Re: Al Those Great Scientists Here

"Phil Holman" <piholmanc@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in 
news:zN6dnZYsT9wEj7vVnZ2dnUVZ_rzinZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Hmm, to generalize that logic; would it be appropriate to always side 
> with the so-called heavy hitters? Not to dispute the fact that the 
> majority of heavy hitters side with realclimate but ..............well, 
> explain your sampling technique again.

The folks at realclimate are not particularly heavy hitters, you won't 
find them on the U.S. NAS climate panel, for instance.  This particular 
example results from an argument I was having elsewhere, in particular 
about the professional competence of realclimate vs. worldclimatere****t.  
The bigger picture though is that Michaels and Balling *are* particularly 
heavy hitters among the skeptics and an objective measure of their 
professional stature suggests they are at best 2nd tier research 
scientists (Lindzen, for example, has a career-averaged h-index of 1.01, 
mainly because it has gone up in his later years (*after* he became a 
climate skeptic (the h-index measured citations and Lindzen gets cited a 
lot because of his contrarian views)) suggesting perhaps he became a 
skeptic because he enjoys a notariety he didn't as an MIT professor whose 
speciality is something few people in science have heard of, and even 
fewer care about).  I have done similar analyses for CO2Science, run by 
the Idso's, and the only one there who measures up is daddy Idso, again 
with a average h-index of barely over 1 (although his isn't back-end 
weigted like Lindzen's).  Another noted IPCC-sup****ter, Jim Hansen's 
average h-index is around 0.85, I forget exactly.  I've never bothered to 
run people like Baliunas, Soon, or the delusional V. Gray, my hunch is 
they would come out fairly low.  The Pielke's would likely come out 
relatively high, although Pielke's take on climate change is far more 
nuanced than most skeptics (although Pielke sr. acknowledges there likely 
will be climate change due to anthropogenic CO2, he mainly objects to 
doing anything based on regional climate models, which he regards as 
useless (I might have this a little wrong, I don't follow Pielke's output 
all that closely)).  

I'm not going to bother to do this, but perhaps someone should.  Go down 
the list of the guys on Inhofe's list of 500 and compute the career 
average h-index.  Then do the same for the authors of the IPCC AR4, WG1, 
WG2, and WG3.  I'm betting the IPCC folks would simply crush the Inhofe 
gang.  

If I were a skeptic and believed wholeheartedly everything these guys are 
saying, I would ask myself two things:  1).  Why is it that mostly 
marginal scientists are skeptics? and 2).  Do I really think it is a good 
idea to be on the same intellectual side of any debate as Kunich?

-- 
Bill Asher