I mean they aren't scientists as in they aren't professionally practicing and educated scientists. Less than a third have Ph.D's. Fewer still hold a degree in a scientific field. Fewer still appear to actually be actively in practice. Do you think people with bachelor degrees in anthropology are scientists?
As I suspected, you didn't mean anyone who had advanced substantive training in scientific disciplines and who were knowledgeable, well read, and intellectually competent to understand the fundamental claims of AGW and critique them accordingly. You meant only a tiny cell of scientists with advanced degrees in an arcane, gnostic discipline that has come to be called "climate science" and which no one in the many other earth sciences that, together, comprise what could be called "climate science," and no one else having substantial training in core aspects of "climate science" (such as mathematics, statistics, computer science etc.) can penetrate.
This is all bosh, of course, and far, far more people are on to the game than were just ten or fifteen years ago.
and almost no one is in a field related to climatology.
Being a scientist generally, or less than that, doesn't give one much, if any expertise to discuss climate science and therefore their opinion carries little authoritative weight, which is what the petition is intended to convey.
Nonsense. Being trained in the scientific method (the theory and application of which does not vary from science to science), logical thought, close reasoning, and the intellectual processes of falsification and empirical verification through experiment and observation among multiple independent observers is all that is required to understand and critique the arguments and theories of others making theoretical claims - this and being well read and knowledgeable in the theory in question. Numerous people trained in mathematics, statistics, and computer science have, while not initially being expert in all the nuts and bolts of "climate science," been more than competent to expose the GCM's as the highly complex, highly sophisticated and wholly inadequate, vastly simplistic and empirically useless computer sims they are for the purposes for which they have been commandeered and then shown (along with thousands of revealing emails) Michael Mann to be an flat-footed scientific fraud. That didn't take any specific knowledge of "climate science," only the data, computer code, and algorithms which the "team" in England and Mann himself fought so virulently and bitterly to keep secret (along with the rest of their core data).
It is of little more value than you signing the petition. Having a masters in mechanical engineering and working on designing ventilation ducts does not, in fact, make you scientifically qualified to speak on the quality of climate system modeling.
No, it isn't, but it is also the case that climate system modeling
is not doing atmospheric science, is not doing serious empirical science, is known to be effectively useless as a predictive tool in forecasting future, or past climate, ivolve computer programs that have never been validated by sufficient runs, and, comprising literally the entire evidential basis for the DAGW claim, have thoroughly failed along a number of empirical measures to support the claims made from them, including that fact that the 20th warming predicted by all the models and by the IPCC has not, in fact, occurred. The "hot spot" pointing to anthropogenic origins does not exist, 20th century warming is well within known historical variation, All climatic shifts in known geological time involve warming leading CO2 change, and the models completely missed the end of warming in 1995, its flattening from 2000 onwards, and the substantial cooling trend from about 2002 to the present.
Every major scientific organization composed of climate-related scientific fields endorses the view that the earth is warming due human activities
Yes, but substantial portions of their membership do not, and that's the key point. What you're talking about here are the public political and grant money motivated views of the managerial and fund-raising leadership of these institutions, not the bulk of their membership, which have registered substantial displeasure with the statements of the tiny minority among them within the administrations of these organizations.
and this is by far the prevailing view among climatologists.
Bosh. This has been thoroughly debunked for upwards of a decade (if not longer). While most scientists to believe (which, of itself, means nothing scientifically) that the earth has warmed due to human activities (AGW) nothing approaching a majority has ever believed that this warming is represents a serious danger (DAGW) to human life, let alone earth's ecosystems (which have survived and thrived through numerous swings in climate far in excess of anything predicted even by the IPCC's wildest estimates) or that it represents a catastrophic threat (CAGW).
You also dodge the primary point of your own hypocrisy here: the IPCC has has never been a scientific body at all, was not conceived as such, and in all likelihood never will be, and its vaunted 2,500 "scientists" were comprised mostly of either non-scientists, social scientists, or natural scientists wholly outside "climate science" or even related fields. The total, by your own credentialist standards, who were ever competent to pronounce on climate related matters? Oh, about 60 or so, who actively supported the alarmist claims of the IPCC and who were in a credentialed position to do so (and this can be reduced, on some chapters of the original IPCC report, such as chapter 9, to 5 who supported the overall conclusions of the chapter and could reasonable be represented as "climate" scientists).
For comparison, only 30 lead authors were actually involved in the 2007 SPM, and the now notorious SPM's were never anything but political documents meant for media consumption and always written after the fact by a small cell of true believers without input from the broader scientific population of the IPCC that had amassed and analyzed the original evidence. Interestingly, the original IPCC reports themselves were not that bad, and contained a number of key statements reflecting the substantial degree of tentativeness and uncertainty endemic to the subject itself. The political ideologues and politicized (and/or governmentally bought-and-paid-for) scientists within this body, however, are the one's who wrote the SPMs, controlled the public discourse, did all the media hounding, and ignored the warnings and circumspection of many of their colleagues.
Add to this the now well exposed politicization, group-think, in-group collusion and rampant confirmation bias, substantial lack of transparency, and Benjamin Santer, to the mix, and, well, the rest is Lysenkoist history.
Almost all research published in top tier journals supports this view.
In the first case, this is flatly false, depending upon which of the many allied sub-disciplines that make up the study of climate you mean, and secondly, the reason for that state of affairs has been long exposed and critically deconstructed for what it is. I'll leave you to do your own homework on that wise.
Perhaps here you'll say, "science isn't done by consensus" again, failing to distinguish yourself from a crude bot program, and misunderstanding the point.
More than likely, its that "social" scientists, given the nature and pretensions of their interests, simply don't understand the scientific method, or aren't particularly interested in the severe limitations and disciplines it imposes on the intersection of what one can know empirically about the world and ideology.
1. CAGW (DAGW) is dead as a serious scientific theory, which is saying a great deal because it never made it, empirically speaking, out of the hypothesis stage.
False.
Its been completely discredited and falsified as a hypothesis for at least a decade, along a number of dimensions, and even as a matter of pure theory, was questionable as far back as the early 1990s. The fact of the matter is that if you wean academia off of the tens of billions of government research grants that only pay for the "right" conclusions regarding global warming and upon which numerous scientific careers are now dependent, remove the traditional apocalyptic media hysteria and the opportunities of media hounding that attract the likes of Hansen and Mann, and demand that people move away from playing extremely sophisticated computer games and go back to doing actual empirical science, the theory would be, in essence, dead. End the oceans of federal research grant money for science with policy implications, and DAGW would evaporate overnight. As its never been an empirical, observationally or experimentally based theory, but is primarily a creation of the inputs and outputs of the GCMs, this is only to be expected.
3. Science is not done by consensus.
This comment in now way addresses the fact that the petition attempts to portray a level of dissent to create significance that does not actually exist.
You used the term, which means that either you don't understand what science and the scientific method really are, don't care, or have a personal belief system that requires they be ignored for "the cause."
Do you want to defend Art Robinson's HIV denialism next?
It interesting that, while you cannot (which places you in a large and distinguished company) mount an actual scientific defense of DAGW, on empirical scientific grounds, your entire argument here, from the "consensus"
argumentum ad populum "don't question the experts" approach to your
ad hominem circumstantial attacks on Robinson are nothing but a layered series of logical fallacies.
But of course, the entire edifice of AGW has been erected on that fundamental foundation for the last 20 years, so this is all to be expected.