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

Ted Moffett starbliss at gmail.com
Sun Aug 8 22:03:47 PDT 2010


Given your interest in this issue, you might want to post your objections to
Realclimate.org, where the authors of the study in question respond to some
of the objections to their work.  After you post your objections to
Realclimate.org, if you chose to do so, I would be happy to post the
responses to your objections appearing on Realclimate.org, if any, to
Vision2020, so that readers of this list will be exposed to an open and
science based discussion of critical issues regarding human impacts on
climate:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/08/expert-credibility-in-climate-change-responses-to-comments/#more-4699


Expert Credibility in Climate Change – Responses to Comments
Filed under:

   - Climate Science<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/>
   - skeptics<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/communicating-climate/skeptics/>

— group @ 3 August 2010

Guest commentary by William R. L. Anderegg, Jim Prall, Jacob Harold, Stephen
H. Schneider

*Note: Before Stephen Schneider’s untimely passing, he and his co-authors
were working on a response to the conversation sparked by their recent paper
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on climate change
expertise. One of Dr. Schneider’s final
interviews<http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/csw/details/schneider-interview-climate-expert-credibility/>also
addresses and discusses many of the issues covered here.
*
------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

On 8/7/10, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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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