What Scientists Really Think About Global Warming - Forbes- Topic: global warming news

The STATS study polled nearly 500 randomly selected members of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union listed in American Men and Women of Science, the longtime "Who's Who" directory of the scientific community. To get a more general sense of how climate experts feel about the risks of global warming, we asked them to rate the likely effects of climate change during the next 50 to 100 years along a spectrum ranging from "trivial" to "catastrophic. Only 13% saw relatively little danger (ratings of 1 to 3 on a 10-point scale); the rest were about evenly split between the 44% who see moderate to high danger (ratings of 4 to 7) and 41% who see very high or grave danger (ratings of 8 to 10). For example, when asked to rate the predictability of future climate change along the same 1-to-10 scale, 32% found its effects difficult to predict (ratings of 1 to 3), 51% found them moderately predictable (4 to 7), and only 17% found them easy to predict (8 to 10). For example, only 29% express a "great deal of confidence" in science's current understanding of the size and extent of human sources of greenhouse gases, and even fewer (23%) express great confidence in scientific understanding of their natural sources. Little wonder that only 5% of the scientists we surveyed describe the study of climate change as a fully mature science–51% call it fairly mature and 39% still see it as an emerging science.

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