Anderegg et al., 2010
William R. Love Anderegg,
then a Stanford University student,
used Google Scholar
to identify the views
of the most prolific writers
on climate change.
He claimed to find “97% – 98% of the
climate researchers most actively publishing
in the field support the tenets of anthropogenic
(man made) climate change outlined by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "
This college paper was published
in Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, thanks to the addition
of three academics as coauthors.
This is not a survey of scientists.
Anderegg simply counted the number
of articles he found on the Internet,
published in academic journals,
by 908 scientists.
This counting exercise falsely assumes
abstracts of papers accurately reflect
their findings.
Anderegg did not determine
how many of these authors
believe global warming is harmful,
or that the science is sufficiently
established to be the basis
for public policy.
Anderegg didn’t count as “skeptics”
the scientists whose work
exposes gaps in the man-made
global warming theory,
or contradicts claims
that climate change
will be catastrophic.
Hundreds of scientists
fall into this category,
even though some profess
to “believe in" global warming.
Anderegg et al. found
the average skeptic
has been published
about half as frequently
as the average alarmist
(60 versus 119 articles).
The 50 most prolific alarmists
were published an average of 408 times,
versus only 89 times for the skeptics.
Reason:
The US government paid $64 billion
to climate researchers during the four years
from 2010 to 2013, virtually all
to find a human impact on the climate,
and virtually no dollars spent
on examining natural causes
of climate change.
It is also increasingly
common for academic articles
on climate change
to have multiple authors,
even a dozen or more,
inflating the number of times
a researcher can claim
to have been published.
Climate scientists
who are skeptics
tend to be older,
and under much less
pressure to publish.
What Anderegg discovered
is a small clique
of climate alarmists
who had their names added
to hundreds of articles
published in academic journals,
something that would have been
considered unethical
just a decade or two ago.
Anderegg asserts those “top 50"
are more credible than scientists
who publish less often, but
he made no effort to prove that.
Once again, no one asked
if the authors believe
that global warming
is a serious problem,
or if the science
was sufficiently established
to be the basis for public policy.