31,000 scientists sign petition denying man is responsible for global warming

[Christians4LessGvt]

Scientists sign petition denying man-made global warming

More than 31,000 scientists have signed a petition denying that man is responsible for global warming.

By Graham Tibbetts
30/05/2008

The academics, including 9,000 with PhDs, claim that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are actually beneficial for the environment.

The petition was created in 1998 by an American physicist, the late Frederick Seitz, in response to the Kyoto Protocol a year earlier.

It urged the US government to reject the treaty and said: "The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind."

It added: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of ... greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the forseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth?s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments."

The petition was reissued last year by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, an independent research group, partly in response to Al Gore's film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth.

Its president, Arthur Robinson, said: "If this many American scientists will sign this petition, you certainly can't continue to contend that there is a consensus on this subject."

One of the signatories, Frank Nuttall, a professor of medicine, said he believed the Earth was becoming warmer, despite his signature.

"This issue is whether the major reason for this is from human activities. I consider that inconclusive at the present time," he said.

A spokesman for the Royal Society, Britain?s national academy of science, said: "The world's leading climate experts at the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believe that it is greater than 90 per cent likely that human activity is responsible for most of the observed warming in recent decades. That is a pretty strong consensus."

"The science has come a long way since 1998 and it continues to point in one direction - the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avert dangerous climate change."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/2053842/Scientists-sign-petition-denying-man-made-global-warming.html

[Plane]

I don't take this any more seriously than I did Al Gore.



9,000 with PhDs in what?

The truth is discovered by small teams more often than not , then diseminated to the wider audience . Not voted into being true .

I think that the Global warming scare is overblown , and this is an overblown reaction to it.

What would it take to have real research hunting up the real facts and compile them , analise them?

[fatman]

I've seen this study discussed on another board (a hiking board, of all things!) and Plane is dead on.  The PhD's are in everything from economics to education, and a lot of the other signataries are doctors, dentists, and retail managers.

My mind is isn't made up on global warming, one way or another, but this is hogwash.

[Christians4LessGvt]

"The PhD's are in everything from economics to education,
and a lot of the other signataries are doctors, dentists, and retail managers"

i wonder if they are any less credible than a rich senator's kid that "took the initiative in creating the internet"? 

[Plane]

Being a political football is bad for the quality of this science.


Compare this with the study of fisheries , that is a disaster coming down the rails no joke , but it is not a political football so I don't feel as if it is being told to me just to manipulate my giving and voting.



BTW- thank you Fatman

[fatman]

i wonder if they are any less credible than a rich senator's kid that "took the initiative in creating the internet"? 

I see Al Gore as a mouthpiece or a spokesman for global warming, not necessarily a scientist.  If you have a petition of climatologists saying the same thing, I'll gladly read it with an open mind; like I said I'm on the fence with this issue.  It is a poor idea though, to bring a petition with people signing who have no intimate connection or knowledge of the issue to light to support your case.  I noticed that the article didn't make any mention of this, if I hadn't seen the petition discussed in another forum I wouldn't have known any better either, so it's not like I fault you for this.  This is crappy and misleading reporting at its finest.


Here's a link to the petition:  Anti Global Warming Petition

If you ever get really bored and want to see the discussion that I referenced, here's the link to thread (beware!  This sucker is 66 pages long and I don't know what pages the discussion of the petition are on, but it's interesting reading if you have the time and inclination):  NWHikers.net

[Christians4LessGvt]

i am glad to see you are at least "on the fence" and i hope all the fools and reports
that blindly support the theory of so called "global warming" and to borrow your exact words
"have no intimate connection or knowledge of the issue"
are as easily dismissed and referred to as "crappy".

[fatman]

i am glad to see you are at least "on the fence" and i hope all the fools and reports
that blindly support the theory of so called "global warming" and to borrow your exact words
"have no intimate connection or knowledge of the issue"
are as easily dismissed and referred to as "crappy".

Let me put it this way:  if my dentist talks to me about global warming, I consider that to be his opinion, and while he may be a learned man, I don't think that his education has prepared him to analyze the data and the related issue.  If a meteorologist were to talk to me about tooth decay and gingivitis, the situation would be reversed.  I've seen studies that come out on one side or another, by legitimate scientists that have connections with the issue.  The interpretations tend to vary.  I do not accept someone offering their opinion as science, though a consensus of scientific opinion usually leads to fact, or if not fact then an accepted theorem.

[Universe Prince]

I wonder how many scientists and folks with PhDs we could get to sign onto a petition that the WTC towers just had to have been imploded by bombs. Obviously the actual science would disagree with them, but if there were a lot of them, that would mean they could be correct too, right?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not on Al Gore's side here. I see no reason for alarmism or vastly restrictive environmental regulations. I'm just getting a little tired of the whole game of trying to measure who is correct by how many scientists and degreed people agree with one opinion or the other. If the average temperature of the planet is over all going up, down or staying about the same, whatever the case is, it is true regardless of how many people agree or disagree that it is happening.

[kimba1]

as I said before
what does this mean?
can we stop recycling?
can we litter in the streets now?
is it ok to dump sewage in the oceans again?
doesn`t that petition mean it`s ok to polute again?

my question would be,why do we need a global event for us to keep our streets clean
I think it`s truely sad we need laws to stop us from peeing and other stuff in the streets.

[Michael Tee]

I just had dinner tonight with my wife, her cousin and his wife.  The cousin is an engineer and a semi-retired nuclear physicist with a Ph. D. in that subject, who has supervised the installation of Canadian nuclear reactors around the world as well as all over Canada, and as it turns out, he is one of the signatories to the petition.

Although he's a very intelligent and highly educated man, with a wealth of practical experience in nuclear engineering, I still felt that he was way out of his depth in pronouncing on global warming issues.  He did mention, however, that he felt the whole global-warming issue has its roots in politics, which he traces back to Margaret Thatcher and the British national coal-miners' strike of the mid-1980s, when (he says) Thatcher convened a meeting of scientists and demanded that they find a reason why burning coal was a very bad thing to be doing (this was in anticipation of a lengthy miners' strike, when people would have to be persuaded to cut back substantially on burning coal) and suggested that a new global warming theory might be the best vehicle for conveying this message.  According to our cousin, this was the genesis of the whole global-warming movement.

I don't know if any of that is true or not, but I thought it was an interesting comment, and I offer it for what it's worth.  Our cousin says he has a video that deals in detail with this Margaret Thatcher story, and that it (the video) is also on the net, but he didn't know anything about the IP address.

[Plane]

this Margaret Thatcher story,

http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,258993,00.html


When Margaret Thatcher became UK Prime Minister in 1979, her mandate was to reduce Britain?s economic decline. Thatcher wanted to make the UK energy-independent through nuclear power ? she didn?t like her country?s reliance on coal, which politically empowered the coal miner unions, or oil, which empowered Middle Eastern states.

So Thatcher latched onto Bolin?s notion that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide warmed the planet in a harmful way, thereby providing the perfect political cover for advancing her nuclear power agenda without having to fight the miners or Arab oil states.



And the happy alarmist.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-541748/Were-doomed-40-years-global-catastrophe--theres-NOTHING-says-climate-change-expert.html

[kimba1]

doesn`t nuclear power cost more than petro based power??

[Michael Tee]

<<doesn`t nuclear power cost more than petro based power??>>

I'm not sure, I think so.  What's your point?

[kimba1]

just noticing
no matter what it`s gonna cost.
shame it`s not possible for people to make thier own power .