Expert credibility in climate change

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 discussions. 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 surveyed here 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.

Fig. 1.

Distribution of the number of researchers (n = 908) in convinced by the evidence (CE) of anthropogenic climate change and unconvinced by the evidence (UE) categories with a given number of total climate publications. Tick marks indicate the center of right-inclusive categories (e.g., 20–50, 51–100, 101–150, etc.).

Fig. 2.

Distribution of the number of the top 50 most-published researchers from CE and UE categories with a given number of total climate publications. Tick marks indicate the center of right-inclusive categories (e.g., 20–50, 51–100, 101–150, etc.).

Fig. 3.

Distribution of the number of researchers (n = 908) in CE and UE categories with a given number times cited for each researcher's average of the first through fourth most-cited papers. Tick marks indicate the center of right-inclusive categories (e.g., 0–50, 51–100, 101–150, etc.), stepped by increments of 50 until 1,000 citations, and 500 thereafter.