A Crap Alberta Government Survey Of Alberta "Rock Scientists" On Climate Change

Given the abuse that James Annan and Fergus Brown took as a result of their good-faith attempt to survey honest-to-god climate scientists (including from me here), zero weight can be given to this ghastly survey of Professional Engineers, Geologists, and Geophysicists of Alberta (esp. given the state of some of the questions, but see below for more on that):

Virtually all respondents (99.4%) agree that the climate is changing. There is also general agreement that the climate is changing both regionally and globally (78.7% agree) and that it may result in both warming and cooling (83.0% agree). There is less agreement as to the magnitude of the change:65.7% believe that there are changes to both the average and variability of the climate, 20.2% believe that there are changes to the average state, and 14.1% believe that there are changes to the variability. There is also disagreement as to the timescale: 55.3% believe that there are both long and short term effects, 28.8% believe there are long term effects, and 11.6% believe that there are short term effects.

There is even less agreement as to the cause: 27.4% believe it is caused by primarily natural factors (natural variation, volcanoes, sunspots, lithosphere motions, etc.), 25.7% believe it is caused by primarily human factors (burning fossil fuels, changing land use, enhanced water evaporation due to irrigation), and 45.2% believe that climate change is caused by both human and natural factors.

[...]

The highest disagreement (68% disagree) with statement “the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled”. It is somewhat reassuring that 66% of respondents do not feel pressured by their peers to take a certain stance on climate change and 59% do not feel like that must base their professional work on factors other their solid scientific principles.

Note that the first couple of sentences in the first paragraph are so vague as to be meaningless. This is what you get when you ask your members to choose between the following assertions:

1) Our climate is not presently changing
2) Our climate is changing.

The Consensus that there is no consensus is similarly crap, since the survey does not make clear whether the respondents are disagreeing with the contention that the cause, or extent, or time scale, or magnitude of climate change is "settled" (or some combination.

And there is interesting data collected but not shared in the document above, such as do APEGGA members think Canada should uphold its Kyoto commitments?

The members of APEGGA have been ill-served by their association. In fact, it looks like they got suckered by the Alberta Environment Ministry (Alberta Environment), which designed the survey. Designed it to give the results they were looking for, no doubt.