PNAS Climate Change Expert Credibility Farce
Submitted by Doug L. Hoffman on Tue, 06/22/2010 - 16:01
A new, purportedly scientific report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is claiming that more “top” environmental scientists believe in global warming. Moreover, the report also claims that the scientists who do believe in global warming—now re-labeled anthropogenic climate change (ACC)—have higher credibility than those who do not. All of this is based on an “extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data.” Citing such data is like saying “most of the people who write for conservative magazines are conservatives.” In other words, the study is devoid of factual significance and possibly purposely misleading. More propaganda from the sinking global warming ship.
In an open access article, rather innocuously titled “Expert credibility in climate change,” William R. L. Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob Harold, and Stephen H. Schneider have attempted to denigrate those who dare to disagree with the IPCC party line. In order to provide a false sense of balance, the “researchers” refer to climate change believers as “convinced by the evidence” (CE) and skeptics as “unconvinced by the evidence” (UE). That is the only unbiased thing about the report. Here is the paper's 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 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
The first suspicious thing is that the “extensive dataset” contains only 1,372 climate researchers on both sides of the issue. I seem to recall that the IPCC alone claimed more than that many “experts” had worked on its reports.
The second suspicious thing is the 97-98% pro-AGW result, a figure more in line with the election results from a tin-pot dictatorship or Stalinist people's republic. This result alone is an indication that the dataset is biased.
