Most-Cited Authors on Climate Science

Compiled by Jim Prall, Toronto, Canada Views expressed on this site are my own and do not represent the position of my employer.

WARNING these next two links are to pages with HUNDREDS of photo links, totaling over 40 MB for the larger set. Loading these over a slow link may take eons, or may exceed the memory limits of devices with small memory. Not recommended if you pay per byte, as on a wireless handheld (Crackberry, web-enabled cellphone etc.) Each photo links to the author's homepage, if known. Mouse over any photo to see their name and institutional affiliation.
Faces of most of the 619 IPCC AR4 wg 1 contributing authors
Faces of over 1300 climate authors and skeptics

Sources for positions taken by scientists

• Calls for action and open letters from scientists: see my links to source documents which includes notes on my methods; see also my discussion on petitions and another on open letters and lists.
  Some of the key calls to action:
  • The January, 2009 Monaco Declaration on Ocean Acification signed by 155 oceanographers [Tag: Monaco09; stats done for 21 signers]. (Note that ocean acidification by elevated CO2 entering the oceans from the atmosphere is independent of the 'greenhouse' effect, and represents an additional harmful impact on top of temperature changes. Here's another powerful statement on how serious this 'other CO2 problem' is.)
  • The "Bali Climate Declaration" signed by 212 scientists in December 2007, urging the delegates to the Bali climate negotiations to negotiate strong targets for greenhouse gas reductions. [Signatories shown as 'Bali07' in the notes column of the tables]
  • A new and forceful appeal for action on climate put together by the Union of Conerned Scientists and endorsed by over 1,700 American scientists and economists. [Tag: UCS08 - far from complete but I've noted some 144 signers already in my longer list.]
  • An open letter entitled The State of Climate Science: October 2003 from just over 1000 U.S. scientists, 880 of them PhDs. [Tagged as SCS03 in the 'notes' column; 35 in list with stats, 22 listed without stats yet.]
    
• A list of over sixty scholarly journals in the field of climate science and related disciplines. Each one is a link to the journal's online edition. Most allow free access to article abstracts, and some to even more content. See what peer-reviewed content on climate is available online to judge for yourself.
  
• A list of 75 University research centers on climate-related topics.
  
• My Blogspot site Green Herring
  
• A 2009-09-03 NYT editorial 'Another Astroturf Campaign' about oil industry tactics in opposing U.S. climate legislation
  

The 'Who'

Thanks to my job as computer support staff at University of Toronto, I have access to electronic and/or print copies of most major journals, and a very extensive library collection of print works. I also get the opportunity to enroll in or to audit whatever courses catch my interest. I usually select one course per semester. Even when I'm just auditing, I try to do all the assigned readings. In this way I've benefited from courses on global climate change, climatology, future energy supply and demand, the physics of the greenhouse effect and planetary radiation balance, and climate politics and policy options. I also take advantage of many excellent guest lecture series, particularly those hosted by the Centre for Global Change Science in the Physics department, just across St. George St. from my office.

The 'Why'

I've gotten pretty fed up with the undue weight given to the skeptics in the media and online. Many media reports aimed for a false 'balance' by interviewing one mainstream scientist followed by one 'skeptic.' On the web, it's even crazier, with numerous sites promoting "climate denial" by collecting names of skeptics, "quote-mining" for skeptical or ambiguous statements, and producing dodgy climate-denial 'petitions' claiming numerous "scientists" as signatories. Most of these skeptics/deniers/petition signers have little to no academic credentials in this specific field, although a handful stand out as widely published in this or a somewhat related field.

The 'What'

This is my shot at 'portrait of a consensus' in the journals. I offer this as a complement to work like Naomi Oereskes' review.

The 'How'

For each author, I look up their current or last institutional affiliation, jotting down a few words to note their areas of research, and linking to their homepage if I can. University professors almost always have one (or more), but scholars working at a government or military research institution (UK Met Office, US Navy NRL) generally do not. In several such cases I've settled for a link to their staff directory listing, which confirms they work there and gives contact info. My notes on areas of interest are sketchy at best; for better info see the author's homepage.

I've created a reference list including name, year of Ph.D. if shown, citation stats (still gathering), homepage, and photo URL. I collect this in Excel for ease of editing, then I export as tab-delimited text and run the data through a perl script to generate various HTML files.

The Results

• A table showing names, stats, and links to homepage, photo, and a pre-formatted query for Google Scholar to retrieve that author's publications. Google Scholar sorts results by citation count, so the first page of results gives the author's top-cited works, and is a good way to introduce yourself to an author's work.
• A similar table of only Canadian authors, including the 130 who signed the CMOS open letter in 2006.
• A page of only the photos, with the most cited authors first. Each photo is a link to the author's homepage. Hover the mouse over any photo without clicking to see a 'tooltip' box showing their name and institution. The photos are all in one long "line", which will wrap to fill your browser window, then can scroll vertically. This one is mostly for fun, and to give a non-verbal impression of the 'sea of faces' speaking on the science. Self-declared 'skeptics' are flagged with red brackets (e.g. signatories of various open letters that argue against any action to cut carbon emissions.)

We can use these citation stats for comparative purposes, subject to the caveat that more common names can easily match multiple unrelated authors. Journal author names are typical given only as first initial(s) and last name; it appears that searching on a full first-and-last name may not work consistently in excluding other authors with the same first initial(s), while at the same time may under-count or miss some works actually by that author.

This mixing in of false positives can often inflate the GS tot. and/or GS PAPS tot. figures. However, when viewing the citation counts, I have taken care not to count such false positives, by skimming the title, journal name, and excerpt. In that case, I try to create a custom search string to exclude false positives caused by same-named authors, before collecting the totals. This is hard to guarantee, as I'd need to review all the hits to be really certain, which is burdensome. Instead I've usually checked the first few screens of 10 results each; if there are no more false positives in the top 30, I deem the exclusions to be good enough, and the total count be 'close enough.' In some cases a name is just so common that I gave up on isolating that author's work to get the totals; in that case I've just entered "names" to indicate there were too many false positives to get a valid total.

Table of over 2900 climate authors
Table of all 619 IPCC AR4 wg 1 contributing authors Table of 225 Canadian climate scientists (including AR4wg1 and others)

WARNING these two links are to pages with HUNDREDS of photo links on one page. Loading these over a slow link may take eons, or may exceed the memory limits of devices with small memory. Not recommended if you pay per byte, as on a wireless handheld (Crackberry etc.)
Photos of over 1100 climate scientists
Photos of IPCC AR4 wg 1 contributing authors