Climate Change skeptics? [ot]

Actually, yes, 31,000+ scientists from all the disciplines that comprise the non-linear complex study of climate dynamics (9,000+ of whom have PhDs) have been polled as to what they think about whether or not AGW is a settled matter, and those 31,000+ scientists were unanimous in that they say it is NOT a settled matter at all.

The Global Warming Petition Project, also known as the Oregon Petition, is a petition urging the United States government to reject the global warming Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and similar policies.[1] It was organized and circulated by Arthur B. Robinson, president of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in 1998, and again in 2007.[2][3] Past National Academy of Sciences president Frederick Seitz wrote a cover letter endorsing the petition.[4]

According to Robinson, the petition has over 31,000 signatories. Over 9,000 report to have a Ph.D.,[1][2][3] mostly in engineering.[5] The NIPCC (2009) Report lists 31,478 degreed signatories, including 9,029 with Ph.D.s.[6] The list has been criticized for its lack of verification, with pranksters successfully submitting Charles Darwin, members of the Spice Girls and characters from Star Wars, and getting them briefly included on the list.[7]

Yes. It's been my opinion, since the Cook study was released, that the researchers played fast and loose with their data. That the 97% claim was cooked up propaganda.

Seems like they've done their best to avoid releasing their findings

One problem with the idea of using the multi-model ensemble to improve our predictions of the future may be summarised by a recent visit to Chester zoo.
The problems arise if this is the multi-model ensemble,

while this is reality:

Our work to date indicates that reality is much more like another meerkat than it is like a rhinoceros, but it is possible that the rhino may yet rear its ugly head and cause difficulties.

I'm just trying to figure out the meaning of the Tol ( or other ) criticism of Cook. It appears that it is a matter of interpretation and that Tol "weights" his interpretation away from an explicit endorsement, into the neutral category.

The consensus would drop from %97 to %91. But Tol is full of sh#t, in any case.

Human influence on Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, land, and biology has grown to the extent that some people now think that the planet may have entered a new geological period, known as the Anthropocene.

Scientists at a news briefing about the Anthropocene held at the European Geoscience Union’s General Assembly on 29 April discussed human impacts on Earth and questioned whether those impacts are significant and clear enough to formally declare a new geological time period.

Jan Zalasiewicz, one of the scientists at the briefing, explained that the term Anthropocene refers to a hypothesis that people have changed Earth’s surface systems sufficiently to affect the geology on a scale comparable with some geologic epochs or periods in the past.
....
Brown, professor of physical geography at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, said the question of whether to formalize the Anthropocene does matter. He said that although there may be some differences of opinion in terms of setting a boundary and how sharply defined an Anthropocene boundary needs to be, “we live in a geologically and atmospherically and biologically transformed globe.” He noted, for example, that humans now move around more sediment on Earth’s surface than natural processes do.

The authors found that by 5 July the surface temperature in an open water area [in the Beaufort Sea] had increased by 6.5°C and the extent of open water occupied by warm waters had increased by 50%. They conclude that the Mackenzie and other large rivers bring a substantial amount of heat into the Arctic Ocean, which contributes to melting sea ice. In a stark contrast, there is no such large river in the Antarctic, where sea ice has little change.