Want to know who Inhofe's "400 prominent scientists" were?

Question

http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/inhofe-global-warming-deniers-47011101

"Inhofe's 400 Global Warming Deniers Debunked

List of "Scientists" Includes Economists, Amateurs, TV Weathermen and Industry Hacks

Inhofe's list includes 413 people. (Score one Inhofe; the math holds up.)

84 have either taken money from, or are connected to, fossil fuel industries, or think tanks started by those industries.

49 are retired

44 are television weathermen

20 are economists

70 have no apparent expertise in climate science

Several supposed skeptics have publicly stated that they are very concerned about global warming, and support efforts to address it. One claims he was duped into signing the list and regrets it."

OK, some are valid. But what kind of credibility do you have when your list is padded to include so many people who are not remotely "prominent" in this field?

The article has a link to a guy who took the time to research every last one. Amazing.

Answer 1

No.  Even if the entire list of 400 had credentials, they disagree with the combined membership of the following organizations:

NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

National Academy of Sciences (NAS)

State of the Canadian Cryosphere (SOCC)

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Royal Society of the United Kingdom (RS)

American Geophysical Union (AGU)

American Institute of Physics (AIP)

National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

American Meteorological Society (AMS)

Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS)

Academia Brasiliera de Ciências (Bazil)

Royal Society of Canada

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Academié des Sciences (France)

Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)

Indian National Science Academy

Accademia dei Lincei (Italy)

Science Council of Japan

Russian Academy of Sciences

Royal Society (United Kingdom)

National Academy of Sciences (United States of America)

Australian Academy of Sciences

Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts

Caribbean Academy of Sciences

Indonesian Academy of Sciences

Royal Irish Academy

Academy of Sciences Malaysia

Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The AGU alone has 50,000 members vs. Inhofe's 400 “scientists” for his minority skeptics list on his blog.  

The skeptics are outnumbered several thousand to one.  Impressive (not).

As Andrew Dessler of Grist pointed out:

"That blog provides a long list of names of people who disagree with the consensus, and I have no doubt that many on this list are indeed skeptics. The question is: does their opinion matter?"

The list plays well to people who want to cling to something to justify their position.  To people trying to make sense of the topic the desperation of Inhofe posting such a list on his blog and his failure to reference a much larger number of scientists (such as the scientific organizations listed above) is a measure of how complete, and just how important, the consensus is on this global issue.

Answer 2

Inhole's talking through his ...hole.

Answer 3

I'm not surprised. What I found even stranger when I briefly looked through the list was that not all of the people named were actually skeptical of AGW theory. For example, Inhofe included every member of Bjørn Lomborg's "Copenhagen Consensus," a group which accepted AGW theory, but was against the Kyoto Protocol. There are numerous examples of this throughout the list.

I also saw that several names were included more than once.

And, like I always say, when real scientists want to do a study like this (Oreskes, 2004), they publish their work in peer reviewed journals, not their personal Blogs.,

Answer 4

To answer some of these comments:

fredo--Inhofe is probably not an idiot... Come on he's no Bush (Bush wouldn't be the smartest one in the room if he got locked in the monkey house).

Dana1981--you have no proof of this bias from Inhofe except... well what he says and does... and votes for... um nevermind. I take it back, Dana.

Chris Hammond--retired from research is NOTHING like retired from baseball. When scientists 'retire' it is like playing golf. Most scientists I met (it's been a lot more than 2) they read, give an occasional lecture or two BUT they do not eat, breath, and most importantly publish--(as publish or perish)--edit--review (as in peer review) the latest and newest ideologies that are changing week to week. Oh yeah, where did hear that there are many television weathermen with degrees (maybe in journalism or broadcasting--but few are climatologists because that's a geographer's degree--meteorologists predict the weather and usually only TV stations in bigger markets can afford their own meteorologists). And do you really mean professional classicist:

clas·si·cist  (kls-sst) n.

1. One versed in the classics; a classical scholar.

2. An adherent of classicism.

3. An advocate of the study of ancient Greek and Latin.

I missed the debate about realclimate.org and Michael Mann Ph.D (MDs are always prefaced as Dr. but a majority of PhDs prefer not to be titled as Dr. but use the suffix PhD. --New York Times Style Book 1984 ed.)

Stevewassuu !--Clinton's fine for meeting with... come on what about Ronald Wilson Reagan? Didn't he have his 'people' meet with... what was the name of that place? OH YEAH--IRAN!  so he could buy weapons (to illegally send to Nicaragua) in exchange for the release of the hostages (hours after he took office--coincidence?)

Ken: do you think those audition tapes are used to determine the best at weather prediction or who has the bigger t*ts?

Mike420...? What are you talking about?!?!?

Mike S--You are correct BUT the discussion isn't about the where most heat comes from BUT instead if we, people and our consumption habits and manufacturing techniques can effect the climate enough to make it change...

To all--we know mankind can effect climate to a small degree (the dustbowl was a drought--cyclic drought added to bad farming practices and some other dumb stuff) so to think that MANY bad practices combined could not effect a much larger area is kinda dumb. The problem is simple: We don't for sure if it would cause one thing or another! But if the effects are bad, who's gonna pay to clean up the mess? I predict, the middle class taxpayers and third world countries. And if Bangladesh declared war on us, sending a million suicide bombers to the malls and gas stations across the country because rising waters drown them out, don't act surprised.

I won't...

Answer 5

Did you notice the name of the site. Notice the word GREEN! That means it's written with a slant. Did you know that sometimes politicians are paid, or offered favors to do and say what they do! shocking isn't it. It's also illegal for elected officials to meet with foreign leaders without permission from congress or the president. Clinton was fined for this. A lot more should be now!

Answer 6

Wow, that's an impressive amount of research.

I'm really not surprised.  Anyone who is familiar with the science behind global warming knows that the AGW theory is robust and no other theory has been conceived which can explain the observational data.  Plus we all know that Inhofe is about as biased as they come, and would not hesitate to pad his list of skeptics with inexpert names.

Answer 7

Inhofe is an idiot

Answer 8

Sounds like sour grapes Bob.

Why is it that "global warming" is the only science that is involved in the art of personal destruction?

Why is this?  I'm guessing that since you can't prove this pseudo science, you have to ruin others lives to accomplish your goals.

Answer 9

Most of your "climatologists" on realclimate.org are "scientists by training", but yet you support them.  They are being trained, they are not experts or even have any educational background in the field.  It's amazing how it is ok when they support your argument, but when they don't, it is not ok.  Pretty biased I would say.  Now go "cut and paste" some more "facts".

Yeah, I know Bob, the first 2 or 3 have degrees in Geosciences.  But much like a previous post by you, Geoscience majors are not qualified to discuss climatology:

"It's extraordinarily strange for him to not list his degrees on his resume. Presumably they're in Geology."

Your exact quote.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

I like the guy who states he has a "Dr Phil", that's just comical.

Answer 10

The biggest contibutor to the Earths warmth is...  Drumroll please.........   the sun!

I can paste articles too:   (prove the sun wrong!)

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pl...

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/06...

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/1998052...

http://www.lubbockonline.com/news/092897...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jht...

I think all scientists agree the sun is pretty darn hot, and that it contributes a lot of heat.

Answer 11

It was interesting that Inhofe released it just before a long holiday break, obviously hoping it would get some good press coverage before it could be scrutinized.  And he was successful.  The non-thinking members of the blogsphere and many small-time newspapers published it repeatedly without making even the slightest effort for any kind of journalistic analysis.

I quickly evaluated a few of the names myself (it's very time consuming) and discovered they weren't exactly "prominent scientists".  Thanks for the link.

Edit:

Chris - retired generally means not active in their former fields.  So they wouldn't be aware of most of the research discoveries over the past 10 - 20 years.

There are no educational requirements to work as a Weatherman. Send in an audition tape and if they like you they'll hire you. So classifying them as "prominent scientists" (as Inhofe did) is not exactly honest in my mind.  There are many qualified climate researchers (people with appropriate Ph.D's, years of experience in actual research, published journal articles respected by their peers, etc.), weathermen simply are not among them.

Edit 2:

Mike - these bios clearly show the qualification (education, experience and published research) of the real-climate guys to be considered Climatologists:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?cat...

Contrast this with TV weathermen and economists and it becomes pretty clear that Inhofe was spinning so much his head should have detached.