I'm updating the notes and commentary on my climate scientists/petition signers list pages, including notes on one new skeptic letter, the "Copenhagen Climate Challenge", plus one one activist statement from 1700 UK scientists, re-affirming the integrity of climate science in response to the East Anglia email break-in. (More about those in another post.)
For now, I'm updating my rationale for not attempting to address the old, well-worn "Oregon Petition" or "Petition Project of the OISM." My page on Sources now includes over a dozen links to rebuttals or debunkings of the Oregon Petition.
Up to now I had only done a small random sampling of OISM signer names; much like other such efforts, I found very few active professors, journal article authors, or much of anything of note.
Tonight I decided to try a larger OISM sample, exercising a handy perl script I've written which can compare two lists of names, finding matches even where one instance is an exact substring match of the other, or has an initial and the other has either a full name starting with that initial, or omits the initial (works in either direction). It reports a match where file A has "Public, John Q" and file B has "Public, John Quincy", "Public, John", or "Public, JQ". It's something I'd been meaning to write for some time, and it's proving very helpful in semi-automating searches and comparisons, especially between lists of names from a petition, letter or statement, versus my existing list of names I've already gathered (2300 already traced for homepage and stats; 700+ still not done, just names or name + clue.)
So I looked at the petitionproject website, decided to try the list for one large state, and landed on California (lots of universities, plenty of liberal/left ideas in the air, although the state also has a strong conservative streak as well.) Anyway it was supposed to be pseudorandom, and to give a large enough sample for a meaningful test.
The petitionproject site has 3,766 names listed under California. I copied their list into a unix text file, did a bit of massaging to get one name per line, and then counted the listed degrees: 987 PhDs, 308 MDs, 32 DVM (veterinarians). I decided to start with just the PhDs. I ran my name-comparing script, checking OISM PhDs from California against my current list of names already in my web listings from other sources (other petitions, co-authors of someone in the list, found on a department website of someone I was adding, etc.)
The script matched up the following 14 names:
Baker, Don Robert
Berry, Edwin X
Chilingar, George V
Ellsaesser, Hugh W
Gruntman, Mike
Kunc, Joseph A
Lewis, William P
Maccabee, Howard D
Nierenberg, William A
Ogren, John A
Sharp, Gary Duane
Starr, Chauncey
Stevenson, Robert E
Whitten, Robert C
Don R Baker and William P Lewis were the only two not already tagged as signers of another skeptic declaration. The rest had also signed either the Leipzig Declaration, the 2009 APS letter, Manhattan Declaration, or in two cases, several other skeptic statements.
I haven't tracked down Don R Baker yet, but I wanted to blog about my tribulations trying to sort out William P Lewis and John A Ogren.
William P Lewis
There was already a William Lewis on my list, but on checking his homepage, I found his middle initial is M. He's a Fellow of the CIRES Center in Boulder, CO. I had his homepage but no stats for him yet - to do... Meanwhile, back to William P Lewis, PhD, OISM signer. Technically, he was a 'false positive' in my name-matching script, as I had not filled in William M Lewis' middle initial previously. No matter; let's make William P Lewis, PhD a blind draw for an online search for identity and credentials.
So I tried Google Scholar with author:wp-lewis and there were 79 hits, the tops ones from an engineer in Australia (scratch that one); a doctor from USC Medical School doing tropical medicine and parasitology, top cited works dating back to the 1960s. Hmm. Right state, not exactly climate-related, and MD != PhD, though he might have both. Wait! I found this article from Arch.Ophthalmol (1961) listing the lead author as William P Lewis, PhD - an exact match. Stuff about parasite infections. The most recent work that's clearly by the same author is from 1977. The same guy as the one publishing one paper in 1992 on TB and HIV, out of USC School of Medicine? Still around in 1998 or later to sign petitions? Who knows.
But has any WP Lewis published anything at all on climate change? Well, Google Scholar on author:wp-lewis climate returns three, one by someone else, an engineer, and two by the parasitologist; one mentions "amebic infections acquired in temperate climates". The other one is paywalled; the abstract doesn't mention climate; it's mainly about diagnostic tests for amebiasis. Hmm... climate expert?
Next I did a couple of google searches, and found there is one William P Lewis, P.Eng, working in Yuba City, California in wastewater treatment. He's even published a couple of articles that show up in Google Scholar, including one on how new aerators saved 1/3 of the power consumption for their treatment plant. Good on ya, WP. Three of his papers even mention the word "climate" (ties in with hydrology, affecting water services, I guess.)
So, are any of these William P Lewises the obvious candidate for OISM petition signer? Ummm... I'm not sure. One is a PhD in parasitology at UCLA, publishing up to 1977; one is an MD at USC med school, a single paper in 1992; was the WP Lewis, PhD who wrote on parasitology in the 60's this same doctor, or perhaps his father? (there's no 'II' or 'Jr') Or no relation?
The other one in Yuba City has a P.Eng. professional designation (implying perhaps an MSc or BSc in engineering - you can get a P.Eng without a PhD.)
None of them has published any research into climate science, but then we already knew the Oregon Petition was pretty "liberal", pardon the expression, on name inclusion.
So who signed the petition, exactly: the tropical medicine prof, the 1960s opthalmologist, or the wastewater treatment engineer - or someone else entirely, who has even less of a web presence?
This took me at least 20 minutes to research, not counting the time to write up this blog entry. By contrast, a match on a real climate scientist with a teaching job at a university can typically be traced and added to my list in under two minutes. That ease is what's made it possible for me to accumulate a couple of thousand completed listings; the legitimate experts simply show up quickly in a Google search for their name. Nearly everyone doing research at a university has a homepage on the university's website, and once they've published any peer-reviewed work at all, their name will show up in Google Scholar. There, a single article on a relevant topic may provide the author's full name (if they don't limit the printout to first initial(s) only, a vexatious and outdated convention) and institutional affiliation (at the time.)
It's not uncommon for a young scientist's career path to lead through various universities and research centres, often spanning the globe. It can require a bit more reading to see if it's the same person working at two different places at different times, but it can also be interesting to see a rising star get hired away by another school or lab halfway around the world (or be forced to settle for that, perhaps?)
I've still got John A. Ogren to cover - I'll split him off into another post.
Showing posts with label climate scientists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate scientists. Show all posts
Sunday, 17 January 2010
Sunday, 23 November 2008
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.
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
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
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