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 assumedabstracts 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 that 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 the authors if they believed global warming is a serious problem, or if the science was sufficiently established to be the basis for public policy.