To my brothers/sisters that I hope to see "On The Trail" and continue to express our opinions, or attack another' opinion "without attacking the man". I expected some blowback. Perhaps later I've got some time later to respond in detail, as the data doesn't lie, but here is some reading:
From the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science" journal, a highly-respected peer-review journal, the title of the Review Article is:
"Expert credibility in climate change"
William R. L. Anderegga,1, James W. Prallb, Jacob Haroldc, and Stephen H. Schneidera,d,1
aDepartment of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305; bElectrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3G4; cWilliam and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Palo Alto, CA 94025; and dWoods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
Contributed by Stephen H. Schneider, April 9, 2010 (sent for review December 22, 2009)
The Abstract:
Although preliminary estimates from published literature and expert surveys suggest striking agreement among climate scientists on the tenets of anthropogenic climate change (ACC), the American public expresses substantial doubt about both the anthropogenic cause and the level of scientific agreement underpinning ACC. A broad analysis of the climate scientist community itself, the distribution of credibility of dissenting researchers relative to agreeing researchers, and the level of agreement among top climate experts has not been conducted and would inform future ACC dis- cussions. Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
Please take the time to read the research as outlined in the article above. It was published 10 years ago. It compares the opinions of those who have published the greatest numbers of peer-reviewed research articles on Climate Change vs. those who have published a paucity of peer-reviewed articles...draw your own conclusions but please don't attack me for my opinions. Let's get back to discussing our passions for fly fishing/sheep hunting/elk hunting etc and keep a civil discourse. Time to get to the office.
Best,
DWD