Can you think of any reasons why we shouldn't rely on a poll of laymen to determine the merits of quantum phys?

Your position is a reasonable one. Everyone cannot be an expert at everything. If I start having chest pains, I'm not going to ask my plumber what I should do about it, I'm going to go to the doctor. If I'm not well-versed in at least basic climate science - and most people obviously aren't - then I'm giong to listen to what climate scientists say. And the vast majority of them agree humans are causing global warming.

Bucket nailed it that deniers reject the consensus of the scientific experts through the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is a psychological effect whereby Dunning and Kruger discovered that the less a person knows about a subject, the more he overestimates his knowledge. This is why deniers who have little to no research into basic climate science think they're right and the climate scientists are all wrong.

Another method they use to arrive at this bizarre conclusion is through conspiracy theories. They convince themselves that climate scientists are perpetrating a massive hoax just to get more grant money, and for whatever reason, the 'skeptical' scientists like Roy Spencer have chosen not to reveal this fraud. This conspiracy theory is about as likely as the moon landing being faked.

As for davem's comments, again I agree with bucket that 'skeptics' are much more vocal about their positions (just see this site as an example) and thus much more likely to fill out the survey. I have little doubt that greater than 97% of climate scientists agree humans are causing global warming. Oreskes' study illustrated this, finding that less than 1% of peer-reviewed climate science papers dispute this conclusion.

As for the survey linked by Eric C, it's a red flag that it's on the Heartland Institute's website. The flaws in this survey are discussed here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008...

Noah - physics is extremely relevant to climate science. That's what it's based on. And Hansen has been researching climate science for about 40 years now. He is a climate scientist as defined in this survey. Similarly, Gavin Schmidt is a climate modeller and quite clearly a climate scientist.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004...

What a scientist researches is more relevant than what his degree is in. Take Tim Ball, who has a PhD in climatology (studied the climate of Canda) and since then has been a geographer. He is cited by deniers as a climate science expert because of his degree, but he is almost totally ignorant about the subject.

First, it's the Law of Gravity, it always works. Second, if a group of scientists only looked at one aspect of problem then yes I have every right to thing that they are twisting the results. It is the same as the anti-nuclear crowd. Fear sells and these scientists would have a lot less money if they came out with reports saying that climate change was mainly natural and there was little we can do about it. I mean how come we are just now doing any research into the effect water vapor has on climate change?

Just one thing? But there are so many to choose from! The first and foremost I choose that has no rhyme, reason, or place in my life is letting my insecurities and petty jealousies over rule my logic and emotion. It has done nothing but cause a debate and I'm tired of letting it control me. It creeps into my head and then I can't get rid of it. It is no longer acceptable.

For my part it is the fact that most who label themselves as climatologists have not training in the major disciplines that climatology is based on. Almost all who call themselves climatologists have physics degrees or law degrees, not a single one of them has a degree in meteorology which is the prime scientific discipline concerned with the atmosphere. The secondary disciplines that deal with the atmosphere are oceanography and geology because their sciences interact with atmospheric conditions. But no climatologists belong to any of these disciplines that deal with the earth sciences so it is very difficult for any who have worked with these disciplines and understand them and the scientific Research they represent to accept the word of any climatologist who makes outrageous claims about a very minor atmospheric gas that anyone who has done basic studies in these major disciplines know to be false.

This is why a historian such as myself or any educated meteorologist, oceanographer or geologist will find the claims made by those who claim to be climatologists but at the best have only a minor general physics degree unacceptable and needing scientific backing not peer review nonsense. But no scientific evidence has ever been presented that can be validated through the scientific method. And every scientist who has ever attempted to do so has joined the skeptic cause claiming there is no scientific basis for he AGW claims and so it does not rate being called a theory or hypothesis or really even a claim!

I love seeing this (poor) argument. Lets take away the vote from everyone without a political science degree.

You have presented a great argument for the resignation of James Hansen. He has no degree in climate nor meteorology.

Education:

B.A., Physics and Mathematics, 1963, University of Iowa

M.S., Astronomy, 1965, University of Iowa

Ph.D., Physics, 1967, University of Iowa

Now your are going to say a PhD in physics qualifies a person to be competent in any branch of science?

Gavin Schmidt it a mathematician, how dare he publish climate research!

davem has a pretty standard denier take on this

"It's odd that 70% of the Earth scientists who received the poll didn't see fit to respond"

It's not at all odd that most scientists would not respond to this just as they don't bother responding to claims the moon landing didn't happen or nonsense about the Bermuda triangle or Atlantis.

In fact the Oregon Petition is worse than not verified, this is about the third version, the first bordered on fraud by pretending to be from NAS, to the extent that NAS issued a statement stating it was nothing to do with them.

It was then open to anyone to put their name to, online few of the names gathered during this period have been removed unless they were obvious frauds like Geri Haliwell. It is little different today

Excellent question !

In 1904, the year before Einstein's papers. I expect 99.9% of physicists would have believed Einstein was silly/wrong. Before Kirchhoff and Boltzmann in the late 1800's 99+% of physicists would have laughed at Quantum Mechanics. Before about 1980 physicians laughed at Marshall and Warren's idea that stomach ulcers could be caused by H.pylori bacteria.

No - you should not trust a consensus of uninformed individuals, nor a consensus of experts either !! Science never produces a "proof" of anything, it merely accreted evidence until it becomes statistically improbable that alternate conclusions are correct. The scientific method has absolutely nothing to do with consensus - it is all about evidence. Anyone on either side proposing the argument that X% of experts believe Y proposition is a knuckle dragging troglodyte,incapable of understanding the scientific method

Climatology is an incredibly weak science, because they cannot perform experiments and can't even collect reliable data of the past. It's about like the state of medicine in the middle ages or the state of astronomy before the telescope, or the state of cosmology before the radio-telescope and nuclear physics.

If you are even half-aware you realize that in one decade medical science tells us that saccharine is a health risk and cyclamates are fine, the next decade it's just the opposite. One decade eggs are a fine source of protein, the next eggs contain troubling levels of cholesterol. This is due not to the inability to perform good experiments (at least on lab rats) but by the very complex systems and the huge number of variables that impact the outcome. Climatology has a similar high level of complexity, coupled with no ability to perform experiments and only weak methods for estimating the past state of the climate.

In early 2008 there was an 18% correction to the ocean/air heat transfer coefficient and a 17% correction to one of the less important humidity factors for the Hansen NASA model. No one knows how many more 18% corrections need to be made to the climate model. There is impressive ignorance about the interactions of water, temp, cloud albedo and water's GHG effect. The solar output is unpredictable, yet there are assumptions made about this in the distant past. Some sources estimate a temp about 6C above the current when CO2 was about 20 times higher than today, yet we've had glaciation periods while the CO2 is 12 times that of today. If we look beyond the short 400k year period Henson suggests his correlation evidence looks very weak.

Most important - the place where scientific theories and laws always run into trouble is where they extrapolate beyond the range of available evidence. Newtons laws of motion work well at conventional velocities, but as we near the speed of light we need Einstein. The atomic theory of matter work nicely at macroscopic scale - but we need Q-M in the very tiny scale of wavelengths of light. We have no accurate and well established evidence about the climate at higher CO2 levels - it's all extrapolation based on models than can't predict the local weather 3 days out.

Humans releasing enough CO2 to impact the atmospheric level is of great concern and we should plan to reduce this. The chicken-littles claiming to know the catastrophic climate future should be viewed in much the same way as religions nutjobs with "the end is near" signs; not provably wrong, but acting radically based on thread-thin evidence.

What a pathetic attempt to rationalise you faith.

Everyone with an advanced degree in homeopathy believes in homeopathy. Most scientists think it's a load of bunk.

Are you about to start believing in homeopathy because everyone with an advanced degree in the subject believes in it? No? Well maybe you're kidding yourself about the reasons you believe in AGW.

Also your poll is typical of the rhetoric that is used to justify AGW. There are many polls on the subject, you cherry picked the most favourable one. There were many questions in the poll, the authors of the study cherry picked the one with the most favourable response.

(edit) There are hundreds of institutions in the world offering degrees in homeopathy, there is some media coverage of a prestigious London University under a lot of pressure to drop its bachelor in homeopathy - if people from other fields want to call them quacks, then they why shouldn't they. Your argument that only people who are specialised in a field can have an informed opinion is complete and utter nonsense and you know it.

You want a better poll - ask yourself, you posted one.

How about your last link? 74% believe that there is scientific evidence that humans are having some effect on the climate? That isn't a very strong statement. I'm sure they asked questions like are humans driving the climate to which most scientific minded people would say of course not, there's no evidence to indicate that. For some reason the pollsters thought you wouldn't want to know that statistic.

No. This is a democracy. The laymen are the final answer. If a majority of people say grand unification theory is nothing more than vector addition, it must be true.

It's wise for laypersons to defer to a consensus of experts. Sadly, global warming deniers tend to exhibit a certain psychological condition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

davem's claim is likely the opposite of reality. I would think skeptics are more eager to let their fringe opinions be known, as is evident by their political activism and petition drives. Consensus scientists are less motivated to answer polls.