Climate Change Skeptics

Team

Sabine Niederer, Andrei Mogoutov, Bram Nijhof.

Introduction - Climate Change Skeptics Hold a Conference

In March 2008, the Heartland Institute organized the first Climate Change skeptics conference, "the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change." It was organized in a traditional scientific format with keynote speakers and 3 days of parallel tracks with panels. There are also proceedings in the form of audio and video clips. In his opening remarks, the organizer, Joseph L. Bast, states: "These scientists and economists have been published thousands of times in the world’s leading scientific journals and have written hundreds of books. If you call this the fringe, where’s the center?" (http://www.heartland.org/NewYork08/newyork08.cfm)

This project is an inquiry into the place and status of climate change skepticism. First, we would like to gain a sense of the composition of climate change skepticism by comparing the skeptics' disciplines with those of climate science. Do the skeptics have a similar distribution of disciplines as the non-skeptics?

Secondly, we are interested in how 'mainstream' or 'fringe' the skeptics are. Are they published in journals that are significant in climate science more broadly? What is the status of the publications and journals within climate science? Here a comparison of three types of journals is of interest: those publishing no skeptics, those publishing only skeptics and those publishing both. Are the journals that publish both the skeptics and the non-skeptics amongst the journals with the greatest impact in the climate-related fields? Are the journals that publish only the skeptics among the most significant journals?

Finally, we ask would like to inquire into the specificity of the expertise of the skeptics. Are they working exclusively or mainly in the area of climate change? Or, do they also work in other areas? In particular, we are interested in whether the skeptics have other issues they are skeptical about.

Lists of Climate Change Skeptics

There are a series of lists available with climate change skeptics, including wikipedia entries, compiliations by watchdogs as well as outcomes from more academic analysis. For the purposes of analysis we have compiled a short list as well as a long list of climate change skeptics. The short list is derived from a triangulation of sources (below) as well as the keynote speakers at the skeptics' conference, "the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change," organized by the Heartland Institute in March 2008. (Frederick Seitz passed away prior to the conference, yet has been kept on the list.)

• http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_warming_skeptics
• http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2007/globalwarming/SkepticalScientists.asp
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Global_warming_skeptics
• http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2005/05/exxon_chart.html

The long list is the short list with the addition of those who participated in a panel at the skeptics' conference. (See the program of the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change at http://www.heartland.org/NewYork08/ConferenceProgram.pdf)

Skeptics shortlist:

• Sallie Baliunas
• Joseph Bast
• Paul Driessen
• William Gray
• Sherwood Idso
• Vaclav Klaus
• Richard Lindzen
• Patrick Michaels
• Steven Milloy
• Frederick Seitz
• Fred Singer
• Willie Soon
• Roy Spencer
• John Stossel
• James M. Taylor

Skeptics' shortlist with URL of the homepages and other data: skeptics_list.rtf

Skeptics long list: heartland_conference_panel_participants_march2008.xls

Question 1: Does climate change science look like climate change skepticism? Does climate science have a similar distribution of fields as the skeptics'?

Does the composition of climate science mirror that of skeptic climate science? In other words, is skeptic climate science in its own field, in the sense of the particular distribution of disciplines?

Here we compare the disciplines of the journals in which significant climate change articles appear with those of the skeptics.

climate change skeptics' disciplines	climate change disciplines

Articles per discipline	Discipline (skeptics list)	Discipline (climate sciences)	Articles per discipline
2788	ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES	ECOLOGY	4262
2636	METEOROLOGY & ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES	METEOROLOGY & ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES	4088
1333	AGRONOMY	MULTIDISCIPLINARY SCIENCES	3178
1126	GEOSCIENCES, INTERDISCIPLINARY	ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES	2761
1073	MULTIDISCIPLINARY SCIENCES	GEOSCIENCES, INTERDISCIPLINARY	2179
1024	PLANT SCIENCES	PLANT SCIENCES	941
649	ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS	AGRONOMY	653
178	ECOLOGY	BIOLOGY, MISCELLANEOUS	543
140	BIOCHEMISTRY & MOLECULAR BIOLOGY	FORESTRY	504
121	CHEMISTRY, MEDICINAL	ENGINEERING, ENVIRONMENTAL	396

The top 5 disciplines in the climate sciences are among the top 10 disciplines in the skeptics' sciences.

Question 2: How 'mainstream' or 'fringe' are climate change skeptics within the fields of climate science?

Do the skeptics publish significant articles (heavily cited by others in the fields of climate science)? Do they publish in significant journals, according to those journals receiving the most citations for climate change related articles?

Are the journals that publish no skeptics more significant than those that publish only skeptics?

Here we query ISI's Web of Science for all articles on "climate change." On 9 July 2008 there are approximately 27,000 articles, 15,877 of which receive at least three citations. That set of almost 16,000 articles is retained for the analysis.

Nr. of citations	Name Journal Climate Sciences	Name Journal Skeptics	Nr. of citations
32558	NATURE	SCIENCE	751
26361	SCIENCE	NATURE	651
13586	J CLIMATE	J CLIMATE	556
10572	GEOPHYS RES LETT	GEOPHYS RES LETT	409
9424	J GEOPHYS RES-ATMOS	J ATMOS SC	374
8984	CLIMATIC CHANGE	J APPL METEOROL	339
8868	ECOLOGY	MON WEATHER REV	335
6497	CLIM DYNAM	B AM METEOROL SOC	294
6183	QUATERNARY RES	AGRON J	287
5733	OECOLOGIA	MON WEA REV	267
5048	J GEOPHYS RES	J GEOPHYS RES	241
4807	PALEOCEANOGRAPHY	CLIMATIC CHANGE	23

The skeptics and the non-skeptics publish in the same top four climate change-related journals.

climate_change_journals_all.png:

Question 3: Are the climate change skeptics devoted mainly to climate change, or do they also have other issues (which they may be skeptical about as well)?

The question concerns the specificity of the skeptics to the issue of climate change. Are the skeptics primarily in the area of climate change, or do they have other issues (which they also may be skeptical about)?

In order to find the climate change skeptics' other issues, perform qualitative analysis of the climate change skeptics' homepages as well as pages about the skeptics (e.g., from Wikipedia, Sourcewatch as well as the DeSmogBlog).

method

• Query ISI Web of Science for the skeptics' articles and download the articles' data.
• Perform co-authorship analysis.

• SkepticsRelatedIssuesDorling11 -07-08.png:
  

Findings

Skeptics form a network through co-authoring articles.

Skeptics Co-Authors:

Question: Do skeptics have related issues?

Do skeptics have related issues they are sceptical about?

Question 4: Related Issues

method 1:

• update the list of climate change skeptics
• query the source lists and the Web for other issues they are skeptical about (in their list of publications, Google Scholar, etc)
• cloud the other issues climate change skeptics have (leaving out the skeptics that only focus on climate change second method

method 2:

• query ISI web of science for the skeptics shortlist and download the articles data + citations
• use reseaulu to perform textual analysis on the descriptions and on the skeptics biographies
• visualize and analyze to find related issues

Finding the related issues by reading the source lists on:

• http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_warming_skeptics
• http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2007/globalwarming/SkepticalScientists.asp
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Global_warming_skeptics
• http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2005/05/exxon_chart.html

Subsequently checking the homepages and publications (with Google Scholar) on issues other than climate change.

• SkepticsRelatedIssuesTagcloud _small.jpg:
  

Misc.

• ExxonSecrets:
  

External Links

• http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Dennis_Avery
• A list of articles by Dennis Avery is available here.
• "It's The Sun, Stupid" by Thomas Lifson, 2008. "Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Sally Bulinas is the latest distinguished scientist to declare anthropogenic global warming theory wrong."
• "Has David Bellamy gone mad"? by Mark Lynas, 2004.
• [4]Junk Science, by George Monbiot, The Guardian 10th May 2005. (About David Bellamy)

-- SabineNiederer - 05 Jun 2008

• SkepticsRelatedIssuesTagcloud11-07-08.pdf: SkepticsRelatedIssuesTagcloud11 -07-08.pdf

• heartland_conference_panel_participants_march2008.xls: heartland_conference_panel_participants_march2008.xls

• ClimateChangeTopJournals.pdf: ClimateChangeTopJournals.pdf

• SkepticsJournals11-07-08.pdf: SkepticsJournals11 -07-08.pdf

• SkepticsRelatedIssuesDorling11-07-08.svg: SkepticsRelatedIssuesDorling11 -07-08.svg

• SkepticsRelatedIssuesTagcloud54-15-11-07-08.svg: SkepticsRelatedIssuesTagcloud54 -15-11-07-08.svg

• climate_change_journals_all.png:
  

• Heartland Conference Poster: