Petition to Change the American Physical Society Position on Climate Change

On 30 January 2010, I became the 250th member or former member of the American Physical Society (APS) to sign the following petition:

Regarding the National Policy Statement on Climate Change of the APS Council:
A Petition to the Council of the American Physical Society

As current and past members of the American Physical Society, we the undersigned petition the
APS Council to commission an independent, objective study and assessment of the science relating to the
question of anthropogenic global warming. The assessment should consider findings representing the full
scope of available scientific sources. The assessment is to be used as a basis for a new Statement on
Climate Change that reflects the current state of scientific knowledge and its uncertainties. This Petition is
to be provided to the membership for comment prior to action by the Council.

If you are a present or former member of the APS, please contact Roger Cohen to sign this petition.  The APS, like many other scientific professional societies, made a statement supporting the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming on 18 November 2007.  This statement was not approved by the members of APS and was only approved by the APS Council members of that time.  The membership of these societies are rarely consulted.  There has been a similar revolt of members of the American Chemical Society for instance for this reason.  Such statements implicitly imply that scientific truth is determined by those society members who aspire to hold offices in the society.  This is not the case.  It is also not the case that scientific truth is determined even by a vote of the society membership.

More recently, a number of professional scientific societies joined together to send another message backing the idea of man-made global warming to Congress.  The APS did not join them in this statement.  The American Physical Society should issue a statement after performing the requested review, in my opinion, that the case for catastrophic man-made global warming has not been made successfully.  While I think that hypothesis is actually wrong, I believe it is enough and appropriate that the APS issue a statement simply saying that global warming due to man's emissions of CO2 is an unproven hypothesis.

The American Physical Society is Reviewing its Position on Catastrophic AGW

After many members of the American Physical Society (APS) objected that it was not clear that there is a catastrophic anthropogenic global warming crisis looming, the APS leadership has decided to review its policy on that hypothesis.  More recently, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and other professional scientific organizations sent a letter to the members of the Senate claiming that their organizations support the need for immediate action to prevent a crisis due to man's production of CO2 from fossil fuel use.  A new letter from 162 members of the APS was then sent to Senators telling them that these members did not support the catastrophic AGW hypothesis.  Some of the signers of this letter are also members and fellows of AAAS and noted that they were not polled for their opinions on the issue by AAAS.  The letter also notes that as far as they knew, the other 17 scientific organizations signing the letter with AAAS did not poll their members either.

Members of the American Chemical Society (ACS) have also complained that they have not been polled by ACS and yet ACS signed the same letter of support for immediate action on AGW with the AAAS.  Members have also been complaining that the C&EN Magazine sent to all members editorially supports catastrophic AGW.

Revolts of Scientists Against Global Warming Dogma

Many members of the American Physical Society are revolting against a statement issued by that society of professional physicists in 2007 that claimed that man-made emissions of CO2 were a serious problem. You can read a brief article about the request by 80 prominent physicists to have the earlier statement replaced with one which states that natural forces such as solar and ocean forces are the primary cause of climate change, that the 20th Century and early 21st Century temperatures are not unusual, and that objective research on the effects of both natural and man-made effects are the proper business of science.

Comments in favor of man-made global warming by the editor of the monthly magazine published for all members of the American Chemical Society resulted in a firestorm of protesting letters only a few weeks ago. Thus it is clear that the so-called consensus of scientists that anthropogenic global warming is a major factor leading to catastrophic effects has broken down.

That consensus may have seemed plausible to many a short while back because most scientists had never really looked into the issues of global climate. But as the public policy issues related to preventing a global warming catastrophe caused many scientists to realize how important climate-affecting factors were, more and more of them have done their homework. More and more of them, as I was, were embarrassed to find that much of what has been called climate science has been very poor science indeed. More and more of the scientists in the "hard" sciences have been able to evaluate the so-called science of greenhouse global warming and have dismissed it as obviously inadequate science, with many very apparent biases based upon political, rather than scientific, values.

Bring on the revolt my fellow scientists. It is late, but we must still save as much respect for science as we can.