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Member Scientists Ignored
As a council member of one of the professional societies (the AMS),
I can tell you I was extremely disappointed with the process and even
the notion of issuing a statement supposedly representing to
policymakers the view of the society without the full involvement of
its members.
In the case of the AMS, the statement drafting process involved
appointing an ad hoc committee to draft a statement and then having the
council review and recommend changes and post the statement for
comment, for just 30 days, on the home page of the society's Web site.
Few members visit the home page, and many go to the site only to
look for papers or register for upcoming conferences. Still, the posted
statement received a record number of comments, many of them strongly
negative. Despite an exhaustive effort to catalog the comments, in the
end little substantive change was made to the statement.
In spite of the dissent, the society proclaimed to Dr. Roger Pielke
Sr., when he inquired about the process for creating the statement,
that the committee simply "facilitated the drafting and that the
council and the membership owned and controlled the final statement."
Pielke pushed for longer review and for a referendum. However,
little changed from the draft statement, and no changes were made to
the process.
Goal Is Advocacy
Pielke believes "this problem of our professional organizations
using their positions as political pulpits is appalling and compromises
the scientific process."
The AMS has gone so far as to list advocacy and efforts to influence
policy in its strategic goals, although to the society's credit it
softened the wording in its 2007 version.
Rank and File Disagree
With my experience as chief meteorologist for two large weather
companies, and with many personal contacts in operational meteorology,
climatology, and broadcasting, I believe the majority of rank-and-file
members within those specialties (as many as 60 to 70 percent) do not
buy the notion that man is entirely responsible for climate change. Yet
the societies use their statements to imply full support of all the
scientists involved. Source
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