What is the Petition Project?
The Petition Project is presented as a list of people who do not “believe” (for want of a better word) in global warming:
We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. 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.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable 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 of the Earth.
We are also told, that “31,072 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,021 with PhDs”. That all seems to be in order, right? Well no, actually. There are some fundamental problems with the very concept behind the Petition, not to mention various other controversies surrounding it.
You can view this on the Petition Project’s website.
Appeal to Authority
The first problem with the Petition Project is that the concept behind it is a fallacy, known as an appeal to authority. The idea is that “these people are very clever, therefore they have authority which makes what they are saying worth something” (to paraphrase). When you read that there are 31,000 or so scientists who oppose global warming, you are supposed to think that because there are so many of them, and they are “scientists”, they must be right.
Presenting an argument based on how many people supposedly agree with it as evidence is flawed, but it does get worse…
Appeal to False Authority
If you look more closely at the qualifications of signers of the petition, you will see that:
The Petition Project classifies petition signers on the basis of their formal academic training, as summarized below. Scientists often pursue specialized fields of endeavor that are different from their formal education, but their underlying training can be applied to any scientific field in which they become interested.
Essentially, the majority of the signers have some kind of qualification in a scientific field, be it a Bachelor’s, Master’s or PhD. The problem is that, as science is such a vast field, you can spend your entire life studying one branch of science and still know absolutely nothing about another. For example, I am a physics student, and I can honestly say that I know nothing about medicine. I also wouldn’t expect an ecologist to understand the processes behind the formation of stars, for example.
This is precisely what the Petition Project does assume, though. If we look at the qualifications of the signers, we see that even medical doctors are eligible to sign. Take a look. Some of the more amusing backgrounds, that supposedly give these people enough special knowledge about global warming to deny its existence, include:
Mathematics – without a special interest in the climate, this is worthless in the field.
Physics – I have almost finished a Bachelor’s degree in Physics and there has been only one, optional course about “Environmental Physics”, so I can argue from experience that a degree in Physics does not necessarily equip someone with the information they may need to decry global warming.
Biology – unless there’s a large degree of specialisation of the effects of climate change on some biological variable (growth, change of ecosystems etc), this has no bearing on the subject.
Medicine – What?!
Aerospace Engineering – I happen to live with an Aeronautical Engineering student, who has had no training in any environmental subjects whatsoever.
Computer Science – see Aerospace Engineering
It is like asking celebrities what they think of the economy of Chad. They may be famous, and therefore carry some weight, but their opinions are nothing more than opinion. Asking “Dr X” what he thinks of the manufacture of steel may be all well and good, except that “Dr X” has a PhD in ancient history. He may be qualified in something, but it is misleading to assume that because he is a doctor of something, he must know everything about everything.
Controversy
In a previous incarnation of the petition, many fake names were discovered to have been added with the aim of showing the dubious methods by which the Petition Project gathered names. These have included an actor, a senator, a fictional character and a spice girl. It would appear that a number of names are duplicates, or belong to people who have died or have since changed their minds.
When the first petition was circulated to many American scientists, it contained a wad of paper claiming to be a research paper, which I would encourage you to look at. It was formatted in such a way as to resemble a paper published by the National Academy of Science (or so says my source. I have seen this claim elsewhere, also) which was misleading as the paper was not peer reviewed or even published.
The content of the paper itself is highly misleading (and, from what I’ve seen of it, quite amusing). For example, they show a graph showing a flat horizontal line, which shows that the number of hurricanes has not increased over the past however many years. This may be true, but as I have discussed, we wouldn’t expect it to. We expect the strength of the average hurricane to increase, but the number of them would stay approximately the same.
What they’ve done in this case, is argue something that was never in contention in the first place, and then use that argument to claim that their opposition are wrong.
To Sum Up
As I said before, the Petition Project is used very frequently on the internet by “climate change deniers”. I would of course encourage you to have an open mind to everything you read, but please don’t be taken in by this one. Its methodology is flawed, its motives are highly biased and its conclusions are misleading.
Michael Ashcroft is a Physics student at Imperial College London, with a passion for Environmental and Energy issues. He plans to go into a career in the Environmental and Energy fields after further study He’s also a keen musician and photographer, and writes articles on Environmental topics for his website. For more articles, please visit at http://www.howtopowertheworld.com
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