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In the never ending quest for alarmists to one up their incompetent friends they continue to seek out new ways to demonstrate their own computer illiteracy. Enter James Powell who in a meaningless analysisis apparently ignorant that the ‘Web of Science’ database does not have a “peer-reviewed” only filter and the existence of a search phrase in a returned result does not determine it’s context. Thus, all that can be claimed is there were 13,950 meaningless search resultsnot “peer-reviewed scientific articles” for a query of the ‘Web of Science’ database – with 24 chosen by strawman argument.1. The context of how the “search phrases” were used in all the results was never determined.
2. The results are padded by not using the search qualifier “anthropogenic”.
3. The 13,950 results cannot be claimed to be peer-reviewed as the Web of Science does not have a peer-reviewed only filter.
4. It is a strawman argument that skeptics deny or reject there has been a global temperature increase of a fraction of a degree since the end of the little ice age.
1. Context matters
The existence of a search phrase in a returned result does not determine its context. So making any arguments for or against an implied position relating to the use of a phrase by simply looking at numerical result totals is impossible. Powell never determined the context of how the search phrases were used in all the results.
Thus, Powell’s 13,950 meaningless search results include ones irrelevant to the global warming debate such as,
Case study of visualizing global user download patterns using Google Earth and NASA World Wind
(Journal of Applied Remote Sensing, Volume 6, Issue 1, October 2012)
– Ziliang Zong et al.2. Padding the Results
Powell padded his search results total by using the phrases; “global warming” and/or “global climate change” instead of “anthropogenicglobal warming” [man-made global warming] or “anthropogenicglobal climate change” [man-made global climate change], which would have significantly reduced the number of returned results. Without the qualifier “anthropogenic”, results are included where no claim of explicit endorsement or rejection of ACC/AGW can be made.
Others alarmists have been challenged to search for the phrase, “anthropogenic climate change” using Oreskes (2004) methods and they only got 108 returned results. These low number of results are not useful to sell the type of propaganda alarmists like Powell are looking for.
3. Peer-Reviewed?
In his methods, Powell filtered his results by the ‘articles’ document type which includes content that may not be peer-reviewed depending on the specific journal,
Document Type Descriptions (Web of Science)
“Article: Reports of research on original works. Includes research papers, features, brief communications, case reports, technical notes, chronology, and full papers that were presented at a symposium or conference.”
Categories like these have been the subject of debate and confusionin relation to their peer-review status,
“…three categories of articles have been published: review articles up to 10 000 words, original articles of 2500–5000 words and brief communications of 1000–2000 words. Only the first two categories were subject to peer review and brief communications were being published without this quality check.” – Health Information and Libraries Journal
“Because of trends in submissions, Nature’s Brief Communications will bow out at the end of the year. […] False rumours that the section was not peer reviewed have occasionally circulated.” – Nature
4. Strawman argument
By fabricating a strawman argument claiming he found only 24 papers “rejecting global warming”, Powell intentionally misrepresented actual skeptic arguments and failed to count hundreds of peer-reviewed papers authored by skeptics such as,
If you use articles from the Internet, you can prove or disprove any point you want to.