Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I thought I’d take a more detailed look at the claims of the recent paper entitled “Discrepancies in scientific authority and media visibility of climate change scientists and contrarians.”. The paper is discussed here on WUWT. I’m number 148 out of 386 on their list of contrarians, based on how many times I got mentioned in the media. But there are some bizarre oddities in their reckoning of media visibility.
One of their “media mentions” in my list is a hit piece on me over at PopTech. The guy who wrote it obviously hates me. I won’t link to it, it’s ugly and untrue. But this counts on their planet as media visibility. (Fools like PopTech don’t seem to realize that when they write such hit pieces, the reader naturally wants to know what the fuss is about, so they go read my work … but I digress.)
And this, of course, means that their lists are meaningless. People are always rubbishing climate skeptics by name, and since they are counting those as media mentions, their results will be wildly skewed.
Also, it seems that they do not cite most things that anyone has actually written for the web. I’ve written some 700 posts or so here on WUWT. Not one is mentioned. However, they did list three WUWT posts among my mentions … in one because I’m mentioned in the comments. Really? Only once was I ever mentioned by name in the WUWT comments???
For the other two, there’s a WUWT “Categories” aggregation page, which doesn’t mention me at all, and a “Tag” aggregation page where I’m listed as the author of one of the pieces linked to on the page … totally bizarre. I have the same visibility on literally dozens and dozens of WUWT aggregation pages.
However, it seems that if someone is mentioned in a comment to a post, it counts. So for example, Steve McIntyre wrote a post called “Willis Eschenbach on GISS Model E“. That appears on Judith Curry’s list of media referrals, and she’s only mentioned in a comment.
Even more bizarrely, that same post got onto Steve McIntyre’s list of media mentions, but not onto my list … go figure.
And it’s stranger than that. On Steve McIntyre’s list, some 22 posts on his own blog (out of hundreds he’s written) are included, and the rest are not. Say what?
Weirder yet. On Judith Curry’s list of media mentions, there are no less than 83 citations to the Laguna Beach Independent, a local California newspaper, with headlines like “Volleyball Open Returns” and “Student Musical Rolls The Dice”. At least upon a cursory inspection, not one of the eighty-two mentions Dr. Curry. I even looked at the “Source” version of the pages, where text can be there but not visible … but nothing there either.
Next oddity. Judith Curry gets two mentions for the same piece in Reason … and not only that, but she’s not mentioned in the Reason article at all. Nor would we expect her to be mentioned, it’s a piece about Ron Paul and Charlie Hebdo.
And out of all of the posts she’s written for her own blog, they list thirteen of them on her media mentions and not the others. Why not?
Since I was having so much fun, I thought I’d look at Anthony Watt’s “media visibility”. No less than seven of the mentions are by Slandering Sue over at hotwhopper … seriously, guys, that’s hardly “media visibility”. And how come I didn’t get any hotwhopper counts, she’s as vile to me as she is to Anthony …
Anthony also got two mentions over at Climate Audit … I greatly doubt that that is as many times as he is mentioned. Hang on, let me take a look … OK, a Google search for “site:climateaudit.org ‘anthony watts'” brings up no less than 813 hits …
He also gets three and only three hits over at Judith Curry’s blog … why only three? You tell me.
Next, Anthony gets exactly eight hits here at Watts Up With That … why eight? No idea. Why those eight? Not a clue.
(Let me note here that despite Anthony, Dr. Judith, myself, and others not getting credit for mentions on our own blogs … Marc Morano, the #1 “contrarian” by their count, got no less than 3,887 media mentions on their list from his own blog. Say what? With those, he’s at number one on the hit parade … and without them, he’d be down near me on the list.)
Anthony Watts did, however, get eleven hits at Amazon Japan, Italy, Netherlands, UK, Australia, Spain, and France for being listed as the lead author on “Climate Change: The Facts 2017”.
And Anthony got twelve hits at DeSmogBlog … no comment.
Then there are 51 links on Anthony’s list to examiner.com, all of which simply bounce you to axs.com … all the links are dead.
Next, here are the top twenty “contrarians” on their list, along with the number of media mentions that they got:
MARC MORANO: 4171
JAMES INHOFE: 2628
RICK PERRY: 1903
JUDITH CURRY: 1107
ROY SPENCER: 892
RICHARD LINDZEN: 878
CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON: 868
LAMAR SMITH: 831
BJORN LOMBORG: 770
JOHN CHRISTY: 723
WILLIE SOON: 711
ANTHONY WATTS: 699
ROGER PIELKE JR: 697
FRED SINGER: 626
PATRICK MICHAELS: 533
REX TILLERSON: 507
BOB CARTER: 505
DAVID ROSE: 437
MICHAEL FOX: 409
STEVE MCINTYRE: 374
MYRON EBELL: 369
A quick scan of the list reveals a fundamental problem with their analysis—many people on this list do no actual scientific research, and some have very little to do with the field … for example:
Mark Morano (#1) aggregates and publishes “contrarian” articles
James Inhofe (#2) is a US Senator
Rick Perry (#3) is the US Secretary of Energy
Lamar Smith (#8) is a US Representative
Rex Tillerson (#16) was the US Secretary of State and before that the head of Exxon
David Rose (#18) is an author and journalist
Michael Fox (#19, deceased) was the science and energy writer/reporter for the HawaiiReport.com
So … just who would you expect to get more mentions in the media, “T. Rex” Tillerson or Andrew Weaver? Who is Andrew Weaver, you may ask? Well, he’s a Canadian who is number 3 on their list of “Climate Change Scientists” … I’m sure you can see the problem with comparing media mentions of T. Rex and Andrew.
And the shabby scholarship knows no end … seeing so many links to stories in the Laguna Beach Independent, with none of them mentioning anything about climate, I thought I’d search the “contrarians” list to see how many links to the Independent there were in total.
There are 66,332 media mentions in total for all of the “contrarians”. Of these, amazingly, no less than 6,279, which is 9.5% of the total media links, are meaningless references to stories in the Laguna Beach Independent … and bizarrely, almost everyone who has any links to the Independent has the same number of links, 83. Other than that, one person has 82 links, one has 37, one has 17, and one has a single lonely link to the Independent.
As you might imagine, with the thousands of claimed media links for the 386 “contrarians”, I’ve only had the time (and the stomach) to look at a few of them … and in that few, the errors and bizarre choices are legion.
My conclusion? Like far too much climate “science”, this is lousy, sloppy, extremely poor scholarship … no wonder they’re trying to silence their scientific opposition.
In closing, let me note two tweets from Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. and one from Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. regarding the piece of bumpf in question. In the first one, Dr. P. Jr. objects strongly and reasonably to being lumped in with the “contrarians”
In the second one, he points out that the purpose of the paper is simple censorship:
And in the final one, Senior tells us what happened when he protested to Nature about the matter:
You’ve got to love the irony … in response to a reasonable, professional, valid, and 100% true complaint about the study, rather than deal with the actual issue, they just erase the entire Supplementary Information file, which contains (contained) a host of things showing that they are totally incompetent.
Good thing I downloaded the Supplementary Information file containing the links I referred to above before these latest scientific Stalinists simply disappeared the offending facts …
And so we end with the most outré situation of all—they’re so far into censorship that they’re even censoring themselves …
Ouroboros would be proud. The rest of us … not so much.
Best to all,
w.
[UPDATE] I’ve put the Supplementary Information as a zip file on my Dropbox public folder. It’s 23 megabytes … I think Dropbox will handle it, but let me know if it doesn’t.
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Did you expect fake science, conducted by antintellectual charlatans, to make sense?
I will mention your name here, Willis Eschenbach, to help raise your profile.
You might have to spell it wrong to get it counted.
Nature Communications shall hereafter be known as Nature Confabulations. Note the Con part.
Here, I’ll give Willis a hand too: Willis Eschenbach is an evil, evil person., … since NATURE seems to gravitate towards negative … “citations”.
You’re welcome, W. (^_^)
I had a look at the file for Marc Morano, because he is allegedly the top ‘contrarian’, with over 4000 media articles about him. It turns out that most of these ‘media articles’ (about 80%) are posts at his own blog, climate depot. So Marc Morano is the most visible climate contrarian, because Marc Morano has written a lot of blog articles about Marc Morano at Marc Morano’s blog.
As also noted in the comments to Dr. Curry’s post in Climate Etc., it is not necessary to be among the living to qualify as a “contrarian”. Several people among the deceased have been mentioned in this list. I noted that the late, great, John Coleman who started his career at a local TV station I watched as a kid and eventually wound up co-founding “The Weather Channel”, who passed in 2018 is listed in the top quartile at #42 right after the very much alive Ross McKitrick (#41). Unless they are referring to another John Coleman? So like CO2 in the atmosphere I guess contrarianism persists long after it is introduced?
I have no hesitation suggesting these authors have demonstrated their imminent qualifications to conduct a comparative study on the voting patterns in Chicago.
You can only laugh when they want to censor the opinions of dead people.
But, as someone mentioned in the previous WUWT article, Stephen Schneider (somebody who loved both global cooling and then global warming) was also on the list. The authors do at least have some measure of consistency in the madness.
Even Zbigniew Jaworowski who died almost ten years ago.
Making a list like the Nature paper has with the legitimization of a ‘prestigious’ journal is a chilling threat, not simply a form of censorship.
Indeed; chilling, psychotic, malevolent and vicious, the standard Alinsky fare (Rules for Radicals):
13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.
I’m number 148 out of 386 on their list of contrarians
Congratulations! But what a bizarre way to have gained entry.
Seriously, thank you for the essay. I expect the paper to be widely cited. Probably honored with an award.
I don’t have the list; is Mother Nature #1 there?
List, as also noted in some of the above posts, and at Dr Curry’s post on it, is here: http://climatlas.com/tropical/media_cloud_list.txt Judging from the “climatlas.com/tropical/” url root there, it appears Ryan Maue snagged the list out of the paper’s Supplements section before the paper’s authors managed to delete it yesterday.
Let us see if any of Climate sciences exalted warming proponents step up and demand this terribly sinister and ugly paper be retracted! That their has been no attempt at true scholarship in it is an indictment of its true purpose. Crickets anyone?
Thanks for those who provided the list of climate realists. I notice that there are many politicians and journalists on it, in addition to professional scientists. I haven’t been able to access the list of Deniers of Natural Climate Change, but from context in the article I deduce it is all scientists in the climate field. If that is the case, a short summary of the study’s findings would seem to be: Michael Mann has published more climate-related articles in professional journals than John Stossell or Rick Perry. That is not surprising. The other finding is that Perry and Stossel are mentioned in lay media more often than Mann, on all subjects, not just climate. This is probably a close one but still not surprising if true. No doubt there would be different numbers if their “scientist” list include Al Gore, Bill Nye, Greta Thunberg and Occasional Cortex. Classic climate research — decide what narrative you want the rubes to swallow, then structure your study to get that result.
“Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done…This is not a good system for research into those areas of science that affect policy. Even worse, the system works against problem solving. Because if you solve a problem, your funding ends.”
“I have great respect for the corrosive influence of bias, systematic distortions of thought, the power of rationalization, the guises of self-interest, and the inevitability of unintended consequences.”
– Dr. Michael Crichton, 2004
Willis: Just a small correction. The line:
Rex Tillerson (#16) was the US Secretary of Energy and before that the head of Exxon.
Is not correct, Rex Tillerson was the US Secretary of State.
Willis had it right, with Tillerson at State and Perry at Energy.
Mark Morano (#1) aggregates and publishes “contrarian” articles
James Inhofe (#2) is a US Senator
Rick Perry (#3) is the US Secretary of Energy
Lamar Smith (#8) is a US Representative
Rex Tillerson (#16) was the US Secretary of State and before that the head of Exxon
John,
I copied that right off of the screen, with Ctrl-c, and pasted it in to my post. Apparently, had been corrected.
Thanks for checking my post. Another set of eyes never hurts.
Interesting that Nature would allow the ad hominem fallacy into an accepted peer reviewed article. They’re squandering their prestige.
Their whatnow? 😉
{UPDATE] I’ve put the Supplementary Information as a zip file on my Dropbox public folder. It’s 23 megabytes … I think Dropbox will handle it, but let me know if it doesn’t.
w.
I’ve also added to the head post that despite Anthony, Dr. Judith, myself, and others not getting credit for mentions on our own blogs … Marc Morano, the #1 “contrarian” by their count, got no less than 3,887 media mentions on their list from his own blog.
Say what? With those, he’s at number one on the hit parade … and without them, he’d be down near me on the list.
No end to the oddities …
w.
You should write them, Willis, and demand a correction because you are proud to be on the list and think you deserve to have a much higher score.
Interesting to look up the authors in Google scholar and note they claim no competing interests in the ethics declaration in the paper.
It is an astounding level of deceit.
Willis,
I didn’t know you were a message therapist until the young and upcoming scientist, Trevor Nace, explicitly pointed it out several times. Instead of having a scientific discussion over my reference to your Greenland post, he simply choose to negate the author. The CCC are making the so-called CCS very nervous. Congrats.
https://imgur.com/a/Eyg7dBu
Damn, I’m not on the list.
I’m going to have to try harder.
Well, the fun knows no end. Seeing so many links to the Laguna Beach Independent, with none of them mentioning anything about climate, I thought I’d search the “contrarians” list to see how many there were in total.
There are 66,332 media mentions in total for all of the “contrarians”. Of these, amazingly, no less than 6,279, which is 9.5% of the total media links, are meaningless references to the Laguna Beach Independent …
I’ll add this to the head post, and keep investigating.
w.
The big winner in the Laguna Beach Independent competition is a contrarian named Ken Malloy. Of his 84 listed media mentions, no less than 83 of them (99%) are useless links to random Independent articles. And strangely, almost every one of the 78 people whose media mentions contain links to the Independent has the same number of links, 83 …
w.
Looking at this further, the authors do appear to have filtered out the Laguna Beach references as well as some other spurious hits when they calculate the final media mention totals (perhaps using the filter-list that is among the SI files). In the CCC list, for example, Ken Malloy just has one media mention, not 84.
Thanks, Ruth … but the numbers still don’t add up, and there is still stacks of nonsense in the lists. And if they’ve filtered them out, why are they still listing them in their files?
Also, some of the contrarians are counted as having 0 media mentions. And ClimateDepot, Marc Morano’s blog, is still the source of almost all of his mentions, while WUWT hardly gives Anthony any. And DeSmogBlog is one of the largest sources. See my latest post here.
w.
I agree, still many irrelevant hits in the lists. But there does seem to have been some preliminary filtering.
When one uses a search engine, the results are tailored to the users previous history.
I suspect that may explain this oddity of an obscure local paper getting so heavily weighted.
My guess would be that whoever did the searching spends a lot of time at the website of that paper.
Willis.
I think with a little work, a dozen or so people could write individual matters Arising
and subit to the journal
Publicity seekers shouldn’t complain about how their efforts are measured. After all, it’s a common hazard of show-biz.
Dear heavens, 1sky1, could you possibly find a more trival and meaningless issue to comment on? Are you really someone who is that totally clueless, or do you just play that person here on WUWT?
w.
There’s nothing “trivial or meaningless” in distinguishing between doing competent science out of intellectual curiosity and seeking publicity for reasons narcissistic or political. Clueless is he who thinks that this distinction holds only on one side of the great climate debate.
Dude, you are hilarious. You truly think that you see what’s happening. But keep it up, you do you …
w.
I think this last comment by 1sky1 may actually have merit, except for it is true of the side he seeks to defend, if I understand him correctly.
The warmistas certainly seem to be motivated by something other than an honest search for objective scientific veracity.
Although he left out another of the motivating factors of the climate mafia: Financial gain.
To understand me correctly, note that the third sentence of this follow-on post tells us:
BTW, I’ve never been on the side of junk science for any gain–personal, political or financial.
“…BTW, I’ve never been on the side of junk science for any gain–personal, political or financial…”
We understand you correctly. You’ve just been on the side of junk science for loserdom.
If you claim to have been misunderstood, you might simply declare in plain language who it is you are referring to.
I allowed for the possibility that you were misunderstood.
But there is little point in speaking in riddles.
Most people here take this entire subject very seriously, and so any intimation that people here are engaging in entertainment or mere publicity seeking, whether you meant to say that or not, will not be taken warmly.
Personally, I do not think publicity, to use the term literally, is a strong motivator of the majority on either side.
Perhaps for someone like Leo di Caprio, or Mikey Mann.
But I think people like the authors of the Nature Communications paper are far more interested in power, and to that end seek to shut down discussion.
Fat chance!
In the age of burgeoning social media, the entire notion that, by “tracking their digital footprints,” the relative “visibility” of “prominent contrarians” and “expert scientists” can be meaningfully determined is outlandish on the face of it. As Judith Curry clearly recognized, this is little more than socio-babble, patently put up to stifle contrarian debate.
The wholly undeserved attention given the exact rankings here suggests a preoccupation with matters of publicity more than substantive issues of science. And the immediate resort to ad hominems to counter such a suggestion indicates that it’s not far off. Indeed, what would the world know of those who want to roar like lions were it not for their seeking out a platform on the web.
Who would be on our list of the worthy 400?
The latest from the Editors:
Onwards …
w.
Willis, along the lines of the most sunlight being gotten at the latitude with the least government:. “Figures lie, and Liars figure.” My personal favorite comes from the original climate realist, Sam Clemens: “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics!”
Pointy end forward, dirty side down.
And upwards! A couple of newbies exposed the CliSci scam. The old boys are scrambling in damage control.
Newbies?
Newbies: The authors of the subject “study,” working at a nothing school and using a lousy $10,000 government grant. This might be the event that brings down the whole CliSci scam.
While the supplementary matter has been taken down, the paper still has Figure 2, which displays the names of the top 100 “real” climate scientists, see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09959-4/figures/2
That includes Richard Betts, who is concerned with being named.
It’s amusing that Tony Heller isn’t on the contrarian list, though his pen name, Steven Goddard is.
(Thank you for saving the SI, I created a dropbox account so I could download it. It’s not entirely clear where the CCS list is, but the media list is interesting as is.)