I am a member of Pacific Section American Association of Petroleum Geologists(AAPG), but not the national organization. I had dinner with a bunch of petroleum geologists 10 days ago...and we got into an interesting conversation (debate?) on global warming/CO2. None of them believed that it was a problem: one did not even believe the warming was real (that it was urban heat-island related). Another thought it was not man-related...natural cycle. When we had a discussion like this on this page, Canie brought up water vapor, so I got thatat the dinner and was ready for it. I tried to make it simple: virtually every scientist who works in the field believes that the earth had warmed since about 1950. CO2 has been measured at Mauna Loa observatory (and elsewhere), and it has gone up 30 or 40% (not a local volcanic effect). It is known from bubbles in ice cores and other data that CO2 mirrors the glacial-interglacial cycles. Occam's razor/principle of least astonishment says that the simplest explanation for data is usually the correct one.
But, we will still have cold winters some years. A week ago, we had 2 straight days of record hear here: 94 deg F here. We are forecast to get a frost of freeze Thursday, with the high temperature almost 50 deg less than a week before. Local effects like this don't mean anything about whether there is warming or not.....but the very hot summer nationwide does...especially of the hottest years globally have almost all been in the last decade.
I just read the "Forum" in the AGU weekly newsletter/journal EOS. It is titled "Petroleum Geologists award to novelist Chrichton is inappropriate".
AAPG gave Crichton their 2006 Journalism award for Jurassic Park and State of Fear. I read State of Fear recently. The quote from the EOS article: "The novel is not journalism. Furthermore, it is fiction that presents a distorted view of global warming as a scientific hoax....."
Later in article, "Back in reality, U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), failing to distinguish between fiction and fact but clearly resonating with Crichton's maverick views on global warming, invited the author to testify before the U.S. senate Environment and public works Committee."
This is all pretty sad in my opinion...especially that AAPG would give this award. There are a lot of valid controversies about what the future effects will be, and whether Global Climate Models are giving accurate predictions. I heard Al Gore plug his movie on a couple of TV shows, and was a little surprised about how extreme his views seemed. But, I need to read his early 1990s book to see how much he got correct...a decade before I took this all seriously. This should not be political...it should be science. Some of the best environmentalists in the senate have been republicans (esp. John Chaffee (deceased) and his son Lincoln Chaffee (sp?) from Rhode Island.
Chris