Yesterday I received a petition in the mail from the so-called Petition Project. The petition actually says this:
“… 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.”
Seriously… Stop the nonsense!
The petition came with a reprint of a paper that looks like it would be from a respectable scientific publication. However, it is from the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Now, you may ask yourself, wouldn’t this be a publication that discusses new approaches to surgery, or something like that? Why would they have a paper on CO2 in the atmosphere? And who of their reviewers (presumably physicians and surgeons) is qualified to provide a peer review of such a paper? Then you look at the content of the Fall 2007 issue of the publication and you see that they discuss the connection between breast cancer and abortion (regardless of your ethical views on abortion, the National Cancer Institute says there’s no connection), liberalism as a mental disorder (perhaps an entertaining read, but unlikely to be scientific) and government spending vs. private health care (is this an economics journal?). This choice of topics of course gives you the distinct impression that you’re not looking at a scientific publication but one that’s intended to provide cover for political purposes (e.g. for people who would like to make money selling fosil fuels without taking responsibility for the environmental effects of burning those fuels).
Btw, around 2000 this same petition was circulated with a paper written in the style of a paper to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, even though it was not accepted for publication in the proceedings (of course).
What a joke! Anyway, read more here. Perhaps the only good thing: even ideologues feel that they need to use science to win arguments. Now they just need to start practicing the real thing.
Andrew Kun
5 comments
Erin says:
May 18, 2009 at 1:19 am (UTC -4)
Andrew, you didn’t actually rebut anything from the literature attached to the petition. I don’t find your blog entry here to be substantive–just accusatory.
joe says:
May 24, 2009 at 8:37 pm (UTC -4)
Andrew, thanks for your post. I’m a professor in Civil Engineering and I got the same stuff in the mail, as did many of my colleagues. The only guy who signed it was a structural engineer who has since retired. If you look at the list of names online, you will see that almost all of the signers have no relevant experience in the Earth Sciences or climatology.
Lars Hagen says:
June 7, 2009 at 10:23 am (UTC -4)
Perhaps the signatories of the global warming petitionproject have some valid views.
See the following:
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http://www.nipccreport.org/
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Sheri says:
July 13, 2009 at 5:42 pm (UTC -4)
Wow Joe am I impressed, 31,000 names and you know so many of them personally that you can say without question that “almost all have no relevant experience”. Exactly what relevant experience does Al Gore have?
Matthew says:
November 18, 2010 at 1:41 am (UTC -4)
John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at MIT are two scientists among hundreds that I’ve read and thousands that I’ve heard of who don’t believe the catastrophic global warming story being told by Al Gore and the United Nations, IPCC.
I don’t either.
For 30 years they’ve been saying that the ice caps will melt and the seas rise but every time walk down to the beach the sea levels are still there where they normally are. There’s no houses under water, no humanitarian catastrophe. Nothing.
Add to that the fact the IPCC data was admittedly tinkered with by the scientists at East Anglia University and you’d be ill advised to believe the old lie of catastrophic global warming.