Oregon Petition

A friend sent me a link to the Oregon Petition which aims to show a divided scientific consensus.

Noticing that the petition is in states with numbers per state already recorded it gave me the idea of testing the distribution of names against political orientation.

Quick look on the net gives good stats for all the states in alphabetical order so I could very quickly cut and paste into excel.

Observed values were collected from the petition and grouped according to their voting patterns over the past 10 years using the red, purple and blue scheme.

Expected values were calculated in two ways:

1) The first was by assuming that people were equally likely to sign the petition across all the states. The total number of signatures divided by the total population of all the states. Then the number of signatures in each state was expected to be directly proportional to the state population.

2) The petition selected for people with qualifications so patterns could have been attributed to the distribution of science establishments. (1) was repeated but using only the population of people in each state was a degree or higher qualification.

Here are the results for 2 (1 provides an identical conclusion)

X^2	Red (Republican)	Purple	Blue (Democrat)	Total
Observed (O)	9542	7919	13295	30756
Population (Degree or above)	20434	17688	43479	81602
Expected (E)	7702	6667	16387	30756
(O-E)^2/E	439.7	235.2	583.6	1258.5

X2 = 1258.5, df=2, p=0

In other words there is 0 chance of the hypothesis being true that scientists have signed the petition independent of state voting patterns. This is a major problem for the petition that claims that scientists are responding to objective research about the debate. Why should coming from a Republican or Democrat state affect your likelihood of signing the petition if it is based on research?

Well that is easy. Al Gore has biased the Democrats and the Oil industry is the second largest lobby group behind the Republicans. Just like tobacco it is not in the interests of oil giants to have us weaned off their product. And it is no surprise that the trend supports this with Republican scientists more likely to sign the petition than those from democrat states.

Now how does politics determine what free scientists think when they are supposed to be evidence based? Next time someone turns up with a “scientific” paper just find out who did the funding.

Something else that was interesting in this. Democrats substantially outnumber Republicans in the US. So Republicans governments don’t actually represent the people very well. It might also be true that Democrat states are more educated but I’ve not followed this up. That more than twice as many Democrats signed the petition as Republicans is an indication of how few Republican would actually qualify for signing the petition. Of those that do quality however they are much more likely to sign than those in Democrat states.