Faces of Climate Science - the Why?

With the onset of winter I have WTMTOMH (way too much time on my hands) and rather than burn it off playing Civ 4, Rise of Nations, or Sim City Societies, I thought I'd finally tackle a project I'd had in mind for some time: creating a website listing the names of all the experts called upon as authors in the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC.

If you've already read my blog post below, or don't really care how or why I did this, here's a shortcut to my intro page for my List of Climate Scientists, with stats plus links to author's homepage. The intro page sets up what I'm doing, then links to some variant forms of my listing: one with just IPCC AR4 authors, another with a longer list of climatologists that I've collated. I've also created variants with only the photos. The intro page links to these, but with a caution that those pages link to several hundred photos, so they eat a lot of bandwidth and can take a long time to load (esp. the first visit when the photos are not in your browser cache).

Okay, why?

Well, last year I spent a fair bit of time working on Wikipedia, on a really wide scattering of topics that grabbed my interest, but always coming back to
List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming - a motley crew of varied qualifications or relevance to the scientific debate. As of today there are 42 names on the page.

This page has a checkered history of edit wars, interminable debates about what screen to use for inclusion and who meets the bar, etc. There are at least a half-dozen active editors who appear to be strong climate change 'skeptics' eager to include as many names as possible. They seem to engage in so-called 'quote mining' to find statements in support of their 'side.'

If you read over that page, the thing that I find striking is how scattered are the views of this list of people. Some think solar variation explains most recent change so well we can dump all our research about CO2; others--almost half--say the task of projecting future changes is too daunting for us to make any judgments at all - they are in effect 'agnostics,' often implying it is simply beyond human knowing to foresee what effects our atmospheric CO2 pulse may have.

Anyway, the kind of argument I often see on this topic frequently involves some kind of claim that the number of names on this list should count as evidence that the "science is not settled" and that there is an ongoing debate over whether humans actions have or could impact on climate in any detectable way.

That claim seems patently false to me. The number of scientists who still maintain that adding CO2 to the atmosphere does little to nothing to global temperatures is almost vanishingly small, in the context of the number of scientists qualified to speak as experts on this topic.

To demonstrate that, we can point to the authors of the four IPCC Assessment Reports. This report did not waver on that question; it very clearly states that adding CO2 is leading and will lead to rising temperatures (and sea levels.) There are a lot of authors credited in this report--a whole lot. The list in Annex B to the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report names 619 authors in "Working Group I" -- the group responsible for summing up the scientific basis: the greenhouse effect, quantifying human-caused emissions of CO2, CH4, CF6, N2O, etc. and quantifying their radiative forcings; working out the other forcings such as sooty aerosols from coal and diesel, jet contrails, etc; and feedbacks, both positive and negative, that either amplify or dampen the initial forcings.

So I set about gathering all their names - getting the list proved quite simple as they are in the PDF file of Annex B, and indeed the climatologist who blogs under the nom-du-clavier "Eli Rabbett" has already extracted this list, numbered, and made a small start at annotating. His list is here.

I thought I would take things a few steps further. First, when I found that handy list I had already begun assembling a list by hand, picking the author names out of highly-cited papers on climate that I'd find via Google Scholar. This was labour-intensive but still rather interesting, and I've carried on tracing co-authors and departmental co-workers to find yet more names in this field.

Google Scholar can select all works by a specific author. There is an 'advanced' search' page with a box for this, but I found a quick way to enter this search condition is to type author:fm-surname (by observing what Google filled in as the URL once I'd run an 'advanced search').

Google returns the papers by that author sorted by how many times that work has been cited by others, with the most cited at the top. I started collecting just the number of cites for the top articles by each author as a simple indicator of that person's impact within the discipline.

I ended up gathering the number of citations for each author's top four listed papers. Why four? Because I could see that many on the first results page without scrolling, and it felt like a useful number.

I've settled on sorting the authors on the number of cites for their #4 most cited work (sub-sorting on #3 in case of ties). This is a totally arbitrary metric, but the results seem reasonably representative of the authors' standing. For all the ones I haven't gathered the stats on, I've just fallen back on alphabetical order.

Here's what I've got so far (the page is still a work-in-progress for me; I've only got up to letter K looking up home pages, and I've only done the citation stats for about a quarter of these names.)

Here is the intro page explaining the project, with links to the various formats.
The list in table form has name, year of Ph.D., country of birth (or residence), cite stats from Google Scholar, research area, and institutional affiliation. Each name links to the author's homepage.

The 'How'

I'd start with a name generally in the form "F.M. Surname", with just first and possibly middle initials. For some of the top names, I already knew what the initials stand for; otherwise, I'd have to follow the links to the journal paper in search of more clues. Many journals actually never give the full first or middle name of the authors, but they almost always add footnotes showing their institutional affiliations. A few journals now show the full name - much easier for me - but if not, I would next google for the surname plus the institution. Often this would lead straight to the author's academic homepage. If so, great; if not, keep hunting.

Some people - shocking! - don't actually have a homepage. Proving a negative is tough, so given the size of my self-defined challenge, I set a time limit on how long I'll search for a link for any given person. As a rule, anyone teaching at a university has at least some sort of locator page, with their address, phone number, and email. Most fill these in with statements of their research interest, academic history, and current group members. By contrast, some of the largest government-run research bodies such as the Hadley Centre and the U.S. nation research labs, and especially military labs, don't make this a practice. At best they may have a table of member names with contact info (phone and email); they simply don't create member home pages. The same holds for scientists at commercial service providers in the private sector, who from time to time get listed as co-authors on papers they helped on with such services as instrumentation, satellite communications, data assimilation and management, software delevopment, etc.

Fortunately, most experts at the civilian labs typically are cross-appointed at a nearby university also (Hadley->Reading/U.of East Anglia; NCAR->U.Colorado@Boulder, etc.) That usually gets me out of those blind alley.

The step of filling out the author's given names from just initials can take couple of minutes per person. Once armed with the full name and academic affiliation, it's usually a short search to get their home page. Finding the university or government lab, of course, gave me a new source of (full) names of all their research colleagues to add in. So the list just keeps growing - about to pass 1300, as of today.

Almost everyone in academia has a P.R. photo head shot online - if not on their homepage, then elsewhere on their institution's site or in an online brochure for a conference where they've spoken. So I started saving the URL of each author's photo as well.

This led me to create a second version of my project: the "Faces of Climate Science" all on a single page. Viewers with a slow link will probably want to skip this one. I've written a script to convert my tabular list into HTML, and I can tweak any design details such as the assigned image height to which all pictures get scaled:

Just photos with links to author's homepage.

I've been compiling the list for a couple of weeks now, filling up much of my spare time. I've found just under 1300 names, so almost 680 of my own that were not on the IPCC AR4 wg1 authors list.

I welcome any suggestions on how to improve these pages - alternate formats, ways to make them more readable/accessible/useful, whatever.

--
Jim Prall
Toronto, Canada

Denial in decline

Glancing at the subheading I set up for this blog, I remembered my aim was to focus on climate change deniers. Lots of what I've read this fall (as covered in my last post) applies to this topic, particularly the two Stauber and Rampton titles. Another book I haven't yet checked out that applies directly here is Al Gore's new one The Assault on Reason, reviewed by The New York Times, Brent Budowsky of The Hill's Pundit Blog, and The Guardian.

Gee, I'll have to make time to read that one too. Will the must-reads never let me rest?

Anyway, I want to reflect a bit on the past year and the change in public reaction to climate change. This year saw the release of the IPCC's fourth assessment report ("AR4"), starting in February with working group I and just wrapping up this past week with the final summary of the synthesis report. Over that time, public attention to climate has certainly been building steadily, and the hold-out energy hog nations of the USA, Canada and Australia have begun to wake up to the crisis. This past weekend Australia voted out long-serving anti-Kyoto P.M. John Howard. The new Labour P.M.-elect Kevin Rudd has vowed to ratify Kyoto as soon as he takes office. This leaves the U.S. as the sole major emitter still outside the Kyoto treaty, while Canada stands as the only other G8 member pulling in the wrong direction, despite our earlier ratification.

Canada's policy responses to the threat of global warming have been pretty sorry. As Simpson, Jaccard and Rivers lay out in Hot Air (see previous post), Canada has done precious little of substance to begin slowing the growth of our GHG emissions. Stephen Harper called Kyoto "a socialist plot", and his first year in office saw Rona Ambrose earn Canada a black eye for obstruction and foot-dragging, as typified by the "Fossil of the Day" award from the Climate Action Network during last year's Nairobi conference. Ambrose stunned the delegates by using the occasion to attack our prior Liberal government for inaction on climate, and to boast that Harper's Tories were now leading the world in setting the most ambitious targets. This while Canada's current emissions continued to soar, with no actual legislation in place or on the table to stop that increase. All the Tories did for their first year was to cut existing programs, limited as they were, in an orgy of Liberal-bashing.

A year has passed since then, Ambrose was soon shuffled out of that post and replaced by John Baird. Baird has also taken up the mantle of boasting of how ambitious the Tory targets are (going to be?) But we still don't have any legislation to curb soaring GHG emissions. And this month, Harper drew renewed criticism of Canada's obstructionism on climate for his stand against binding targets at the Commonwealth Summit in Kampala. Then Harper's minions have the gall to claim Canada showed "leadership" on climate. Feh. "Advance to the rear!" does not count as leadership, guys. Here's a report warning Canada risks losing credibility internationally on climate if we don't get moving.

Maybe next year?

The one ray of hope is that the public appears increasingly impatient with government delaying tactics, hollow rhetoric and fig-leaf measures like rebates and feel-good ads. Canada needs to get down to brass tacks and impose a carbon tax. Cap and trade for Large Final Emitters or "LFEs", as proposed by the Tories, is second best. But what we simply can't afford is another decade of claiming we have "targets" for reductions, with no hard choices actually taking place to achieve them.

As for denialists, the are losing the battle in the public arena. Most have given up claiming that the climate isn't really warming (usually accompanied by "nobody ever claimed that...") Plenty of people still buy their lame arguments, but the media has all but abandoned the "equal time" sham of airing one real scientist beside one denialist shill. A strange exception was the recent CNN series "Planet in Peril" which paired stunning location photography and undercover work with well-stated summations by Sanjay Gupta, Anderson Cooper, and Jeff Corwin. The series covered a range of current environmental crises, including global warming. In the set-up, they said what all journalists are saying this year: the scientific debate is over, climate change is real. Yet jarringly, in the wrap-up to that segment, they gave equal time and billing to industry patsy Patrick Michaels right next to Real Climatologist James Hansen of NASA Goddard. The segment was otherwise powerful and may have gotten the message out to many Americans, although giving Michaels air-time merely let those in denial continue to grasp at the straw of "scientists still don't agree." Sigh.

Another really great information format I've hit on is podcasting. It turns out there are all sorts of great podcasts on climate science and politics, and on renewables and other solutions. A few of my favorites are Renewable Energy Access, NPR Climate Connections, Weekly Radio Spin, the Insider Podcast from Environmental Defence, and EarthBeat Radio. Podcasts help fill "in-between" time including commuting, making supper, ironing, exercising, etc. It's like having a custom radio station that only plays content I want to keep up on. I'm definitely more plugged in to current events in the fight against global warming thanks to these podcasts.

I've especially enjoyed hearing about the youth conference "Power Shift 2007" and the ongoing youth action movements arising from that.

Locally, there's lots of work going into organizing the Dec. 8 Rally for Kyoto. I don't know if anyone is doing this here, but a lot of cities are joining in Greenpeace's polar bear plunge to save the polar bears.

So come out out to the rally on Dec. 8th and drive the message home!