Expert credibility in climate change_Convinced-CE (98%) vs Skeptics UE (2%)_ Can THE 98% be mistaken or corrupt?

Like my young blog colleague, student at a leading Univ in Climate Change research, writing in his blog Fight Entropy, I came across this gem of a paper in the most read articles in PNAS

 To my mind, this is a paper which, for all intents and purposes, removes much of the uncertainty which has arisen in the interminable debates on the credibility of anthropogenic (human generated) origin of  climate change (ACC).   The paper is entitled "Expert credibility in climate change" by   William R. L. Anderegg,  James W. Prall,  Jacob Harold, and  Stephen H. Schneider, and is Freely available online through the PNAS open access option. [pdf] Contributed by Stephen H. Schneider, April 9, 2010 (sent for review December 22, 2009)

This date is important in the light of the Incident known to a wide public as Climate Gate which originated in November 2009 cf. TIME LINE in WIKIPEDIA 

Returning to the paper  "Expert credibility in climate change" 

The Discrepancy between the convinced experts (CE) [98%] and the rise in scepticism in the general public fired by the unconvinced experts (UE) [2%] led my young colleague climate scientist, at in his blog Fight Entropy to comment  "we are the 98% joke." 

 - Quick Summary of "Expert credibility in climate change" 

"Although preliminary estimates from published literature and expert surveys suggest striking agreement among climate scientists on the tenets of anthropogenic climate change (ACC), the American public expresses substantial doubt about both the anthropogenic cause and the level of scientific agreement underpinning ACC.

A broad analysis of the climate scientist community itself, the distribution of credibility of dissenting researchers (UE) relative to agreeing researchers (CE), and the level of agreement among top climate experts has not been conducted and would inform future ACC discussions. Here, we use an extensive data set of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.


  - Research Ranking 



" The authors provide a broad assessment of the relative credibility of researchers convinced by the evidence (CE) of ACC and those unconvinced by the evidence (UE) of ACC." They claim that:

"consideration of UE researchers differs from previous work on climate change sceptics and contrarians in that the authors primarily focus on researchers that have published extensively in the climate field, although we consider all skeptics/contrarians that have signed prominent statements concerning ACC (6–8). Such expert analysis can illuminate public and policy discussions about ACC and the extent of consensus in the expert scientific community.


 - Results and Discussion Summarised (Numbers in brackets below refer to references in the full paper)



"We (the authors) provide a large-scale quantitative assessment of the relative level of agreement, expertise, and prominence in the climate researcher community. We show that the expertise and prominence,two integral components of overall expert credibility, of climate researchers convinced by the evidence of ACC vastly overshadows that of the climate change skeptics and contrarians. This divide is even starker when considering the top researchers in each group. Despite media tendencies to present both sides in ACC debates (9), which can contribute to continued public misunderstanding regarding ACC (7, 11, 12, 14), not all climate researchers are equal in scientific credibility and expertise in the climate system. This extensive analysis of the mainstream versus skeptical/contrarian researchers suggests a strong role for considering expert credibility in the relative weight of and attention to these groups of researchers in future discussions in media, policy, and public forums regarding anthropogenic climate change." 

Endogeneity

The Authors are of course well aware of the imperfections of  their research credibility indicators  from reviewing the literature (cf? their references 21 to 29) 


"Publication and citation analyses are not perfect indicators of researcher credibility, but they have been widely used in the natural sciences for comparing research productivity, quality, and prominence (21–24). Furthermore, these methods tend to correlate highly with other estimates of research quality, expertise, and  prominence  (21–26).  These  standard  publication  and  citation metrics are often used in many academic fields to inform decisions regarding hiring and tenure..."

and again

"Regarding the influence of citation patterns, we acknowledge that it is difficult to quantify potential biases of self-citation or clique citation in the analysis presented here. However, citation analysis research suggests that the potential of these patterns to in fluence results is likely to decline as sample size of researchers, possible cliques, and papers analysed for citations considered increases (22, 25–28)."

Largely absent from my blogs in 2011,(a hectic year of much change in our personal lives) I thought such a paper would bring some serenity to such a crucial issue and united effort to such a global Issue.  Reading the literature opened by studying the current paper "Expert credibility in climate change"_ I was surprised to see that resistance to the required freely consented united stance and accompanying measures to alleviate " best-worst scenario prevision - designed to alleviate unwanted greenhouse gas and global warming (GW).

The subject is still a downer in any conversation among friends ie. if you wish to keep them especially if they have readily available coal at hand. GW-CC appears to be the subject to be avoided in our Presidential candidates here in France. Like the situation of EU anthropogenic debt there is no magic wand at hand.


MORE...


Anderegg et al's reply to Aarstad: Risk management versus “truth”


Anderegg et al's reply to Bodenstein: Contextual data about the relative scale of opposing scientific communities. 


Anderegg et al's Reply to O’Neill and Boykoff: Objective classification of climate experts

Supporting Information Anderegg et al. 10.1073/pnas.1003187107 

I will return to the GW theme in the light of my rapid update in order to write this log. Many of these peer reviewed papers are well worth reading and deserve as strong an echo as possible.

CHEERS Anderegg et al

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