Global Warming/Climate Change/Global Weirding?

[Conan71]

http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

And if you survey all climatologists publishing papers agreeing with AGW er ACC, you will have a statistical agreement of 97-98%.

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.

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/27/12107.full

[Conan71]

http://www.cna.org/sites/default/files/MAB_2014.pdf

What's the report say, Swake, or are you just link dumping without reading the content?

I didn't figure a bunch of retired military leaders would hold much sway with you since they aren't climatologists.

[swake]

What's the report say, Swake, or are you just link dumping without reading the content?

I didn't figure a bunch of retired military leaders would hold much sway with you since they aren't climatologists.

here's what your report said:

We show that the expertise and prominence, two integral components of overall expert credibility, of climate researchers convinced by the evidence of ACC vastly overshadows that of the climate change skeptics and contrarians. This divide is even starker when considering the top researchers in each group.

[Conan71]

So basically: "We discount anyone whose research and opinion doesn't fit our paradigm."  Thank you.

[Hoss]

So basically: "We discount anyone whose research and opinion doesn't fit our paradigm."  Thank you.

In today's world, that is known as "republicanism".

[swake]

So basically: "We discount anyone whose research and opinion doesn't fit our paradigm."  Thank you.

you didn't read the methodology, and it's your paper.

[swake]

What's the report say, Swake, or are you just link dumping without reading the content?

I didn't figure a bunch of retired military leaders would hold much sway with you since they aren't climatologists.

My great grandfather, grandfather and uncle all were career military officers with 30+ years in each. One of the things high ranking members of the military better be good at is risk assessment. No?

[dbacksfan 2.0]

In today's world, that is known as "republicanism".

Ah yes, the theory that the left is always right, and the right is always wrong, and compromise is a dirty word never to be used.

[swake]

Ah yes, the theory that the left is always right, and the right is always wrong, and compromise is a dirty word never to be used.

No, the left is often stupid about science as well.

The far left are being idiots over vaccinations and GMO foods for example. And healing crystals and cleansing toxins from your body and the health benefits of a wheat grass based diet. Don't get me started on Dr Oz.

The right is much just worse over  rejecting science, but both sides do it.

[Hoss]

Ah yes, the theory that the left is always right, and the right is always wrong, and compromise is a dirty word never to be used.

If you take the first two phrases and reverse the ideology, you'd have nailed the current far-right wing talking mantra.

Consider Sen. Cruz's asinine comments about something he knows nothing about - net neutrality.  Calling it 'the Obamacare of the Internet' doesn't exactly inspire enthusiasm that he's researched the subject.  Which gets to the 'compromise being a dirty word' part of your statement.

[Conan71]

you didn't read the methodology, and it's your paper.

Hah!  It's source material used in your NOAA link.  It clearly states that they marginalized anyone who dissents from AGW as the methodology, as I previously quoted from the paper.  That's really easy to come up with a consensus when you give credibility to one subset and completely dismiss another subset as being inferior. 

You can set your criteria to include or exclude any subset from a study, there's nothing terribly objective about that.  Don't you think 1,372 climate researchers sounds like a terribly small sampling considering there are thousands of climate researchers across the globe?

Again from pnas.org:

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,

So basically, yes, if you surveyed a subset of scientists in agreement on AGW, it's a no-brainer you will have near unanimity they believe in human caused climate change.  Problem is, there's plenty of evidence to suggest there are other credible causes and plenty of researchers who believe this but they are being marginalized by the pro AGW bloc as "deniers" or being on the payroll of the kooky right, Koch Brothers, Exxon Mobil, *insert bogeyman here*. 

There's no doubt climate changes, as it has since day one. 

[swake]

materials and methods

We compiled a database of 1,372 climate researchers and classified each researcher into two categories: convinced by the evidence (CE) for anthropogenic climate change (ACC) or unconvinced by the evidence (UE) for ACC. We defined CE researchers as those who signed statements broadly agreeing with or directly endorsing the primary tenets of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report that it is "very likely" that anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for "most" of the "unequivocal" warming of the Earth's average global temperature in the second half of the 20th century (3). We compiled these CE researchers comprehensively from the lists of IPCC AR4 Working Group I Contributors and four prominent scientific statements endorsing the IPCC (n = 903; SI Materials and Methods). We defined UE researchers as those who have signed statements strongly dissenting from the views of the IPCC. We compiled UE names comprehensively from 12 of the most prominent statements criticizing the IPCC conclusions (n = 472; SI Materials and Methods). Only three researchers were members of both the CE and UE groups (due to their presence on both CE and UE lists) and remained in the dataset, except in calculations of the top 50, 100, and 200 researchers' group membership.

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.

To examine only researchers with demonstrated climate expertise, we imposed a 20 climate-publications minimum to be considered a climate researcher, bringing the list to 908 researchers (NCE = 817; NUE = 93). Our dataset is not comprehensive of the climate community and therefore does not infer absolute numbers or proportions of all CE versus all UE researchers. We acknowledge that there are other possible and valid approaches to quantifying the level of agreement and relative credibility in the climate science community, including alternate climate researcher cutoffs, publication databases, and search terms to determine climate-relevant publications. However, we provide a useful, conservative, and reasonable approach whose qualitative results are not likely to be affected by the above assumptions. We conducted the above analyses with a climate researcher cutoff of a minimum of 10 and 40 publications, which yielded very little change in the qualitative or strong statistically significant differences between CE and UE groups. Researcher publication and citation counts in Earth Sciences have been found to be largely similar between Google Scholar and other peer-review-only citation indices such as ISI Web of Science (20). Indeed, using Google Scholar provides a more conservative estimate of expertise (e.g., higher levels of publications and more experts considered) because it archives a greater breadth of sources than other citation indices. Our climate-relevant search term does not, understandably, capture all relevant publications and exclude all nonrelevant publications in the detection and attribution of ACC, but we suggest that its generality provides a conservative estimate of expertise (i.e., higher numbers of experts) that should not differentially favor either group.

Publication and citation analyses are not perfect indicators of researcher credibility, but they have been widely used in the natural sciences for comparing research productivity, quality, and prominence (21–24). Furthermore, these methods tend to correlate highly with other estimates of research quality, expertise, and prominence (21–26). These standard publication and citation metrics are often used in many academic fields to inform decisions regarding hiring and tenure. Though these methods explicitly estimate credibility to other academics, which might not directly translate to credibility in broader discourse, polls suggest that about 70% of the American public generally trust scientists' opinions on the environment, making this assessment broadly relevant (27). Criticisms of the two methods center around issues of self-citation, additionality of multiple authors, clique citation, and age demographic (e.g., age distribution where older researchers can accrue more publications and citations) differences between groups (21–26, 28, 29). All of these criticisms are expected to have the least influence at high levels of aggregation (e.g., an entire field) and high levels of citations, both of which are analyzed here (21–23, 25, 28, 29).

Regarding the influence of citation patterns, we acknowledge that it is difficult to quantify potential biases of self-citation or clique citation in the analysis presented here. However, citation analysis research suggests that the potential of these patterns to influence results is likely to decline as sample size of researchers, possible cliques, and papers analyzed for citations considered increases (22, 25–28). By selecting an expansive sample of 1,372 researchers and focusing our analysis only on the researchers' four most-cited papers, we have designed our study to minimize the potential influence of these patterns. Furthermore, we have no a priori basis for assuming any citation (e.g., self-citation rates) or demographic differences (e.g., age effect on publications or citations) between CE and UE groups. Preliminary evidence suggests these differences would likely favor the UE group. From the ∼60% of researchers where year of PhD was available, mean year of receiving a PhD for UE researchers was 1977, versus 1987 for CE researchers, implying that UE researchers should have on average more publications due to an age effect alone. Therefore, these methods are likely to provide a reasonable estimate of the preeminent researchers in each group and are useful in comparing the relative expertise and prominence between CE and UE groups.

Ultimately, of course, scientific confidence is earned by the winnowing process of peer review and replication of studies over time. In the meanwhile, given the immediacy attendant to the state of debate over perception of climate science, we must seek estimates while confidence builds. Based on the arguments presented here, we believe our findings capture the differential climate science credentials of the two groups.

[swake]

Hah!  It's source material used in your NOAA link.  It clearly states that they marginalized anyone who dissents from AGW as the methodology, as I previously quoted from the paper.  That's really easy to come up with a consensus when you give credibility to one subset and completely dismiss another subset as being inferior. 

You can set your criteria to include or exclude any subset from a study, there's nothing terribly objective about that.  Don't you think 1,372 climate researchers sounds like a terribly small sampling considering there are thousands of climate researchers across the globe?

Again from pnas.org:

So basically, yes, if you surveyed a subset of scientists in agreement on AGW, it's a no-brainer you will have near unanimity they believe in human caused climate change.  Problem is, there's plenty of evidence to suggest there are other credible causes and plenty of researchers who believe this but they are being marginalized by the pro AGW bloc as "deniers" or being on the payroll of the kooky right, Koch Brothers, Exxon Mobil, *insert bogeyman here*. 

There's no doubt climate changes, as it has since day one. 

Why don't you go find a real study published in a real, well regarded journal that actually flat out rejects man made climate change. One that is cited by any climate researcher who is not working for or paid by the energy industry. Just one.

[heironymouspasparagus]

Hah!  It's source material used in your NOAA link.  It clearly states that they marginalized anyone who dissents from AGW as the methodology, as I previously quoted from the paper.  That's really easy to come up with a consensus when you give credibility to one subset and completely dismiss another subset as being inferior. 

You can set your criteria to include or exclude any subset from a study, there's nothing terribly objective about that.  Don't you think 1,372 climate researchers sounds like a terribly small sampling considering there are thousands of climate researchers across the globe?

Again from pnas.org:

So basically, yes, if you surveyed a subset of scientists in agreement on AGW, it's a no-brainer you will have near unanimity they believe in human caused climate change.  Problem is, there's plenty of evidence to suggest there are other credible causes and plenty of researchers who believe this but they are being marginalized by the pro AGW bloc as "deniers" or being on the payroll of the kooky right, Koch Brothers, Exxon Mobil, *insert bogeyman here*. 

There's no doubt climate changes, as it has since day one. 

Like swake says - show us 1 that's not bought and paid for by big oil.  Just one....

[Red Arrow]

Why don't you go find a real study published in a real, well regarded by those who promote ACC, journal that actually flat out rejects man made climate change.

FIFY