[UPDATED: See the note and link at the bottom of the article]
Climate skeptics like to claim that there are many independent scientists who refute the consensus of climate change. They love to cite folks like S. Fred Singer, Robert Carter, Roy Spencer (ahem, Dr. Roy Spencer), Pat Michaels, and Willie Soon. Each of these people is asserted to be some independent minded scientist bucking the trend.
Except it isn't true.
There really are only a handful of climate skeptic scientists. Some, Lord Monckton for example, have no real science background at all (the closest Monckton gets to science training is he is a certified Day Skipper for his yacht). Others have a scientific background, though only a few have any actual expertise in climate science. Others, S. Fred Singer for example, are merely figureheads who act as spokesmen for the industry. In any case, qualified climate scientist dissenters must put their data into peer review for incorporation into the analysis, just like every other scientist. Their data must be persuasive. To date it has not. Which may be why they post more on blogs than in the peer-reviewed literature.
Ah, but the climate skeptics (denialists or realists depending on if you are a real scientist or not) point to the vast array of organizations that prove that climate change is not real and/or a natural phenomenon that has nothing to do with anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The skeptics aver that these are scientific organizations, usually in a desperate effort to counter Steve B, who has demonstrated unequivocally that no scientific organization has refuted the IPCC consensus statement on climate change.
Except that the skeptics organizations are not scientific organizations at all.
On the right side of the chart below are the organizations most often touted by the climate skeptics. Some are essentially just blogs, some are actual organizations, but none are scientific organizations. All are advocacy groups. The numbers in the boxes indicate the number of the 11 scientists who are associated with them (e.g., Icecap has 8 of the 11 scientists associated with it).
The boxes on the left side of the graphic represent some of the most often cited skeptic scientists. The numbers indicate how many of the 8 organizations to which each scientist is associated (e.g., Sally Baliunas is associated with 5 of the organizations).
The color-coded lines tie together each of these "independent" scientists to the organizations to which they are most often associated.
As can be clearly seen, there is quite a traffic jam of lines in the middle, which is why I used color-coding (otherwise it becomes impossible to tell one scientist and organization from another).
Which, of course, is the point. These organizations all hire the same handful of scientists that either agree with them or are willing to shill for them. The fact that the scientists are associated with so many organizations suggests that independence is really not particularly important.
But let's take a closer look at the organizations.
Several of the organizations - George C. Marshall Institute, Heartland Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, Greening Earth Society - are free market lobbying organizations that have no expertise or mission regarding climate science. Except of course that these organizations promote free market and free enterprise business principles (which roughly translates to externalizing much of the societal costs to the taxpayers). Thus, since their own mission statements promote free markets, they obviously are only interested in trying to keep Congress and others from taking action that they feel will hurt their organizational goals. That in itself is part of their mission, but they try to sell it as if it were science. It isn't.
The other organizations sound more scientific, but then that is part of the playbook first used successfully by the tobacco industry to obfuscate the health effects of smoking. Folks like S. Fred Singer are no stranger to the playbook as they also were "experts" on tobacco before becoming experts on climate change. The bottom line is that these organizations are front groups for the other free market organizations and the industries most likely to be effected by any policy remedies designed to deal with climate change.
One last point. You'll see in the chart that 8 of the 11 skeptic scientists are associated with the Heartland Institute (whose mission is promoting free market strategies).  A significant number of the skeptic scientists are also associated with other free market groups. This begs the obvious question:
Why would supposedly reputable, independent scientists be associated with free market lobbying organizations? What benefit would the Heartland Institute be to a scientist who is studying climate change? I mean, scientists belong to scientific organizations. Organizations where they can present their research, listen to others presenting their research, and engage in scientific debate about that research. After all, that is how science is done. Scientists publish their research in peer-reviewed literature and discuss their research in scientific conferences and other venues designed for the exchange of data and ideas. Heartland Institute meetings are all about economics and free market principles (and lobbying Congressmen).
So what reason is there that "independent scientists" would be associated with free market organizations whose entire objective is to defeat any possible regulatory remedy that they feel will negatively impact free enterprise?
Â
Note: The article above garnered over 640 comments and thus takes several seconds to load. Therefore, I have copied the article here so others can read it uninhibited. A few summary comments have been added to this post. Anyone wishing to read all of the related comments are encouraged to go to the original article here. Please take the time to read all the comments, as they are very enlightening.
Â
Note that this article is now located in a group called "Exposing Climate Denialism - A Guide to Tactics and Tall Tales," located at climatelies.gather.com. Please join the group and set settings to receive new articles when they are posted. The group also includes an archive of past pasts.
For those interested in knowing the truth about climate change, please check out my group The Truth About Global Warming at climatetruth.gather.com.
recommend
Facebook
Twitter
bookmark 
print
Comments: 3
Due to the quantity of comments the page takes several seconds to load, but please read through the entire string as it is quite revealing.
1) What does it tell us that only a handful of scientists are cited by climate skeptics? And as a corollary, why is the vast majority of the work of these scientists posted on blogs instead published in the peer-reviewed literature and presented at conferences of real scientific organizations?
2) What does it tell us that most of the skeptic "science" comes from non-scientific organizations whose sole purpose is to promote free markets?
3) What does it tell us that there is so much cross-breeding between the handful of scientists and the free market organizations and their front groups?
4) What does it tell us that the scientists most often cited are associated in the first place with free market lobbying organizations, given that most reputable scientists associate themselves with reputable scientific organizations such as those that Steve B has listed? As a corollary, why would any reputable scientist associate with a non-scientific organization in the name of adding to the scientific knowledge, when in fact those organizations are mandated by their charters and membership to fight against any policy remedies that might be considered to address the scientific consensus that they wish to inform?
5) And why do they not discredit themselves due to the factors identified in the article and the first 4 questions in this comment?
1) The chart is verifiably accurate. All of these connections to free market organizations and their front groups is documented.
2) No one offered a rational answer to the questions posed above.
3) The shear number of comments, especially from a pair of the usual Gather denialists, suggests that the truth of the chart was threatening. The denialists used a common deception by returning time after time to leave additional comments, not to provide new information (much of it was infantile or abusive), but to "block" from view the comment that debunked their position, in the hopes that future readers wouldn't read the entire substring (I encourage everyone to read not only the full substring, but the full set of comments on the page). The secondary goal is to put so many comments on the page that it takes forever to load, and thus dissuade future readership. Both techniques are transparent, and they are deceptive.
4) The denialists repeated the same worn out and debunked claims as they had before, including their tendency to repeat multiple times just in this thread the same comment that had already been addressed and suggesting that it hadn't. This tendency toward dishonesty by the denialists became acute in this thread.
5) One denialist commenter in particular would create a "disclaimer" for another commenter, then in future comments refer to it and suggest the other person had written it themselves. This went way beyond deceit and became pathological, not to mention illegal and ripe for a slander lawsuit. It seemed that credibiliy and honesty were attributes easily tossed out the window by the denialists.
6) There were many attempts to say climate change was merely an invention of Al Gore, despite the fact that Al Gore only did a slide show many years after the consensus was reached.
7) But luckily the denialists were met full force by scientists and others who appreciate the scientific process. Many examples and links to information showing how the denialists got almost everything wrong were provided, often over and over as the denialists had a tendency to simply ignore any information that proved them wrong and make believe it never happened.
8) In short, the scientific consensus on climate change was developed by the sum total of tens of thousands of peer-reviewed studies published over more then three decades of research by thousands of researchers working at every scientific organization imaginable worldwide.
9) In contrast, the "skeptics" position was developed because the non-scientific free market lobbying organizations with which the most often cited skeptic scientists are associated simply did not like the possible policy options being discussed. So they used the same playbook these same organizations used earlier to deny that smoking caused cancer.
Again, this new post is provided to allow others to be able to read the post without having to wait several seconds for the page to load. Please see the original article to see the full set of comments.
Thanks for visiting.