Links to source documents

News: 2010-06-21 a peer-reviewed paper drawing on my lists has just been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For links to the sources used in the paper, see below under completed listings in the sections for "mainstream position" and "skeptical position"

News: Dan Moutal discusses my list of recent affirmative statements on climate by scientists (eight statements since Dec. 2009, with over 5000 signatures combined) in episode one of his new climate podcast 'Irregular Climate' - discussion of these begins around 9 minutes in (but do listen to the whole show!) Thanks for the coverage, Dan!

Learned Societies

I've tagged names in my list who are Fellows of a relevant learned society or elected members of a national academy, including: These honours are granted to only a fraction of active scholars and researchers in a field, reflecting lifetime achievement and contribution to science. On Wikipedia, these are some of the distinctions that would pass the "prof test", qualifying the individual as "notable" in WP terms.

Position Statements

I've listed signers of activist and skeptic statements by assigning a unique short tag for each such document, and entering the tag in the first column of my tables. I'm updating my script to make each such tag into a link to the source document. This page provides a central listing of these source documents for reference.

Mainstream position

These are the sources for names that I've flagged as climate "activists." Each of these documents makes a strong and clear statement that climate change is happening, human activity is a major contributor to it, and that prompt action is needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Most of these are public declarations, petitions, or open letters. The IPCC assessments are not really in the same category as these; however, the IPCC Assessment Reports clearly also embody just such a strong call to action. While contrarians like to argue that any given IPCC author may not agree with everything in every section of the reports, the IPCC is a consensus-based body and all language incorporated in their reports gets closely scrutinized multiple times, with all objections addressed and debated to reach consensus on the wording. I claim it is only reasonable to place IPCC authors in the "mainstream" and to recognize that the IPCC reports incorporate a strong call for action on greenhouse gas reductions.

Completed listings

Signers of the following activist documents are included in their entirely in my current web listings. The first three were issued since the data was collected for the PNAS paper and so are not included in that analysis. The following were included as "CE" in Anderegg, Prall et al. 2010: AR4 wg1, Bali07, CMOS06, CMOS08, and noSW07.

Lists partially recorded

The following activist statements have much longer lists of signatories, making it impractical for me to incorporate all signers names in my lists with publication and citation stats. Although these statements fit our criteria for "CE", none of these lists were used as selection criteria in the PNAS paper because the lists were too long for me to have had time to get citation stats on all the signers. On my web listings, I've noted some of the signers whose names I already had.
Instead, I have run comparisons of the signers names with those names I've already collected in other ways, and I've flagged those individuals who signed any these documents as I'm able. This is still relevant for my purposes here: anyone who signed one of these statements counts as a self-declared climate 'activist'; I simply haven't been able to add in stats for all the several thousand names that endorsed these statements. For reference, I've created an alphabetical list of unique names of signers of climate action statements since December 2009 (subsequent to the controversy arising from posting of the stolen UEA/CRU emails). This list, made up of signers of NAS10, FR10, NL10, OLFS10, UCS10, UKsc09, CSW09 and WWFC09, runs to over 5000 unique names.

Additional sources not listed

This statement is from the heads of eighteen scientific organizations, endorsing the validity of global warming science. The signers are not themselves climate scientists and my list does not treat organizations, only individuals:

Skeptical position

I've covered fifteen skeptic letters and statements ranging from 1992 to the present, plust the skeptics profiled in the film "The Great Global Warming Swidle." My list currently has every name of signers of each of these 15 documents, totaling 498 individuals. I assert that this yields a broadly inclusive list that captures the great majority of those contrarians presenting themselves as qualified experts or specialists in climate science or related disciplines.
EPA10 and CCC09 were issued after the data for the PNAS paper was compiled: All the following were included as "UE" in Anderegg, Prall et al. 2010 except NZCSC, as it is not a statement per se.

Not covered: The Oregon Petition

The one quite large and widely discussed skeptic petition I have not attempted to treat here is the Oregon Petition organized by Frederick Seitz through the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, starting in 1997. That document now claims some 31,486 U.S. sicentist signers, 9,029 with PhDs; however, the posted listing does not give institional affiliation, making it extremely difficult to verify signers' identities and publication record (if any). More on this below.

Critiques of the Oregon Petition

  • 1998 commentary in Nature about the petition (subscription required)

    My own observations on OISM

    Even a brief perusal reveals the list maintainers are not effectively limiting endorsers to qualified experts (the list includes dentists, veterinarians, medical doctors, and a few fictional characters -- since deleted after widespread ridicule).
    The page setting out qualifications of signers gives only their count of names by field, without listing which names were counted in any given field. The section for Atmosphere claims 39 signers listed their field as climatology and 112 as atmospheric science.

    Taking a sampling approach, I found it difficult to find any signers who could be identified as having published any peer-reviewed work in any way pertinent to climate science. A different approach might be to take known climate scientists (or skeptics) already in my list, and search to see if they also signed the Oregon Petition. I may try this some day, but the expected outcome would simply be that many already identified skeptics also signed the Oregon Petition - adding little information. More useful would be to have a list of which signers are (self-)identified as climatologists, atomspheric scientists or hydrologists.

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