Reviewing the climate change reviewers: Exploring controversy through report references and citations

There is a growing need to analyse the knowledge controversies about climate change. Human geography has a role in understanding of the motivations and sources of the participants in the debate. In this study, we explore the scientific background of the contrarian arguments, using Climate Change Reconsidered published by the conservative think tank Heartland Institute, in comparison with the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change The Physical Science Basis. Firstly, we surveyed the reference lists, which showed that in general the contrarian report used the same journals, as their most important sources. However, the differences are in the details: journals dealing with paleo-issues are more important for the contrarian report. Further, it is noteworthy that we found only 262 identical references (4.4% of all references) in the reports and their contextual analyses revealed that the rhetoric can be remarkably different, as can the way in which an article is used. These results indicate that we cannot state that the opponents use completely different sources, but the complementarity of their reference list raised some questions which are discussed in the last section of the paper. Should we take the 'contrarians' and their arguments seriously or not?