What Al Gore Doesn't Know
Skeptics don’t argue that the planet is getting warmer. They’re just not ready to fault human activity, and they tend to equate a sense of urgency with hysteria.
Olathe resident Mike Sturdivan laid out the unbelievers’ case in one of those “Midwest Voices” columns that appear occasionally in The Kansas City Star. Sturdivan, a cost estimator at Black & Veatch, took the requisite cracks at Al Gore (“just a snake-oil salesman searching for relevance”) before pulling out the hard data: a 2006 survey of the National Registry of Environmental Professionals.
Sixty-six percent of those surveyed said they agreed with the statement that global warming is a serious problem. For Sturdivan, this number evidenced a lack of consensus in the world of science.
If Sturdivan wants to hang out with the 34 percenters, that’s his prerogative. The problem is not how he defines consensus but what he termed “the scientific community.”
Sturdivan’s column said “environmental scientists and climatologists” participated in the survey. In fact, the National Registry of Environmental Professionals is a business league, not an academic organization. It’s place where engineers get credentials. According to the group’s Web site, 62 percent of the people who participated in the global-warming survey work in the private sector. There’s no mention of climatologists.
Sturdivan says his misrepresentation of survey participants “is sort of immaterial.” The real story, he says, is the need for more research before the U.S. and other nations start regulating carbon emissions and the like. “There needs to be a lot more study and debate,” he tells me.
It’s true that not every scientist has cast his or her lot with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But Sturdivan painted an inaccurate picture in the Star.
His frequent use of exclamation points was really annoying, too. – David Martin
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