Thanks for tracking down that rebuttal Opaline. I am going to...

Thanks for tracking down that rebuttal Opaline. I am going to take the liberty of posting it here and if it gets zapped then so be it...

"Claim: 'Over 31,000 scientists have signed a petition disputing that AGW is real. This clearly represents a significant lack of consensus in the scientific community regarding AGW.'

Rebuttal: No, clearly it does not. Furthermore, the petition itself is misleading and in many respects an outright fraud.

The petition in question was once known as the 'Oregon Petition,' the first time it surfaced in 1998. It's called that because it was the brainchild of an organization called the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which embarked on a project with Dr. Frederick Seitz to circulate a petition to get as many scientists as possible to sign off on opposition to AGW. [Note: I live in Oregon, and I find it interesting that the 'Institute' that created the petition has the acronym OISM, which is a letter-switch for another organization called OMSI, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Whether this was a deliberate attempt to invite confusion I have no idea, though as you will see in the next paragraph, there was evidently a deliberate attempt to invite confusion as to whether the petition was connected to the National Academy of Sciences]. Basically, OISM shotgunned the petition to thousands of scientists of various disciplines, hoping for as many positive responses as possible. This was done while the U.S. government was considering ratification of the 1997 Kyoto Accords which impose voluntary caps on greenhouse gases.

The materials enclosed with the original 1998 petition included a paper'which was not peer-reviewed'arguing that more CO2 is actually good for the environment. The paper was printed in the same format and typeface as used by the National Academy of Sciences' official journal and accompanied by a cover letter signed by Dr. Seitz, who had been NAS president years before (in the 1960s). The confusion was significant enough to cause the NAS to issue a press release (you can read it here: http://144.16.65.194/hpg/envis/doc97html/globalssi422.html) bluntly dissociating itself from Dr. Seitz's efforts. The NAS stated:

'The Council of the National Academy of Sciences is concerned about the confusion caused by a petition being circulated via a letter from a former president of this Academy. This petition criticizes the science underlying the Kyoto treaty on carbon dioxide emissions (the Kyoto Protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Change), and it asks scientists to recommend rejection of this treaty by the U.S. Senate. The petition was mailed with an op-ed article from The Wall Street Journal and a manuscript in a format that is nearly identical to that of scientific articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (http://www.pnas.org/nas/). The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal.'

Over the years the 'Oregon Petition' has surfaced again and again, and gained new traction in 2009 when it was featured on Congressman Ron Paul's website (scroll to where Ron Paul is listed above for a link to that site). However impressive the '31,000' figure seems, three things are evident about it:

There is no independently verifiable method to determine the qualifications of the 31,000 people who have signed it; OISM refuses to release information that would make it clear. In fact only 39 have actually been identified as climatologists.
The number 31,000 represents a tiny minority of the 10.6 million "scientists" (as defined according to OISM's original and very broad qualification statement) who have graduated from U.S. universities since 1970.
OISM has a serious problem with vetting who has signed the petition, as numerous demonstrably fake names have been successfully added to the petition in an attempt to test how open the qualifications really are.
These points in turn. The first two are closely related. OISM called for 'scientists' to sign the petition, but it defined 'scientist' as 'obtained formal educational degrees at the level of Bachelor of Science or higher in appropriate scientific fields.' The scientific fields that are listed as 'appropriate' include such things as computer science, aerospace engineering, zoology, electrical engineering or metallurgy as well as climate science and more appropriate studies. (Source: http://www.petitionproject.org/qualifications_of_signers.php) But the OISM does not indicate the qualifications of the individual signers'just their names and the states they live in. (Example: http://www.petitionproject.org/signers_by_state_main.php) How many zoologists in California have signed the petition? We don't know. How many electrical engineers in Delaware? No idea. What does seem clear is that the number of signers is far less impressive when one realizes that they include experts on chimpanzee behavior or silicon circuit designers who have not studied climate science. What is also clear is that 31,000 is a drop in the bucket when you're talking about people who have 'obtained formal educational degrees at the level of Bachelor of Science or higher' in the fields identified by the OISM as their target demographic. According to U.S. Department of Education statistics (have fun searching them here: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d08/tables_3.asp#Ch3aSub4), nearly eleven million people have done this in the United States since 1970. Thirty-one thousand people'almost all of whom are not climatologists'out of almost eleven million science graduates does not seem particularly impressive, especially when one considers that the petition has been collecting signatures for 12 years.

Furthermore, the Oregon Petition's qualification and gatekeeping functions are clearly deficient. Environmental groups have snuck names such as 'B.J. Hunnicutt' (Mike Farrell's character from the old M*A*S*H TV show) and one of the Spice Girls onto the list with success. They have since been removed, but we have no idea how many other fake names that might not be so recognizable are on the list. How many real climate scientists are there who are willing to go on record as supporting the Oregon Petition? Thirty-nine. (Source: http://www.desmogblog.com/30000-global-warming-petition-easily-debunked-propaganda)

At the risk of committing what conspiracy theorists love to call an 'ad hominem attack,' it should be noted that the independent scientific credibility of Dr. Seitz, whose brainchild the Oregon Petition was, is open to serious question. After Seitz retired from the National Academy of Sciences, he did a good deal of work for the nice fellows at the Philip Morris Tobacco Company, who paid him to spearhead a project to inject officially-tinged doubt into the debate about whether secondhand tobacco smoke causes cancer. The effort was funded by Philip Morris. (You can see a 1994 document indicating Seitz's involvement in tobacco lobbying efforts here: http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/yzb65e00/pdf;jsessionid=2E3191CCAB06867DF3D6D7226CD4DE49) It would seem that during his lifetime Dr. Seitz was not adverse to selling his scientific credentials to a well-paying source.

Further discussion of the Oregon Petition here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/OISM-Petition-Project.htm"