and consensus? Not by a long shot. And as time marches on, the temperatures fall, the JPL’s Auru satellite measuring systems start filling in stratosphere data not previously measured, the numbers of skeptics grow.
Richard Cohen, a man not known for his conservative beliefs, asks a important question in his editorial today at The WaPo:
“Just tell me one thing Barack Obama has done that you admire,” I asked a prominent Democrat. He paused and then said that he admired Obama’s speech to the Democratic convention in 2004. I agreed. It was a hell of a speech, but it was just a speech.
We’ve heard this kind of question before and each time its quite amusing to listen as the Obamamites hem and haw. Great speaker they utter. He’s a uniter they sputter. Nevermind the man has no experience other then being a community organizer. Nevermind the poor judgement he has shown in befriending terrorists, racists, and corrupt politicos. Nevermind his oft stated beliefs that are just an inch or two away from Marxism on the political philospophy dial.
John Gibson asks the question regularly. Most recently yesterday when he got into the fact that most Obama supporters are supporting him for no other reason other then his race?
That last caller towards the end of the audio is classic. He supports Obama over Hillary because he is more informed in foreign policy! Yeah….
One thing Obama seems to hang his hat on policy wise is his opposition to the war in Iraq. Cohen tackles this subject in his editorial:
Obama argues that he himself stuck to the biggest gun of all: opposition to the war. He took that position when the war was enormously popular, the president who initiated it was even more popular and critics of both were slandered as unpatriotic. But at the time, Obama was a mere Illinois state senator, representing the (very) liberal Hyde Park area of Chicago. He either voiced his conscience or his district’s leanings or (lucky fella) both. We will never know.
And we will never know, either, how Obama might have conducted himself had he served in Congress as long as McCain has. Possibly he would have earned a reputation for furious, maybe even sanctimonious, integrity of the sort that often drove McCain’s colleagues to dark thoughts of senatorcide, but the record — scant as it is — suggests otherwise. Obama is not noted for sticking to a position or a person once that position or person becomes a political liability.
All politicians change their positions, sometimes even because they have changed their minds. McCain must have suffered excruciating whiplash from totally reversing himself on George Bush’s tax cuts. He has denounced preachers he later embraced and then, to his chagrin, has had to denounce them all over again. This plasticity has a label: pandering. McCain knows how it’s done.
But Obama has shown that in this area, youth is no handicap. He has been for and against gun control, against and for the recent domestic surveillance legislation and, in almost a single day, for a united Jerusalem under Israeli control and then, when apprised of U.S. policy and Palestinian chagrin, against it. He is an accomplished pol — a statement of both admiration and a bit of regret.
Granted, Cohen wrote about his support of McCain because of issues that most conservatives don’t support him, but when liberals like Cohen are wondering just what Obama stands for, it doesn’t bode well for the Democrat party.
Karl at Protein Wisdom has some issues with Cohens editorial, specifically some of Obama’s “experience” that he overlooks:
As previously noted here, Obama's public record is almost entirely undistinguished, so it is not as though Cohen could discover the same. Cohen might also have looked at Obama's ineffectual efforts on public school reform in the 1980s and 1990s, especially given that Obama manages to get the issue of school choice exactly backward and is clinging to the failed policies of the past in this current campaign.
Cohen could also have looked at how Obama, as an ambitious pol, was so busy plotting his ascent that projects in addition to those education plans were not given follow-through or oversight. As a "community organizer," Obama's work at a housing project called Altgeld Gardens left a potholed trail of boarded-up buildings. As a state senator, his housing policies enriched donors like Valerie Jerrett and Tony Rezko, but spawned uninhabitable slum properties and homelessness in and around his district. As a Congressional candidate, his proposed Englewood Beautification Plan left "a field of unfulfilled dreams, strewn with weeds, garbage and broken pavement." During his short tenure as a US Senator, Obama has failed to honor the pledges of assistance that he made to a Kenyan school named in his honor when he visited there amid great fanfare two years ago.
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