Expert Embarrassment in Climate Change

Guest post by Thomas Fuller

The paper ‘Expert Credibility in Climate Change,’ published in PNAS by Anderegg, the late Stephen Schneider, James Prall and Jacob Harold attempts to measure the credibility of climate scientists by counting how many papers they have published and how often their work has been cited by others.

This led to the creation of a blacklist that will be used to injure the careers of those who have signed letters or petitions that do not agree with the Al Gore/James Hansen position on climate change, and to intimidate future scientists, effectively silencing dissent.

The paper is poorly done, as I’ve explained elsewhere. They used Google Scholar instead of an academic database. They searched only in English, despite the global nature of climate science. They got names wrong. They got job titles wrong. They got incorrect numbers of publications and citations.

As I’ve mentioned, the highly respected Spencer Weart dismissed the paper as rubbish, saying it should not have been published.

But the worst part of this is the violation of the rights of those they studied. Because Prall keeps lists of skeptical scientists on his weblog, obsessively trawling through online petitions and published lists of letters, and because those lists were used as part of the research, anyone now or in the future can have at their fingertips the names of those who now or in the past dared to disagree.

The Joe Romm’s of this world have already called for this list to be used to deny funding, tenure and grants to scientists. And it will be. It doesn’t matter that the nature of the letters and petitions they signed varied widely, from outright skepticism to really innocuous questioning of the state of the science.

The paper is tagged ‘Climate Deniers.’ Now, so are they.

This is an outright violation of every ethical code of conduct for research that has ever been published.

They violate several sections of the American Sociological Association Ethical Guidelines:

“Sociologists conduct research, teach, practice, and provide service only within the boundaries of their competence, based on their education, training, supervised experience, or appropriate professional experience.”

The members of the research team were operating outside their areas of professional competence.

“Sociologists refrain from undertaking an activity when their personal circumstances may interfere with their professional work or lead to harm for a student, supervisee, human subject, client, colleague, or other person to whom they have a scientific, teaching, consulting, or other professional obligation.” The subjects of their research–the scientists on the list–risk grave harm as a result of this paper.

“11. Confidentiality

Sociologists have an obligation to ensure that confidential information is protected. They do so to ensure the integrity of research and the open communication with research participants and to protect sensitive information obtained in research, teaching, practice, and service. When gathering confidential information, sociologists should take into account the long-term uses of the information, including its potential placement in public archives or the examination of the information by other researchers or

practitioners.

11.01 Maintaining Confidentiality

(a) Sociologists take reasonable precautions to protect the confidentiality rights of research participants, students, employees, clients, or others.

(b) Confidential information provided by research participants, students, employees, clients, or others is treated as such by sociologists even if there is no legal protection or privilege to do so. Sociologists have an obligation to protect confidential information and not allow information gained in confidence from

being used in ways that would unfairly compromise research participants, students, employees, clients, or others.

(c) Information provided under an understanding of confidentiality is treated as such even after the death of those providing that information.

(d) Sociologists maintain the integrity of confidential deliberations, activities, or

roles, including, where applicable, that of professional committees, review panels,

or advisory groups (e.g., the ASA Committee on Professional Ethics).

(e) Sociologists, to the extent possible, protect the confidentiality of student records,

performance data, and personal information, whether verbal or written, given in the context of academic consultation, supervision, or advising.

(f) The obligation to maintain confidentiality extends to members of research or training teams and collaborating organizations who have access to the information. To ensure that access to confidential information is restricted, it is the responsibility of researchers, administrators, and principal investigators to instruct staff to take the steps necessary to protect confidentiality.

(g) When using private information about individuals collected by other persons or institutions, sociologists protect the confidentiality of individually identifiable information. Information is private when an individual can reasonably expect that the information will not be made public with personal identifiers (e.g., medical or employment records).”

I think it is clear that the paper, wrong on the facts, is unethical in its intent and outcome. I call for the pape to be withdrawn and for Prall’s website to take down the Blacklist.

Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller