Climatologists consensus on global warming: poll sample size 79

Once upon a time, there was a scientific consensus that the sun revolved around the earth… that the stars made shapes such as birds and crustaceans and told us the history of our world’s creation… that E did not equal MC squared… and that lightning was the wrath of the gods…
Don’t you just love campfire stories ?

This was posted in response to RC’s gushing endorsement of this “survey” result. Of course it was never published by those eminent and ethical “scientists”.
“Of course if this paper had any relationship to science rather than propaganda, the “97% of the leading researchers we studied” (which curiously morphs to “97% of oncologists” in an included metaphor), would have detailed the total number of “leading researchers” sampled, and the method of selection. But this is RC and we only do post-normal science here.”

scientistsRskeptics,
1. Doran and Zimmerman 2009,
Comment on “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change”
(Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, Volume 90, Number 27, July 2009)
– Roland Granqvist

In a summary of their survey on the opinion about global warming among Earth scientists (see Eos, 90(3), 20 January 2009), Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman conclude that the debate on the role of human activity is largely nonexistent, and that the challenge is “how to effectively communicate this fact to policy makers” and to the public. However, I argue that neither of these conclusions can be drawn from the survey. For example, one issue that is much discussed in the public debate is the role of greenhouse gas emissions in global warming. Perhaps there is not much debate about this issue among scientists, but this cannot be concluded from the survey, in which nothing is said about such emissions. In the second question of their survey, Doran and Kendall Zimmerman refer only to “human activity.” Furthermore, even if scientists agree that the effect of human activity is “significant,” which is the word used in the second question, they can have very different beliefs as to how large, and how dangerous, this effect is.

Further Comment on “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change”
(Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, Volume 90, Number 27, July 2009)
– John Helsdon

The feature article “Examining the scientific consensus on climate change,” by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman (see Eos, 90(3), 20 January 2009), while interesting, has a primary flaw that calls their interpretation into question. In their opening sentence, the authors state that on the basis of polling data, “47% [of Americans] think climate scientists agree… that human activities are a major cause of that [global] warming….” They then described the two-question survey they had posed to a large group of Earth scientists and scientifically literate (I presume) people in related fields. While the polled group is important, in any poll the questions are critical. My point revolves around their question 2, to wit, “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” Note that the opening sentence of their article uses the phrase “major cause” in reporting the results of the polling, while the poll itself used the phrase “significant contributing factor.” There is a large difference between these two phrases.

The “97%” is only 75 out of 77 subjectively determined “specialists” or 2.4% of the 3146 who participated in the survey
2. Anderegg, Prall, Harold, Schneider 2010,
Google Scholar at the Academy (National Post, Canada)

The non-expert writer of this analysis of credibility, James W. Prall at Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, is not only not an expert in the field of climate change, he is also not an expert in electrical and computer engineering, at least not in the sense that some might assume from his University of Toronto affiliation. Mr. Prall is an administrator who looks after computers at the university, not a scientist or even a lowly researcher in the field. If it strikes you as odd that an editor at the National Academy of Sciences would accept someone with a life-long service and programming career in the computer field to judge the academic credentials of scientists, it gets odder.
Prall’s methodology in determining who is credible as a scientist involves the use of Google Scholar which, he explained last fall to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “studies just the scientific literature. They look at peer-reviewed journals.” Prall uses Google Scholar to determine how often people publish and how often they are cited. Based on the number of hits that Google Scholar produces – not on any analysis of the actual content of climate studies – Prall determines scientific merit. It’s an easy and straightforward process, he explained, that anyone can perform.
Does Google Scholar really limit itself to scholars? No. Search “Al Gore” on Google Scholar and you will find some 33,200 Scholar hits, almost 10 times as many as obtained by searching “James Hansen,” a true scientist and easily the best known of those endorsed by Prall as a bona fide believer. Neither does Google Scholar limit itself to “just the scientific literature.” Google Scholar finds articles in newspapers and magazines around the world: 113,000 in the New York Times, 22,000 in Economist, 21,000 in Le Monde, 16,000 in The Guardian.
Prall maintains his data on a portion of the University of Toronto website (this is his personal website, and not affiliated with the university, he is careful to note). I first came across him while in the CBC’s studios last fall, when he was invited by CBC Radio to counter my views by presenting a forerunner of his study, which was then unpublished. His results then differed little in the message they conveyed: “According to Jim Prall’s database, of the 615 scientists who published papers on climate change, the sceptics are outnumbered 601 to 14,” CBC announced.
Prall’s now-published work has some important differences. To give his work the trappings required to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, his study has several real scientists as co-authors, the best known and most credible among them being Stanford’s Steven Schneider, who was previously best known for predicting global cooling.
But Prall’s reliance on Google Scholar has not changed. He even tells us what search term he used to arrive at his results – key in the author by first and last name and, to obtain “climate relevant publications,” add the term “climate.”
Works beautifully. Al Gore turns up in such “climate sensitive” academic publications as Vanity Fair, Sierra Club Books, and HollywoodJesus.com.

Poptech,
Again, what’s so objectionable about the Doran & Kendall-Zimmerman survey? I see a lot of complaints about the way the questions were worded, but frankly, I don’t see the issue. In which relevant way is a belief that human activity is a “significant contributing factor” to global warming different from believing that human activity is one of the causes of global warming?
The “97%” is only 75 out of 77 subjectively determined “specialists” or 2.4% of the 3146 who participated in the survey
As for the number 97% coming from a 76 out of 79 (question 1) or 75 out of 77 (question 2), again, what is the relevance? Those 79 individuals are only the ones who indicated that climatology was their main field of work and that more than 50% of their output in the last 5 years was on the topic of climate change. 79 people with those credentials is quite a lot. But crucially, if you take the other categories (with presumably more responders), you still get around 90% of agreement with the IPCC. Are you any happier or any less willing to believe that there is a consensus on this topic with these figures?
It is only when you go to the “Non-publishers, non-climatologists” that you get a below 80% agreement with the IPCC. And still, that is almost 80%. Are you any happier with this figure?
Regarding the issue of self-selection, yes, participants self-selected. The question is, if you think this had a potential to bias the results, WHY didn’t the scientists who disagreed with the IPCC’s conclusions voice their views? In other words, why do you think that the self-selecting bias should go in the direction of the IPCC, and not on the direction of those who disagree with it?
As for the long quote supposed to discredit the Anderegg et al (2010) paper, it is frankly irrelevant. First of all, it picks on the second author of the paper, whose role was doing (but not designing) the research and helping write the paper. Not a substantive criticism. Second, it criticizes the use of Google Scholar as a means of getting scientific citations, by using the example of googling Al Gore vs James Hansen. This is red herring, because it is not what the authors did. They collected the names of scientists based on signatures on consenting or dissenting statements (eg. IPCC, Manhattan declaration). Then, they
“… tallied the number of climate-relevant publications authored or coauthored by each researcher (defined here as expertise) and counted the number of citations for each of the researcher’s four highest-cited papers (defined here as prominence) using Google Scholar. We then imposed an a priori criterion that a researcher must have authored a minimum of 20 climate publications to be considered a climate researcher, thus reducing the database to 908 researchers. Varying this minimum publication cutoff did not materially alter results”
Again, what is so objectionable about this procedure? If you think it biased the results in favor of agreement with the IPCC, can you explain how it did so?

The Doran objection is clear, 75 scientists is not representative of any consensus.
PNAS reviewers and author’s William R. L. Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob Harold and Stephen H. Schneider are apparently Google Scholar illiterate since searching for just the word “climate” with an author’s name will bring results from non-peer-reviewed sources such as books, magazines, newspapers, patents, citations, duplicate listings and all sorts of other erroneous results. There is no “peer-reviewed journal only” search option in Google Scholar. Not to mention using those search techniques will get results from authors with the same name but who are completely different people. For instance even when using the author’s name in quotes or advanced search operators such as “author:”, Google Scholar will still show results from authors with only the same last name. Thus authors with common names will get inflated results. Take for instance using author “Phil Jones” (the infamous former CRU director of climategate fame) with the search word “climate”, you get almost 5000 results!
Cherry Picking:
They cherry picked away skeptics, “we imposed a 20 climate-publications minimum to be considered a climate researcher”. So if a scientist published only 19 or less papers on the climate he is not considered an “expert”. They did this intentionally as they noted “researchers with fewer than 20 climate publications comprise ≈80% the UE group.” Volume of publications does not indicate scientific truth. It cannot be ignored that skeptics extensively publish peer-reviewed papers so they have to use this propaganda to subjectively define “experts”.
Climate Patents:
By default Google Scholar is set to search both “articles and patents” yet no mention of searching only for articles is in the paper. So why were they searching for patents and how is a patent that contains the search word “climate” a relevant “climate publication”?
Verification:
An attempt to reproduce the results using their methods was unsuccessful.
“we collected the number of climate-relevant publications for all 1,372 researchers from Google Scholar (search terms: “author:fi-lastname climate”)”
Using their search terms: “author:fi-lastname climate” I searched Google Scholar for the infamous CRU director Phil Jones,
author:P-Jones climate
Results: 6,580
The first result listed is “Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas” by author Peter G. Jones of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Cali, Colombia.
The third result listed is “Organizational climate: A review of theory and research by author Allan P. Jones of the Department of Psychology, University of Houston.
The seventh result listed is “Psychological climate: Dimensions and relationships of individual and aggregated work environment perceptions by author Allan P. Jones of the Department of Psychology, University of Houston.
Clearly these were not papers from Phil Jones of the CRU on climate change.
Looking on Prall’s list of IPCC AR4 Working Group 1 Authors referenced from their Supplemental Information you see Phil Jones listed with 724 climate publications not the 6,580 that I found using their search method. A link is provided under “GS queries” for Phil Jones labeled “CLIM”, clicking on this link brings a surprising revelation, the search term is changed to “author:PD-Jones climate”. When their paper explicitly said “author:fi-lastname climate” and no mention is made of including the middle initial. It appears Prall added the middle initial arbitrarily to the authors on the list further undermining the consistency of their results. Using this search term I again search Google Scholar,
author:PD-Jones climate
Results: 5,370
The fifth result down is “Climate since A. D. 1500”, a 1992 book by Phil Jones not a peer-reviewed paper.
Chapter 13 from the same book is found later in the same results as a separate listing, “13 Climatic variations in the longest instrumental records, thus counting the same book twice.
The book’s introduction is also found later in the same results “Climate since AD 1500: Introduction”, now counting the same book three times but it gets worse,
Citations for this book are counted over 20 times in Google Scholar, further inflating the results. No mention of turning off citations is mentioned in their paper as this feature is on by default in Google Scholar and in the “CLIM” link from Prall’s page.
The climate total number of 724 for Phil Jones on Prall’s list is unverifiable using the methods outlined in their paper and appears to be made up.
It is clear they counted the total number of climate publications because this is explicitly stated in their paper,
“We ranked researchers based on the total number of climate publications authored.”
However no verification of these results was done by the authors as is mentioned in their paper,
“We verified, however, author identity for the four top-cited papers by each author.”
It appears they only verified the top four results for their “citation analysis” not for the total amount of results using the search word “climate” for each of the 1372 authors.
Conclusion: the study is worthless due to Google Scholar illiteracy and Cherry Picking.
*****
[Note: BB code doesn’t work on WordPress. Use HTML angle brackets instead of square brackets. ~dbs]

Poptech, there is no need to elaborate so thoroughly to counter scientistsRskeptics long narratives. Simply point out that he completely neglects the fact that the opinions of climatologists about AGW gleaned from the survey DO NOT reflect the IPCC consensus (or direct him to my initial comment and those of othrers where he can compare the two). You should have just stopped him when he said this:
“So what exactly is so objectionable about the skepticalscience infographic claiming that 97% of scientists working on climate change agree with the IPCC consensus?”
We’ll do this again. Here is question number 2 from the survey from which the 97% figure is derived:
“2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”
Here is the IPCC AR4 consensus:
“Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”
Doesn’t that simple comparison seal the deal and expose the vacuousness of the sRs argument? The answer to the sRs question as to “what is so objectionable” about the claims emanating from this survey is pretty simple and straightforward: IT”S A LIE!
Those two statements are not remotely the same thing and to claim that they are, something sRs nonchalantly and repeatedly does, nakedly exposes his biases. Connecting the two versions as one is quite “objectionable” thank you very much.
As I said in my post above, my alternate question below would have been more in line with the IPCC consensus (and it still admittedly falls short):
“2. Do you think human activity is THE MOST significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”
One can see why it’s so easy to make the pro-AGW crowd believe “unequivocally” that “it must be CO2.” This particular survey mini-saga reflects the larger debate, where many well-meaning people (and some very sinister wolves mixed in) needed to “save the world” because they swallowed the AGW hook deep and it got a good hold of them. Unfortunately the hook held poisoned political propagandist bait, but I digress. The bottom line is it’ll be hard to set them free of AGW’s grip without gutting them. Once you have this stuff down in your core, it’s hard to let go. I am still optimistic that reality prevails and it does look like the worm has finally turned. But let’s keep steering it right (as in correctly) cuz we have a ways to go. I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.
See, Poptech, it’s that easy. So next time simply tell sRs, “Nice try but that’s a lie.” Keep it short and sweet like…um, I did. Carry on.

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