[Vision2020] Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 2010: "Expert Credibility in Climate Change"

[Paul Rumelhart]

This study, frankly, pisses me off for a number of reasons.

First, their methodology is suspect.  Instead of taking the time to 
build up a database of publications and their references themselves, 
they relied heavily upon Google Scholar keyword searches.  This leads 
them open to the problems of duplicates, researchers with the same name 
as a climate researcher, and Google's own attempts to "correct" your 
queries by bringing in results that might be related based upon name 
similarity or other criteria.

Second, they use citation count as a metric in this.  This can be 
considered more of a metric of how well their attempts to limit the 
access of skeptical researchers to peer reviewed journals is working.  
If you've read the climategate emails, you'll have seen that many of the 
climate researchers at the center of climate change science aren't above 
using the threat of limiting publication in peer reviewed journals or 
refusing to cite them leveled against people whose conclusions they 
disagree with. 

Mainly, however, it pains me to think that these researchers thought 
this paper was a valid use of their time.  It's basically a way to say 
"Hey, we're smart!  They're stupid!  Listen to us!"  When you have to 
rely upon "consensus" to sway people's opinions, you've stepped 
completely out of the realm of science and into the realm of politics.  
Any third-grader knows that lots of people can be wrong about something 
- the number of people that agree with something is not always related 
to its "truthiness".  Look at the geocentric universe theory for one 
example of a case of almost everyone agreeing with something that turned 
out to be completely wrong.  Hell, if you went through school more than 
20 years ago look at how many things we were taught that turned out to 
be flat out wrong or at best poorly understood.

I'm hoping they will soon finish their study on how well penis length 
correlates with agreement with anthropogenic climate change theory so 
they can go back to working on the actual science again.

Paul


Ted Moffett wrote:
> Another attempt to quantify what some call the "consensus" among 
> climate scientists that human impacts are the primary driver of the 
> Earth's current warming climate:
>  
> Article abstract:
>  
> http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/22/1003187107.abstract
>
>
>   Expert credibility in climate change
>
>    1. William R. L. Anderegg
>       <http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=William+R.+L.+Anderegg&sortspec=date&submit=Submit>^a
>       <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/22/1003187107.abstract#aff-1>,^1
>       <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/22/1003187107.abstract#corresp-1>,
>
>    2. James W. Prall
>       <http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=James+W.+Prall&sortspec=date&submit=Submit>^b
>       <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/22/1003187107.abstract#aff-2>,
>
>    3. Jacob Harold
>       <http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=Jacob+Harold&sortspec=date&submit=Submit>^c
>       <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/22/1003187107.abstract#aff-3>,
>       and
>    4. Stephen H. Schneider
>       <http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=Stephen+H.+Schneider&sortspec=date&submit=Submit>^a
>       <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/22/1003187107.abstract#aff-1>,^d
>       <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/22/1003187107.abstract#aff-4>,^1
>       <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/22/1003187107.abstract#corresp-1>
>
>
> + <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/22/1003187107.abstract#> 
> Author Affiliations
>
>   1.
>       ^a Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305;
>
>   2.
>       ^b Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto,
>       Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3G4;
>
>   3.
>       ^c William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Palo Alto, CA 94025; and
>
>   4.
>       ^d Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University,
>       Stanford, CA 94305
>
>   1.
>
>       Contributed by Stephen H. Schneider, April 9, 2010 (sent for
>       review December 22, 2009)
>
>
>     Abstract
>
> Although preliminary estimates from published literature and expert 
> surveys suggest striking agreement among climate scientists on the 
> tenets of anthropogenic climate change (ACC), the American public 
> expresses substantial doubt about both the anthropogenic cause and the 
> level of scientific agreement underpinning ACC. A broad analysis of 
> the climate scientist community itself, the distribution of 
> credibility of dissenting researchers relative to agreeing 
> researchers, and the level of agreement among top climate experts has 
> not been conducted and would inform future ACC discussions. Here, we 
> use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their 
> publication and citation data to show that (/i/) 97–98% of the climate 
> researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here 
> support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on 
> Climate Change, and (/ii/) the relative climate expertise and 
> scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are 
> substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
>
> ------------------
> Full text of article available directly with no log-in:
>  
> http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/22/1003187107.full.pdf+html
>  
> ------------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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