Jim Prall is making a list

I hope he plans to check it more than once.

One correction for his list - Freeman Dyson, while greatly deserving of many honors etc. for his career in physics, never actually received a PhD.

Also, I guess PhD year is one relevant measure, but it would be nice to list the year of birth of these people, if available, and try a couple of cuts on age :-)

Most recent year of top 4 highly cited papers might be another way to measure relative currency of their scientific activities.

I don't really get it. I was wondering why Jim is making this list. Finally I found (from Jim's site):

... I've also grown all too familiar with the tiny minority of 'climate skeptics' or 'deniers' who try to minimize the problem, absolve humans of any major impact, or suggest there is no need to take any action.

I've gotten pretty fed up with the undue weight given to the skeptics in the media and online.

So, what is the proper weight to give to different viewpoints? Is the idea to come up with a ratio of credulists to skeptics and then divide media time in those proportions? What about agnostics, or those who just don't give a s___? Shouldn't they get media time as well in their respective proportions? What about a list of ONE scientist who has a verifiable, repeatable, open source paper that proves the issue one way or the other? Wouldn't that be a lot more valuable?

Science is not a democracy.

> What about a list of ONE scientist who has a verifiable, repeatable, open source paper that proves the issue one way or the other? Wouldn't that be a lot more valuable?

> Science is not a democracy.

That'll explain why the global warming 'skeptics', rather than up with actual research that's not totally stupid, instead like to repeatedly launch noise campaigns... right? Right?

nanny_govt_sucks,

Science is not a democracy.

I don't think anyone would dispute that.

A citation index is a good measure of the quality of research. Scientists are not going to commit the time and effort to pursue a line of investigation based on the conclusions of an earlier paper unless they are convinced that the methodology and results in that paper support the conclusions. Cynics like to say the grant money keeps them "on message", but journals' subscription income is greatly dependent on their impact factor, and I can't think of any single paper that would be more beneficial for a climate journal's impact factor than the scoop of a definitive proof that we don't have to worry about climate change after all. The same logic applies to the profile and fundraising potential of a funding body that could say to governments, "Did you know we funded that paper - you know, Blockbuster et al. 2009 - the one that saved the planet several tens of trillions of dollars? Now, many zeros would suitably express your gratitude for our work?"

And it so happens that there is a strong correlation between the frequency of citation of a scientist's work, and his or her level of concern about global warming.

Not surprisingly, a large share of the top tier signed activist declarations, while signers of the pleas for inaction add up to fewer than 5% of the top 500 most cited sources, and are mostly concentrated near the 'never cited' end of the scale:

But that just PROVES that it's a massive conspiracy! ;)

Gee, my own thread on a blog that some people actually read... I'm a somebody!

Thanks Tim for the link! I'm starting to get some valuable feedback.

My notes currently have Freeman Dyson with an M.Sc. in 1947, but I can no longer find my source for that. Wikipedia has him with a B.A. as his highest earned degree(!) He got an honorary D.Sc. in 1990. Whatever - he's a big name in physics, but not a climatologist. Some of the skeptics' petitions and their echoes have stuck "Ph.D." after his name (google for the combination.) Here's an evidently dispassionate [bio of Dyson](http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Dyson.html)

Here's one comment I did find on Dyson that I couldn't resist:

"Dyson makes [Cdn. TV enviro David] Suzuki look like Carrot Top on a hangover morning..." Good thing I'd finished my Wellington County Dark Ale before I saw that one. (Note that I have NOT included geneticist [David Suzuki](http://www.davidsuzuki.org/) on my list.)

This weekend I crunched through the 1728 names on the May, 2008 [declaration](http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/big_picture_solutions/sc…) put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists. I found 145 names already in my list were signers, and I've tagged these with "UCS08" and included them in the count as "activists."

Distressingly for me, this leaves over 1500 names I haven't even looked at yet. The declaration is from "scientists and economists" so I could grep -v to trim out the economists, but it will still be a lot of names. Maybe I'll just leave them in their own file for "some day."

I've also added a [page on petitions](http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/petitions.html) including those open to the public, in which I put the Oregon petition (you have to get a card to mail in, and put some capital letters after your name, to get on that list, but...) The OISM list at 31K doesn't look so big next to the 2.6 MILLION names on the largest petition, or the 2 million who've endorsed the We Campaign.

Jim,

I suggest you add the contributors to the "Summary for Policymakers of the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change" to your list.

http://www.heartland.org/custom/semod_policybot/pdf/22835.pdf

In particular, it would interesting to directly compare them to the AR4 WG1 contributors. I'm imagining a bar graph 619 fields wide and a mile high compared to a graph 24 fields wide and an inch high.

I've now added all 24 names credited for the "NIPCC SPM" (though only 23 appear in the document.) The majority of the authors fall in the bottom 10% of ranking by citations.
Rumour has it this "summary" will finally get its "summarized document" soon. This may necessitate another look to get all the authors listed.
Meanwhile the 2nd annual NYC deniathon has arrived. I think a few new speakers' names were added this year - I've bookmarked the speakers list but haven't had time to cross-check it yet. I'll be away for two weeks for March break so that will have to wait until the start of April.
Today I came across the new high-level science journalism effort www.climatecentral.org which looks very promising.