By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow

As Andrew Revkin noted on the dot.earth blog today, the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest organization representing earth and space scientists, put out a fresh statement on the causes and consequences of recent climate change and possible responses. In the last few years, the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) have also issued statements endorsing the so-called “consensus” view that man is driving global warming.  What you don’t hear is that these societies never allowed member scientists to vote on these climate statements. Essentially, only two dozen or so members on ad hoc committees and governing boards of these institutions produced the “consensus” statements.

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 the issuance of a statement supposedly representing the view of the society to policymakers 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 have the council review and recommend changes and then post for comment for just 30 days on the society web site home page. Few members frequent the home page often going to the site only to look for papers or register for upcoming conferences. Still the posted statement received a record number of comments back, many of them strongly negative. Despite an exhaustive effort to catalog the comments, in the end little substantive change was made to the statement.

Yet 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’. Roger pushed for longer review and for a referendum. When little changed from the draft statement and no changes were made to the process, Roger responded by posting the names of the authoring committee on Climate Science. Roger believes “this problem of our professional organizations using their positions as political pulpits is appalling and compromises the scientific process”.

And whatsmore, these societies and as Roger Pielke Sr. posted yesterday even organizations like UCAR have drifted away from objective science towards advocacy. Read much more here.