An interesting ‘survey’ was posted on a TV meteorology bulletin board I frequent. It concerns Global Warming, and it’s pretty self explanatory.
- Global Warming is caused primarily by humans and is a very serious threat for the future of humanity. 4% (3)
- Global Warming is caused primarily by humans, but we will successfully deal with it. 3% (2)
- Global Warming is caused by both humans and natural cycles. 15% (11)
- Global Warming is caused primarily by natural cycles, although humans are probably contributing. 55% (39)
- Global Warming is part of natural weather cycles. 11% (8)
- Global Warming is not really happening, but is an artifact of local climate changes (urban effects), changes in instrumentation, and natural cycles. 11% (8)
This is non-scientific. I’m not even sure if all the participants are meteorologists – though the vast majority surely are. It certainly goes against the scientific consensus while conforming to exactly the result I expected.
Operational meteorologists, the people who forecast every day, remain skeptical about Global Warming.
Are you surprised?
There’s a similar (and probably related) pattern in politics that correlates education level and voting tendencies:
In the last 2 Presidential elections college graduates and people with some college education voted Republican over Democrat by a margin of 6 percent in 2000, with a slightly larger margin in 2004 of 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively. While people with a post graduate education voted Democrat over Republican by a margin of 8 percent in 2000 and 11 percent in 2004.
An interesting paper submitted about 10 years ago to the AMS journals had a similar purpose to find the correlation between a forecaster’s education and his accuracy.
The conclusion was that experience is key.
It’s available here, if you’re interested: click.