Anderegg et al Revisited

Update!!  Game to be played at the end of post!

 

If this has already been covered, then a refresher never hurts.

I got irked the other day when I read that asinine “98 percent of our scientists have written thousands of peer-reviewed papers and reports concluding that climate change is realz and caused, or at least accelerated, by human activity…blah, blah, blah…..”

Now, just to be clear this isn’t the one that sent out 10,000 questionnaires and got back 77 saying it was realz.  This is the one where a couple of pinheads got together and set up some arbitrary standards and proclaimed,

TheUEgroup comprises only2%of the top 50 climate researchers as ranked by expertise (number of climate publications), 3% of researchers of the top 100, and 2.5% of the top 200, excluding researchers present in both groups (Materials and Methods).

(UE= Unconvinced, or skeptical of the Evidence).  (CE = Convinced of the Evidence)

Now, I’ve never taken the time to bother with this much, because science isn’t run by consensus, and we’ve demonstrated how poor the other claims to consensus are.  But, this one has been flying around a bit more than I’d like to see, so, I thought I’d give fellow blog and science report travelers some fodder for the occasion when this comes up.

A brief synopsis on what was done, they gathered a list of scientists based on specific declarations in the past, used Google Scholar to determine how many climate papers these scientists wrote and how many times they were cited and came to the stated conclusions.

So, let’s talk about how they came up with their list.  The list, BTW, totaled 1,372 researchers.  The paper itself doesn’t state what they used, you have to go to the (SI Materials and Methods) From there, what is their very first source to get a list of CEs?

We compiled these CE researchers comprehensively (i.e., all names listed) from the following lists: IPCC AR4 Working Group I Contributors (coordinating lead authors, lead authors, and contributing authors; 619 names listed)

Lol, at this point, I should crack wise about “Delinquent Teenagers”, but I’ll leave it to the readers to insert their own comments.  But, yes, that’s right, nearly half of the overall selection came right out of the IPCC….

You see, this is a problem.  The perception has been that these people poured over the papers themselves to come up with this list.  They did nothing of the sort.  In fact, I dare say they didn’t read any paper relative to this one.  Nor, do they say they do, but, they sure pretend they did…… the second paragraph after the abstract…..

An extensive literature examines what constitutes expertise or credibility in technical and policy-relevant scientific research (15). Though our aim is not to expand upon that literature here, we wish to draw upon several important observations from this literature in examining expert credibility in climate change.

I don’t know what “an extensive literature examines” means, but it sure sounds like they’ve examined the literature.  But, they did not. 

Back to the numbers….. after looking at the IPCC and declarative statements they compiled a list of 903 CEs, or alarmists as we know them.  Then after looking at declarative or statements of being unconvinced, such as the “2006 letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper“(61contributors) and  NIPCC: 2008 Heartland Institute document
“Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate,” ed. S. Fred Singer (24 listed contributors) ….. 12 in all.  And they got a gross list of 472 names.  Oh, but there’s one declarative document in which they did not examine for names…….. they didn’t examine the Oregon Petition.

From there, they try to establish their cli-creds….

Between December 2008 and July 2009, we collected the number of climate-relevant publications for all 1,372 researchers from Google Scholar (search terms: “author:fi-lastname climate”), as well as the number of times cited for each researcher’s four top-cited articles in any field (search term “climate” removed). Overall number of publications was not used because it was not possible to provide accurate publication counts in all cases because of similarly named researchers. We verified, however, author identity for the four top-cited papers by each author.

So, here we find some shocking information the authors even missed!  Climate alarmists, carbonphobes and Malthusian totalitarians use the word “climate” more than the people who laugh at them.

Not content with the ratio 903:472, they impose another arbitrary criteria, they remove all of the ones who have not published at least 20 papers on climate.  Which gave them a list of 908 researchers.  Which then, gave us an entirely different ratio….. 817: 93.  They said they tried it with cut offs at 10 and 40 papers published and that it didn’t make much difference.  They refer us to their “Materials and Methods” section but they forgot to put the results of the 10 and 40 cutoffs in there. 

Oh, the really cool published papers about climate?  They include some earth shattering things like Soil organic matter in secondary forests of Puerto Rico (R-Birdsey) , New eyes in the sky measure glaciers and ice sheets  (M Bishop, D MacKinnon, A Ohmura), 1000 years of climate variability in central Asia: assessing the evidence using Lake Baikal (Russia) diatom assemblages and the application of a diatom-inferred …  (AW Mackay, DB Ryves, RW Battarbee) <—— I especially like this one, this was supposed to be from an alarmist, but it confirms the MWP and LIA in the area just north of Mongolia.  But, because one of the authors, signed something or was perhaps part of the IPCC, then it counts as an alarmist and towards his level of expertise.  You can play along as well, the one thing the Anderegg did right, was that he put together a pretty cool web app.  http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/climate_authors_scatterplot_vert.html

Conclusion:  This paper actually proves there is no such thing as a 98% consensus!  Even by their own arbitrary and asinine criteria, it isn’t even 66%.  It isn’t until they start adding more criteria and unverified criteria do they get to the consensus of 49 out of 50 scientists agree….. which in itself is a fallacy.  They could have at least skimmed the titles of the papers. 

Frankly, this is just another clear bit of fraudulent sophistry.  I find it ironic that one of the authors was the late Stephen “I was convinced of global cooling before I was convinced of  global warming” Schneider.  All of his global cooling papers, would likely count toward his expertise in climate issues.

Rationalization for not using the Oregon petition and other meaningless tripe found here.

Game:  Go to the interactive site Anderegg has and see what notable climate skeptic is missing from the paper.