Please read the article. It wasn’t a poll. It has nothing to do with IPCC appointees. It was a review of the publications of 1,372 climate scientsts. The findings of the NASUSA are simply that 97-98% of the world’s climate scientists are in agreement with the IPCC’s conclusions that most of recent global warming is man-made. I’m curious, what would trigger you to act? 100% consensus?
Once again, please read the article. The materials and methods, including the selection process are explained in detail. The selection process was scientific and not political.
[quote]We compiled a database of 1,372 climate researchers and classified each researcher into two categories: convinced by the evidence (CE) for anthropogenic climate change (ACC) or unconvinced by the evidence (UE) for ACC. We defined CE researchers as those who signed statements broadly agreeing with or directly endorsing the primary tenets of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report that it is “very likely” that anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for “most” of the “unequivocal” warming of the Earth’s average global temperature in the second half of the 20th century (3). We compiled these CE researchers comprehensively from the lists of IPCC AR4 Working Group I Contributors and four prominent scientific statements endorsing the IPCC (n = 903; SI Materials and Methods). We defined UE researchers as those who have signed statements strongly dissenting from the views of the IPCC. We compiled UE names comprehensively from 12 of the most prominent statements criticizing the IPCC conclusions (n = 472; SI Materials and Methods). Only three researchers were members of both the CE and UE groups (due to their presence on both CE and UE lists) and remained in the dataset, except in calculations of the top 50, 100, and 200 researchers’ group membership.
Between December 2008 and July 2009, we collected the number of climate-relevant publications for all 1,372 researchers from Google Scholar (search terms: “author:fi-lastname climate”), as well as the number of times cited for each researcher’s four top-cited articles in any field (search term “climate” removed). Overall number of publications was not used because it was not possible to provide accurate publication counts in all cases because of similarly named researchers. We verified, however, author identity for the four top-cited papers by each author.
To examine only researchers with demonstrated climate expertise, we imposed a 20 climate-publications minimum to be considered a climate researcher, bringing the list to 908 researchers (NCE = 817; NUE = 93). Our dataset is not comprehensive of the climate community and therefore does not infer absolute numbers or proportions of all CE versus all UE researchers. We acknowledge that there are other possible and valid approaches to quantifying the level of agreement and relative credibility in the climate science community, including alternate climate researcher cutoffs, publication databases, and search terms to determine climate-relevant publications. However, we provide a useful, conservative, and reasonable approach whose qualitative results are not likely to be affected by the above assumptions. We conducted the above analyses with a climate researcher cutoff of a minimum of 10 and 40 publications, which yielded very little change in the qualitative or strong statistically significant differences between CE and UE groups. Researcher publication and citation counts in Earth Sciences have been found to be largely similar between Google Scholar and other peer-review-only citation indices such as ISI Web of Science (20). Indeed, using Google Scholar provides a more conservative estimate of expertise (e.g., higher levels of publications and more experts considered) because it archives a greater breadth of sources than other citation indices. Our climate-relevant search term does not, understandably, capture all relevant publications and exclude all nonrelevant publications in the detection and attribution of ACC, but we suggest that its generality provides a conservative estimate of expertise (i.e., higher numbers of experts) that should not differentially favor either group[/quote].
Fred, do you have any specific objections to their selection methods? If not, do you recognize the validity of their conclusion that 97-98% of the world’s active climate scientists support the basic tenets of the IPCC, i.e., that global warming is primarily caused by man?
Yes, but when it happened in the past, there were planetological and/or astronomical causes. But there aren’t any natural phenonema to explain the recent increase in temperatures other than human activities.
Many of the solutions to climate change will help solve other environmental problems. Developing cleaner, more efficient energy sources that are renewable will help reduce greenhouse gases and air, water, and soil pollution. There’s a lot of synergy across proposed solutions to various environmental issues. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that efforts to reduce carbon emissions are strongest where pollution is the worst: China. China’s efforts at greenification are outpacing those of the United States and Western Europe. Not because they love polar bears (maybe to eat?), but out of rational self-interest. Rampant pollution is literally killing them, and they’ve set aggressive carbon emission reduction goals to 1. save costs in the long run (despite short term cuts) and 2. reduce pollution. It’s a happy coincidence that their efforts will help reduce the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.
It makes sense that development provides more funds to address environmental problems. But I don’t think we can completely grow ourselves out of it. That’s not realistic, and it is a bit ironic coming from someone who constantly accuses his opponents of idealism. 
One problem is the loss of habitat in Central and South America accompanying industrialization there. The loss of broad-leafed rainforests reduces the world’s supply of oxygen and pharmaceutical materials, and increases the amount of harmful carbon. How can Brazil and other countries “grow” out of that?
The Kyoto Protocols failed because of the lack of political will. The absence of American participation doesn’t help but that’s not the whole story. You keep insisting that nothing can be done, no solution will work, etc. I don’t believe that’s true. With enough determination, anything is possible. You naysayers aren’t helping matters with your constant negativity and oppositionism. :raspberry:
Not directed at Gaobohan by the way…