Talk:Surveys of scientists' views on climate change

Article should not have been split off

This is basically a list type article where I guess notability is inferred because it includes a number of notable surveys. However notability of a collection of different such surveys has not been established. I would not have too much of a problem with that except I can see no reason it was split out of scientific opinion on climate change. That is a fairly complete article and not too long dealing pretty well with its topic I believe and has had quite extensive attention by a number of editors. So what is the point of splitting this out where it doesn't really form a topic on its own? Dmcq (talk) 23:08, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

As part of making logical, non POV fork divisions of content on climate change debate articles. The parent article is itself list-like, and a collection of lists of different types. Itsmejudith (talk) 23:13, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

It has some sections which are list like. That doesn't mean they should be removed. Those lists have no real meaning except in the context of the topic of that article. There is no point splitting up articles like that unless they become too long. Anyway I thought you said you wanted less articles and here you are setting up an unnecessary list type article. This article does not have a notable topic. Scientific opinion of climate change has a well documented and notable topic. Why set up articles that have no real meaning in themselves if you don't need to? Dmcq (talk) 23:20, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

To my eye, the reasons for splitting this article off are that (a) most of these surveys are so old, and (b) most of the discussion of the other surveys is so obscure, that neither of these is relevant in an article called Scientific opinion on climate change. On the other hand, there may be editors here who are so attached to the results in the time-expired surveys, or to the arcana of challenge and counter-challenge about the others, that they would want it preserved. The other article is not called History of scientific opinion on climate change or Quibbles over scientific opinion on climate change, and so is greatly improved by the removals (and the better prose presentation of what's left). What remains is to decide of the fate of this material. If it is actually generally uninteresting, then the next step may be AfD for this article. I can envisage no good argument that the material is too obscure to be presented here, yet it should be dumped into another article to whose central topic it adds nothing. --Nigelj (talk) 16:51, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Results of many of these surveys may not be fairly presented

Please see this discussion for possible misuse of some of these survey results. We may also need to restate the results here, to present a more nuanced picture of the actual responses. Thanks, Pete Tillman (talk) 01:46, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

This discuusion continues at this talk page, at "Continued problem with the "97%" surveys". Thanks, Pete Tillman (talk) 22:00, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

New bar-chart for surveys

There's a new chart being proposed for this topic. It's under discussion at New bar chart. Hope to see you there , Pete Tillman (talk) 20:39, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Blog link

I just reverted a link to 'Watts Up With That' that was introduced as a 'thorough debunking' of the Doran paper. First, peer reviewed papers are not 'thoroughly debunked' in blog posts, but in other peer reviewed papers, that are then themselves well received by the academic community and cited by many. Second, I don't know who Barry Woods is, but if his views have changed those of mainstream climate science since he wrote this 'guest post' in July, then I would expect him to have received widespread media and scientific coverage over the months. In the absence of either or both of those, I assume it was just blogspam. --Nigelj (talk) 17:52, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change

I just reverted the addition of a section based on a paper with the above name.[1] The reason is that this paper clearly states in its abstract that it was designed to "contribute to the understanding of ‘defensive institutional work’ by professionals within petroleum companies, related industries, government regulators, and their professional association." However, the addition to this article said it was "a survey of 1,077 professional engineers and geoscientists", and presented a summary of the results as if a randomly selected group of professional engineers had simply given their opinions. The contributor seems to have failed to understand that the survey specifically chose people whose career depended on their employer continuing to contribute to climate change, and was designed to find out more about how they dealt with that, how they justified it to themselves, and "their legitimation of themselves". This is not a general survey of any scientists' views on climate change, and should not be in this article without a lot of discussion as to how it is relevant. Such discussion of psychological and organisational defensive strategies cannot come from us, as that would be serious WP:OR, and I see that the paper appears only to be cited by one, so it is unlikely to be found in the general academic literature at this time. --Nigelj (talk) 20:40, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

The authors discuss this point in their blog, so I'll edit the section to make it clear what the point of the study was. It's amazing how often it's quoted as "proof" that "scientists don't believe in AGW" by folks who clearly haven't even read the freely available abstract. [2] Doesn't anybody do their homework anymore? Gzuckier (talk) 07:30, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

I think that was a good try. The remaining problem was that, by the time all that was addressed, this had become by far the longest section in the article. I have attempted to reduce this length per WP:WEIGHT. I think it is still too long considering that this is not a representative sample, and this is not a general survey of scientists' views on climate change. Nonetheless, I have tried to reduce to summary form most of the detailed findings and add a little more context and balance. Considering the narrow focus of this survey, and the large amount of extra weight that it appears to take to explain and place it in context, I still question whether it belongs in this article. --Nigelj (talk) 09:44, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature

A new survey here, which should probably be mentioned.[3] AIRcorn (talk) 03:34, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Glenn Tamblyn (talk) 10:32, 9 August 2013 (UTC) This study has been cited on the main Global Warming page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming which links to here. For consistency it should be included here as well. For transparency, although I am not one of the authors of the study, I was one of the 24 crowd-sourced people who carried out the ratings for the study. I will leave it to others to add this reference if considered appropriate.