Analysing the ‘900 papers supporting climate scepticism’: 9 out of top 10 authors linked to ExxonMobil
'900+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism Of "Man-Made" Global Warming (AGW) Alarm' announces the headline on the Global Warming Policy Foundation's website.
The article references a blog linking to more than 900 papers which, according to the GWPF, refute "concern relating to a negative environmental or socio-economic effect of AGW, usually exaggerated as catastrophic."
However, a preliminary data analysis by the Carbon Brief has revealed that nine of the ten most prolific authors cited have links to organisations funded by ExxonMobil, and the tenth has co-authored several papers with Exxon-funded contributors.
The top ten contributors are alone responsible for 186 of the papers cited by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The data also shows that there are many other familiar climate sceptic names among the major contributors to the list.
Dr Sherwood B Idso is the most cited academic on the list, having authored or co-authored 67 of the 938 papers we analysed, which is seven percent of the total.
Idso is president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, a thinktank which has been funded by ExxonMobil. Idso has also been linked to Information Council on the Environment ( ICE ), an energy industry PR campaign accused of "astroturfing".
The second most cited is Dr Patrick J Michaels - with 28 papers to his name. Michaels is a well known climate sceptic who has revealed that he receives around 40% of his funding from the oil industry.
Third most cited is Agricultural scientist Dr Bruce Kimball - the list shows that all of his cited papers were co-authored with Dr Sherwood B Idso.
Why is this important, and what does it indicate?
The "900+ papers" list is supposed to be proof that a large number of different scientists reject the scientific consensus on climate change. Climate sceptics do like big numbers: ' More than 500 scientists dispute global warming' was the story a few years ago. In December it was ' more Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims'.
Once you crunch the numbers, however, you find a good proportion of this new list is made up of a small network of individuals who co-author papers and share funding ties to the oil industry. There are numerous other names on the list with links to oil-industry funded climate sceptic think-tanks, including more from the International Policy Network (IPN) and the Marshall Institute.
Compiling these lists is dramatically different to the process of producing IPCC reports, which reference thousands of scientific papers. The reports are thoroughly reviewed to make sure that the scientific work included is relevant and diverse.
Sceptic organisations have been successful in dumping large lists into the public domain to suggest that there is significant scientific divergence from the consensus. This is partly due to the fact it is time consuming analysing such lists.
Luckily, there are now free tools online which help you interrogate this kind of data. The screen-scraping website NeedleBase can turn the long list of papers into a single database, while the free data-processing tool Google Refine allows for a rapid analysis.
This is the process used here. Because the screen-scraping process is a little rough around the edges the citation numbers may vary slightly. But they give a clear picture of the structure of the list, which in this instance has been very revealing. Should you wish to examine it, you can download the raw data here.
Using this method we could quickly see the ten most referenced authors. We found that nine of the ten have direct links to ExxonMobil. Eight are affiliated to Exxon-funded organisations, while every paper written by Dr Bruce Kimball was co-authored with Sherwood Idso.
The top ten include Willie Soon, a senior scientist at the Exxon funded George C Marshall institute, and John R Christy, also a Marshall Institute expert.
Ross McKitrick is a senior fellow at the Exxon funded Fraser institute and on the academic advisory board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation - funders unknown.
Dr Indur M Goklany is affiliated with the Exxon Funded thinktank the International Policy Network (US). Sallie L Baliunas is listed by the Union of Concerned Scientists as being affiliated with nine different organisations who have all received funding from ExxonMobil, including the George C Marshall Institute.
Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist and prominent sceptic who notably has a degree of credibility in the scientific community, is a member of the 'Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy', which has also received Exxon funding.
The final name in the top 10 contributors - David H Douglass - has written several papers with Singer, Christie and Michaels - six of the fifteen papers he authored on the list were written with Michaels, Singer or Christie.
Nevertheless, these authors do not make up the whole list. There are plenty of other papers on the list which were not written by this small group.
We'll examine some of those in more detail in Part 2...
“Using our paper to support skepticism of anthropogenic global warming is misleading.” Part II of our analysis of the 900+ climate skeptic papers
ant.photos/flickrThree respected scientists have independently complained that their climate studies have been misrepresented by sceptics in order to bolster a list of papers thrown together to challenge the consensus on global warming.
The authors of the list claim it includes more than 900 scientific papers which question human forced climate change, an assertion which has been repeated on blogs and the Global Warming Policy Foundation website. As we have already reported, nine of the ten most prolific authors have links to oil giant Exxon.
Some of the papers cited have been published in prominent peer review journals, including 34 from Nature and 33 from Science.
However, our analysis also shows that many of the papers do not focus on human-induced climate change - and so have little relevance to the theme of the list.
Furthermore, some of the authors featured on the list surprised us, so we contacted a selection to see whether they supported this interpretation of their work - the responses confirmed their work is being misappropriated by inclusion in lists such as this.
Professor Peter deMenocal, of the Earth Institute, Columbia University, told the Carbon Brief when asked about the inclusion of his paper on the list:
"I've responded to similar queries over the years. No, this is not an accurate representation of my work and I've said so many times to them and in print.
"I've asked Dennis Avery of the Heartland Institute to take my name off [another similar] list four times and I've never had a response. There are 15 other Columbia colleagues on there as well ... and all want their names removed."
A paper on the list by Zeebe et al. published in the journal Nature Geoscience in 2009 studies the Palaeo-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which is a period of rapid temperature rise around 55 million years ago."I've asked Dennis Avery of the Heartland Institute to take my name off [another similar] list four times and I've never had a response. There are 15 other Columbia colleagues on there as well ... and all want their names removed."
The authors found that feedbacks such as increases in other greenhouse gases were responsible for a substantial part of global warming, alongside the direct impact of carbon dioxide.
The lead author, Professor Richard Zeebe, University of Hawaii, said:
"Using our paper to support skepticism of anthropogenic global warming is misleading."
These two papers contribute to the scientific consensus on climate change, rather than undermining it. Earth's climate has changed throughout geological time. Studies like the papers listed here have helped to explain why, broadening our understanding of the climate system.It is precisely our knowledge of these processes that allows us to eliminate them as the cause of the current warming trend. Manmade emissions of greenhouse gases are now the dominant factor forcing today's climate.
A paper by Meehl et al, also placed on the list, discussed how the 11-year solar cycle has an amplified effect on climate signals in the tropical Pacific. The author of the paper, Gerald Meehl, of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), said:
"It's odd that our 2009 paper is on a site about global warming. Our paper addressed specifically the climate system response to the 11-year solar cycle. Thus it is about decadal timescale climate variability.
"It said nothing about long-term warming trends, and in fact, in the last sentence of the paper, we state, 'This response also cannot be used to explain recent global warming because the 11-year solar cycle has not shown a measurable trend over the past 30 years.'"
The inclusion of a paper studying the sun's influence on climate is in itself very odd. It's well established that solar irradiance has contributed little to warming since the 1960s, whilst the Earth's temperature has risen. For example, a paper by Scafetta & West (2006) says:"It said nothing about long-term warming trends, and in fact, in the last sentence of the paper, we state, 'This response also cannot be used to explain recent global warming because the 11-year solar cycle has not shown a measurable trend over the past 30 years.'"
"Since 1975 global warming has occurred much faster than could be reasonably expected from the sun alone."
The authors of the list at Popular Technology appear to believe that studying the effect of non-human effects on the climate provides evidence to undermine the theory of man-made climate change.In fact, it is precisely such work which shows that the man-made changes to our planet are unprecedented.
Energy and Environment – “journal of choice for climate skeptics” Analysing the 900+ skeptic papers part III
ant.photos/flickrThe list of '900+' papers linked to by the Global Warming Policy Foundation as supporting climate scepticism included more articles published in Energy and Environment than any other journal.
We reported last week that nine out of the top 10 authors listed by the GWPF were linked to ExxonMobil. We also discovered that prominent scientists featured on the list didn't agree that their work supported skepticism about anthropogenic global warming - and had unsuccessfully asked for their work to be removed from similar lists in the past.
We used the same data analysis tools to examine where the papers on the list were published. The most cited journal by a clear margin was Energy and Environment, which provided 131 papers to the list - almost 15 percent of the total.
Energy and Environment's editor Sonja-Boehmer Christiansen has said that she is "following [her] political agenda" in editing the journal, which is co-edited by Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Christiansen noted in evidence submitted to the UK Parliament that E&E has been characterised as " a journal of choice for climate skeptics," also stating: "If this [is] so, it happened by default as other publication opportunities were closed to them…"
It is unclear whether E&E is peer-reviewed. The journal is not listed by the ISI Web of Knowledge, which provides "comprehensive coverage of the world's most important and influential journals". E&E has been described by Gavin Schmidt of the science blog RealClimate as having "effectively dispensed with substantive peer review for any papers that follow the editor's political line".
One way to consider a journal's relative importance within its field is to examine its impact factor - the number of times the average journal paper is cited over a two year period.
SCImago journal rank shows that the average paper published in E&E has an impact factor of around 0.42 - less than one citation every four years. Nature, one of the most central scientific journals in this field, has an impact factor of around 30. The Journal of Climate, a mainstream but smaller climate journal, has an impact factor of 3.57.
SCImago also provides citation information for every journal it lists - the first graph shows the number of times journal articles in E&E were cited in individual years. The second, by way of comparison, shows the same information for the Journal of Climate.
Citation statistics for Energy and Environment.
Citation statistics for the Journal of Climate.
It's clear that E&E's papers are cited relatively infrequently - suggesting the inclusion of a substantial number of them on the '900+' list does not demonstrate widespread disagreement with the scientific consensus on climate change, but rather that these views are confined to a small climate skeptic lobby.
So in summary, what is the significance of this list of papers?
There are a few respected scientists who are skeptical about man-made climate change - Richard Lindzen is one. Similarly, it's possible to find scientific papers which question the theory - particularly if you look further back in time before scientific certainty on this issue solidified.
But by examining this list in more detail, it becomes clear that rather than capturing broad scientific opposition to the reality of manmade climate change:
A significant chunk of the list is authored by a small group of writers with extensive links to each other and to the oil industry.
The most cited source for the 'peer reviewed papers' featured is a minor journal which appears to have a political agenda to promote climate skepticism.
Not only do many of the other papers on the list either support the scientific consensus on climate change, or not discuss human influence on the climate, we found several cases where scientists featured on the list described the inclusion of their work as misleading.
It seems like these facts should make the genuinely skeptical reassess how significant this list of papers is.
