14 DAY TRIAL // Instead of continuing to survey the general population on the causes of global warming, researcher Peter Doran, an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois in Chicago, working with Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, a former graduate student, asked over 10,200 experts from all around the world to answer a few global warming-related questions for him, in an online questionnaire. The conclusions weren't surprising at all – more than 90 percent of the 3,146 respondents agreed that mean temperatures went up compared to 1800 levels, while 82 said that humans were largely responsible for this occurrence.
The online questionnaire could only be accessed via invitation, and only experts were invited to participate. The researchers sent e-mails to research labs, private companies, and governmental research centers from around the world. They got the list of names from the 2007 issue of the American Geological Institute's Directory of Geoscience Departments.
However, the survey did yield some interesting results. Petroleum geologists and meteorologists were among those doubting human influence on the environment, rating at 47 and 64 percent, respectively. And while in the case of geologists handling oil was the clear reason why they responded the way they did, the researchers were very amazed to find that meteorologists doubted human influence as well.
“The petroleum geologist response is not too surprising, but the meteorologists' is very interesting. Most members of the public think meteorologists know climate, but most of them actually study very short-term phenomenon (sic),” Doran said.
He added that more than 97 percent of climatologists that had answered the survey believed that the human factor was the most important one in global warming and in climate change. “They're the ones who study and publish on climate science. So I guess the take-home message is, the more you know about the field of climate science, the more you're likely to believe in global warming and humankind's contribution to it,” the lead researcher concluded.