The Usual Suspects

I've put together a list of some of the "all-stars" of the climate denial movement, what their area of expertise is, and what their publication record is (if it exists at all). I've been fairly liberal in my inclusion of publications; although I've excluded comments on papers and articles in popular magazines such as Scientific American and New Scientist, I haven't excluded publications in fringe journals such as Energy and Environment; nor have I excluded climate-related publications in non-climate related publications such as the Journal of the American Medical Association (Singer) or the Pipeline and Gas Journal (Spencer). In Seitz's case, I may have overestimated the total number of publications, since there's another physicist named F. Seitz.

The methodology was pretty simple - just search Scopus for the following names as author (not just first author), weed out non-peer reviewed publications, comments, and responses to comments, then count-up how many publications remained, and how many of those actually pertained to climate science. I admit that I may have missed a few publications by not using other literature databases (like Web of Science), but this wasn't intended to be an exhaustive search. In some cases, a judgment call was required as to whether a publication counted as climate-related or not, but generally I gave them the benefit of the doubt and counted rather than discounted the paper if there was any uncertainty.

Name	Affiliation	Background	Total # of Peer-Reviewed Publications	# of Peer-reviewed Climatology Publications
David Bellamy	NZ Climate Science Coalition	Botanist	13	0
Bob Carter	Institute of Public Affairs	Geologist	<60	11
John Coleman	KUSI-TV	Weatherman	0	0
Joe D'Aleo	Science and Public Policy Institute	Meteorologist	0	0
Richard Lindzen	MIT	Atmospheric Physicist	111	~78
Bjorn Lomborg	Copenhagen Consensus	Political scientist	9	0
Stephen McIntyre	Climate Audit	Mathematician/Economist	2	22
Ross McKitrick	Fraser Institute	Economist	28	83
Patrick Michaels	Cato Institute	Environmental Scientist	55	0
Christopher Monckton	Science and Public Policy Institute	Journalist/Politician	0	0
Roger Pielke, Jr.	Breakthrough Institute	Political scientist	524	0
Roger Pielke, Sr.	University of Colorado	Mathematician/Meteorologist	3214	300+
Ian Plimer	Institute of Public Affairs	Mining Geologist	63	0
Fred Seitz (deceased)	George C. Marshall Institute, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, Science and Environmental Policy Project	Physicist	1185	0
Fred Singer	Science and Environmental Policy Project	Physicist	1466	107
Roy Spencer	Heartland Institute, George C. Marshall Institute	Atmospheric Scientist	59	438
Anthony Watts	WattsUpWithThat.com	Weatherman	1	19

 

Key to colour codes:
Red: Denies that the earth is warming at all, and/or denies that carbon dioxide is linked to warming. Analogous to young-earth creationists.
Yellow: Admits that the earth is warming, but believes that it is a natural effect, or admits that some warming is due to human GHG emissions, but believes that the effect will either be positive or not worth worrying about. Alternatively, waffles between arguments that either admit or deny the human role in climate change.
Green: Admits that human GHG emissions are linked to rising temperatures but believes that the climate sensitivity is much lower than IPCC estimates and/or negative feedbacks will predominate. Somewhat analogous to intelligent design advocates (coincidentally - or perhaps not - Roy Spencer actually is an intelligent design advocate).

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Footnotes:
1 - Published in Energy & Environment - a journal of rather ill-repute, to put it kindly; it's not even listed in the ISI.
2 - Both of these were co-authored with Ross McKitrick.
3 - Six of the eight climate-related publications are in Energy & Environment
4 - Somewhat difficult to completely tease apart Pielke Jr. and Pielke Sr.'s publications since they not only have the same middle initial, they also share some institutional affiliations, and don't always specify Junior or Senior in the author list.
5 - Likely an overestimate; there's a German physicist by the same name.
6 - Singer's publication record takes a turn for the crazy around 1970, when his papers start opining on the issues of abortion, overpopulation, nuclear winter, sewage treatment, and ozone depletion.
7 - Including Energy & Environment, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (!).
8 - Of which, perhaps 3 actually have any bearing on human influence on the climate.
9 - This is being exceedingly generous, given that Watts was one of 39 authors in an Essay in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, which amounted to handwaving over the quality of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (concerns which, as it turns out, were unfounded).

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A few names stand out here on the basis of their publication record: Pielke (Sr.), Lindzen, and Spencer. I haven't filtered any of the climate-related publications to see how many of the papers actually contain a contrarian viewpoint, but it's safe to say that none of them are in any danger of overturning the fundamental principles of AGW, namely:
1) That CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
2) That CO2 concentrations are increasing because of human activity.
3) That global temperatures are increasing as a result.

Lindzen (and, to a lesser extent, Spencer) is basically betting the farm on his "iris hypothesis": that increased sea surface temperatures lead to a decrease in cloud cover, and thus an increasing in outgoing infrared radiation. Support for this hypothesis ranges from weak to equivocal.

Pielke Sr. is perhaps the most credible scientist on the whole list, and it should come as no surprise that he's also the least contrarian of the bunch. In fact, Pielke says the following:

Humans are significantly altering the global climate, but in a variety of diverse ways beyond the radiative effect of carbon dioxide. The IPCC assessments have been too conservative in recognizing the importance of these human climate forcings as they alter regional and global climate. These assessments have also not communicated the inability of the models to accurately forecast the spread of possibilities of future climate.

and:

As I have summarized on the Climate Science weblog, humans activities do significantly alter the heat content of the climate system, although, based on the latest understanding, the radiative effect of CO2 has contributed, at most, only about 28% to the human-caused warming up to the present. The other 72% is still a result of human activities!

This relatively non-controversial position is reflected in his publications - none of which appear, at least upon cursory examination, to be paradigm-changing.

Spencer sort of nibbles around the edges, either by trying to poke holes in the satellite temperature record (which constitutes nearly all of his relevant publication record), or coming up with dubious estimates of climate sensitivity, which he does in less formal settings.

In summary, what does this table tell us? Several things:
1) The most extreme skeptics (akin to young-earth creationists) have no scientific credentials or credibility.
2) The Journal of the American Medical Association will apparently accept manuscripts on climatology. Who knew?
3) There's no apparent conspiracy to keep climate skeptics out of the literature, as evidenced by Lindzen, Pielke, and Spencer's publication records . . .
4) Unless you believe that the conspiracy has been successful at keeping the truly revolutionary papers out of the publication record altogether. If this is the case, the conspiracy has also been amazingly successful at preventing this information from being leaked through other channels.

In an upcoming post, I'll look at how incestuous the connections between these contrarians and the organizations they stump for actually are.