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Richard (Dick) Cohen
Experience
I have been a faculty member in Mechanical Engineering for almost 40 years. My specialties have been hydrocarbon fuels, combustion, and pollution. We in the combustion community have been discussing global warming since before I was a graduate student in the 70s. It was known as a potential threat well before then, but was mostly considered a theoretical problem -- we were much more concerned with the threat to the ozone layer and whether products of combustion such as water vapor and oxides of nitrogen injected into the stratosphere (which would be emitted by the high flying supersonic transport then in development) would contribute to its depletion. Some of us were involved with showing that it was refrigerants leaked into the atmosphere that had a very large effect, while water vapor was not involved. The jury was still out on nitrogen compounds.
As for me, I was somewhat in the doubtful camp due to the vast quantities of carbon dioxide which seemed to be required compared to how fast we were producing it. However, I was never in the 'we can't possibly produce enough to make a difference camp' because we had already succeeded in polluting the entire atmosphere with other compounds.
Nowadays, I believe that the vast majority of the combustion community is in the global warming camp -- although there could be a sizable group of skeptics who are laying low. The most vocal skeptics/deniers tend to make the argument that the data is inconclusive and being cherry-picked by the true believers and not for other reasons. Most of the ones I know have retired by now.
As to my academic qualifications: BSChem (ACS accredited) from Purdue 1971, BS Mechanical Engineering Purdue 1971, PhD Mechanical Engineering Princeton 1977 (yes, I am a rocket scientist - and I still need $4.00 to buy a latte at Starbucks). I have been teaching engineering thermodynamics for my entire career and always try to get the students to understand the responsibility we have to protect the planet's ecology and climate.
Regarding our problem, I seem to be one of the few in the group who is both a scientist and an engineer. I would like to point out that for the most part this is no longer a scientific problem. It is mostly a political problem with considerable economic difficulties. Most of the argumentation comes from the feasibility of the engineering solutions from political and economic points of view plus whether the solutions can be scaled to the magnitude of the problem. Just as an example, nuclear fission reactors do not pollute and can be built relatively inexpensively if they are not held up too long by regulatory matters. Whether we can build them and dispose of their waste is a political problem. However, to build the hundreds that would be required to make a dent in the electric generation needed to vastly reduce carbon emissions from coal or natural gas power will require much more steel production capacity than even China has and that will cause huge amounts of emissions in the short term to produce the steel. Also, mining enough uranium to feed these reactors will require a significant ramp up in extraction and the pollution problems that accompany that effort. These are "just technical problems" which means "engineering" but they are by no means insignificant and all go into the mix.