A Bona Fide Dispute

From Darrell Ince, Times Higher Education

The fragile state of climate research is such that a small piece of gravel tossed into the pool causes major ripples. At the end of June, a concrete block was thrown in.

The prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published “Expert Credibility in Climate Change”, a paper in which William R.L. Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob Harold and the late Stephen H. Schneider use citation and publication data to examine the academic credentials of those who agree that human activity is driving global warming and those who are sceptical and believe, for example, that the climate data offered in support of human influence on atmospheric temperature exhibits a natural cyclical variability. The article concludes by stating that those convinced of man’s role in global warming have better academic credentials than the sceptics when judged by the numerical metrics the authors adopt for citation analysis.

The reception to the paper has been predictable: proponents of anthropogenic global warming have hailed it as proof that critics do not know what they are talking about, while those who have been critical have accused the authors of creating a blacklist of opponents and employing a flawed methodological approach. However, even academics in the first camp have expressed some major worries.

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