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Results of an international survey of climate scientists
This booklet summarizes the results of international surveys of climate
scientists conducted in 1996 and 2003 by two German environmental
scientists, Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch. Bray is a research scientist at
the GKSS Institute of Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Germany. Von Storch
is a climatology professor at the University of Hamburg and director of the
Institute of Coastal Research.
More than 530 climate scientists from 27 different countries provided
numerical answers each time the survey was conducted. All responses were
anonymous. The same questions were asked each time the survey was
conducted, plus an additional 32 questions were asked in 2003. The 2003
survey was conducted online. Notice of the survey was posted in the Bulletin
of the American Meteorological Society and on the Climlist server (Climlist
is a moderated international electronic mail distribution list for climatologists
and those working in closely related fields). Notices also were sent to
institutional lists in Germany, Denmark, and the U.K. The survey was
password protected to ensure that scientists in climate-related fields were the
only ones with access to it.
The surveys presented dozens of assertions regarding climate change and
asked respondents to give a numerical score, on a scale of 1 to 7, indicating
the extent to which the respondents agreed or disagreed with each assertion.
The entire results of both surveys can be found online at a site created and
maintained by Bray and von Storch.1
The average responses to every question in both the 1996 and 2003
surveys are reported in the appendix of this booklet. This is all valuable and
accurate data, of course, but it can be difficult for a layperson to interpret.
What does it mean, for example, to say the average response to a question is
3.39?
To make the survey results more transparent, we singled out 18 questions
from the 2003 survey and present the answers here in a simplified and less
academic style. For each question, we combined the percentages of those
respondents who gave numeric scores of 1, 2, or 3 and called this “agree.”
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