The Oregon Petition
Opinion polls appear to be all the rage among contrarians. These polls appear to be attempts to undermine the fact that over 99% of the recent scientific literature agrees with AGW, and 100% of scientific agencies globally that have taken a stance on AGW agree with AGW. In fact, as best as I can count, only about a half dozen credentialed climate scientists still working in the field globally disagree with AGW (11 if you count living, inactive scientists). Since the evidence is overwhelming in favor of AGW and the consensus on AGW is so strong, political activists need to resort to opinion polls to generate the perception that there are a significant number of scientists that disagree with AGW. And of course to get large numbers of signatories, you have to make the requirements to sign very low. This I believe explains the existence of the so-called Oregon Petition and the Petition Project.
To be qualified to sign this, however, you only needed to have a BS degree or higher in something related to science, including "general science," engineering, medicine, or computer science, none of which have anything to do with climate. You did not have to have any expertise in or knowledge about climate science. You did not have to do any research in climate. You didn't even have to have any experience in any scientific field. If you graduated from a college with a BS in computer science, then decided to work as an insurance salesman, you could sign the petition. In other words, this petition was an opinion poll that counted the opinions of those that didn't even know that CO2 is a molecule along side those any that had actual expertise in climate science. A total of 31,487 people have signed the petition, and here's a breakdown of their degrees:
The Oregon Petition does not tell us how many of the signatories are climate scientists actively doing research in the field. But we can do some simple math and make some guesses. Among the fields of study having to do with the atmosphere (they count 579 signatories among the 3805 with degrees in atmosphere, earth and environment), only 151 had degrees in Atmospheric Science or Climatology. Only 28.7% of the total signatories had PhDs, so if we assume this proportion applies to those with degrees in atmospheric science or climatology, then that would mean that 151*0.287=43 signatories had a PhD in atmospheric science or climatology. Of these, who knows how many of them have died, changed their position on AGW or lied when they filled out their card (see below for more on this). But even if we assume that the petition was administered with integrity and all the signatories were honest, this is not a very compelling list of names. of the 31,487 people who signed, perhaps only 43 earned a PhD in atmospheric science or climatology.
I think I'm being extremely generous in assuming that the same proportion of 28.7% applies to those with degrees in Atmospheric Science or Climatology. I've compiled a list of active, credentialed climate scientists currently publishing in the field that disagree with AGW, and my total (so far) is 7. If we include those that have retired from active publishing, that jumps up to 11, and not all of these are Americans. I haven't kept track of those that have passed away since 1998. Perhaps that number is as high as 33; who knows? But I think an estimate of 43 calculated using numbers published by the Oregon Petition errs on the side of being generous.
Today about 70 million Americans have a bachelors degree or higher. I have not been able to determine the exact fraction of that number that have a BS degree (as opposed to a BA or BBA), but 39% of bachelor's degrees awarded in the US are either in core STEM fields or broader science and engineering fields (including health professions). So that would imply that roughly 27 million Americans have a BS degree in a field that would qualify people to be signatories to the Oregon Petition. This means that only 0.1% of Americans that could sign the petition did sign the petition. Likewise, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and professional bodies like AMS indicate that between 1500 and 3000 Americans have a PhD in atmospheric science or climatology and are employed in that field. Including retired professionals or those that shifted to some other field, that number jumps to between 3000 and 4000. In the US between 2003 and 2023 alone, 20,825 doctorates were awarded in "geosciences, atmospheric and ocean sciences." All this suggests that my generous estimate of ~43 signatories with a PhD in Atmospheric Science or Climatology is less than 43/3000 = 1.4% of those that have a PhD in Atmospheric Science or climatology. Over 98.6% of the people who could sign the petition didn't bother signing this petition. These of course are crude guesses, but I think they are generous.
Qualifications of Signatories to the Petition
The Oregon Petition was begun in the wake of the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 as an attempt to assemble a large list of names of people that disagree with climate science. They wanted a large list of "American scientists" to sign the following petition:
To be qualified to sign this, however, you only needed to have a BS degree or higher in something related to science, including "general science," engineering, medicine, or computer science, none of which have anything to do with climate. You did not have to have any expertise in or knowledge about climate science. You did not have to do any research in climate. You didn't even have to have any experience in any scientific field. If you graduated from a college with a BS in computer science, then decided to work as an insurance salesman, you could sign the petition. In other words, this petition was an opinion poll that counted the opinions of those that didn't even know that CO2 is a molecule along side those any that had actual expertise in climate science. A total of 31,487 people have signed the petition, and here's a breakdown of their degrees:
The fields of study where these signatories had their degrees included many fields having nothing to do with atmospheric science or climatology. Here's a breakdown of the fields of study for the signatories.
* Generous estimate. ** Crude, low estimate.
Integrity and Quality Control Issues
Furthermore, I think it would be wrong to assume that the Oregon Petition Project was conducted with integrity and with good quality control standards. In 1998, a document sent out with the original petition was formatted to look nearly identical to the format of a PNAS scientific journal. By sending what appears to be a PNAS journal article to potential respondents that may only have a BS degree but lack any familiarity with climate science, they were clearly trying to bias the survey respondents by feeding them with biased misinformation dressed up to look like a respectable journal article. This prompted the NAS to issue a news release in 1998 clarifying that the petition had nothing to do with NAS, and they disavowed the article and petition.
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| Screenshot of the Fake Paper Accompanying the Petition |
Quality control has also been an issue. Some people signed as fictional characters in movies or crank names such as "I.C. Ewe." In 2001 when the total number of signatories was 17100, Scientific American selected the names of 30 signatories "of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science." This is interesting because the petition no longer lists a breakdown of academic categories of PhDs, and it no longer has a category for "climate-related science." The numbers currently on the website make it hard to justify any claim of 1400 PhDs in a "climate-related science" even with almost double the number of signatories, so I'm guessing that in 2001 the website was organized differently to create that impression. Of the 30 names they randomly selected, SA was able to locate 26, and they sent a survey to each of them. Here are the results of that survey:
Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition—one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages.
So of the 21 responses, only 11 still agreed with the petition. Of those only 3 had relevant expertise, and of those only 1 was an active researcher. In other words, only 10% of these 30 people categorized as having a PhD in a climate related field had relevant expertise, and only 3% were active in climate research. Another 10 either changed their position or couldn't remember signing the petition, and 1 had passed away. So even if my 43 estimate was correct, it may be much smaller than that now, as more and more people are lost through attrition. And of course, the SA survey was of a small sample of the total number of people categorized as having a PhD in a climate related-field, but the results are not very compelling.
Conclusion
I think I should clarify a couple things here. First, There may be legit climate researchers who signed the petition that didn't identify as atmospheric or climate scientists. For instance, perhaps a few geologists signed the petition that do paleoclimate research. However, contrarians this field are going to be dominated by petroleum geologists and the like. I doubt very seriously that a significant number of signatories in these fields do actual climate research. The Petition Project should have catalogued the PhDs doing climate research and documented the ones that signed the petition. However, doing that would make clear what they apparently want to obscure. They want people to think all 31,487 signatories are qualified scientists, not just a small handful of climate scientists with over 31,400 filler signatures.
Second, I don't want to suggest that the percent of signatories above represents the percent consensus. Not everyone with a BS degree that agrees with the petition knew of it and signed it. It would also be wrong to suggest that everyone with a PhD in atmospheric science or climatology that agreed with the petition knew of it and signed it. But at the same time, I think it's extremely clear that a number like 31,000 Americans with BS degrees is not an impressive number, given the number of Americans with BS degrees. It also should be clear that my generous estimate of 43 signatories with PhDs in atmospheric science or climatology is not an impressive number given the thousands of Americans with PhDs in this field. And it also seems clear that we cannot assume that those who signed this petition 20 years ago still agree with it, if they're even still alive. There is likely a significant fraction of the people that signed the petition that no longer agree with it and would not sign it now; the fake, dishonest paper accompanying the original survey may explain a significant fraction of those that no longer would sign the petition.
The Oregon Petition is essentially a joke petition. It was entirely motivated by politics, and was designed to create false impressions about the current scientific consensus on AGW.
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