monkey_brain wrote:Kim O'Hara wrote:monkey_brain wrote:
Are there really thousands of climatologist working on the issue of AGW? It seems surprising to me that there should be so many working on a single issue in climatology, which is just a small part of earth science. How many thousand are there?
Paul J
Just about every aspect of modern climatology is affected by AGW.
Numbers will depend on your definition of "climatologist". 1200 volunteered to contribute to the latest IPCC report (see
http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/ar5.html) and they would have been among the most highly qualified ... give each of them a half a dozen junior staff and half a dozen post-grad students and a dozen undergrad students and you're in the right ballpark.
Kim
Hold on. Looking at the chapter summaries of the working groups, the vast majority of the work is not concerned with the crux of the issue--what are the cause(s) of recent warming, and will it continue in the future, and to what extent. Impacts on Agriculture in Africa, say, doesn't call on quite the same expertise, nor need it be controversial in the way the main issue is. And if a research team that projects warming into the future relies on the work of a research team that worked on the methodology of using tree ring cores to generate historical temperatures, or whatnot, it is still the first team that gets counted as relevant climatologists for our purposes.
It looks like just parts of working group I fits the bill here.
Paul J.
Don't like that? Try this:
http://desmogblog.com/2012/11/15/why-cl ... -pie-chart.
Anther back-of-the-envelope calculation - simply because I don't know where you would find the number you want - but ...
14 000 scientific papers in 20 years (rounding off a bit since we're not going to be very accurate anyway).
That's 3500 per year.
Assume each researcher publishes 5 papers per year (which I think is fairly reasonable), and you get 700 researchers.
But 2 - 5 authors per paper is pretty normal. Call the average 2 to be on the low side and you have 1400 researchers getting published; call it three and you have 2100. Then add in the postgrad students, the undergrads if you like ...
I'm happy to let my "thousands" stand. If you want to disagree, show me some evidence for your position and I will happily defer to the truth.
Kim
P.S. I scrolled down that (linked) page after hitting "submit" and found, "The articles have a total of 33,690 individual authors." It looks like my estimate of papers per researcher was way too high.