Anderegg et al., 2010
William R. Love Anderegg,
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 (IPCC).
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 assumed
abstracts of papers
accurately reflect
their findings.
Anderegg
did not determine
how many
of these authors
believe global warming
is harmful, or if they
believed the science
was 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
climate 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
actually 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
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.