to be considered an expert in any professional scientific field requires the author to have published extensively on that field in the peer reviewed literature.

There's a few bits missing here, JeffH.

First, to be considered by whom? I suppose the professionals of that scientific field. True enough, although I'm sure one can find exceptions:

https://twitter.com/JohnFM49/status/938475301839015936

Second, which field? The domain covered in your paper seems to have 92 papers. Overall. For comparison's sake, there's more than one article published on Plato per day. What you studied looks more like a tiny topic than a field.

Third, how many publications is considered extensive? In your small bibliography, a few names appear more than once. No one seems to have ten papers on polar bears, at least as lead author.

Fourth, how many expert researchers are there in that field? If I take 4 as a minimum for "extensive" in your bibliography, there's Amstrup, Derocher, Regher, Rode, Stirling, and... that's it. So according to that criteria, there are five experts in that field.

Fifth, if there are five polar bear experts and they are the ones who decide who are the experts, we're not talking about a professional scientific field, but a fishing club. I'm being generous here: fishing clubs usually have more than five members. This is a close knit, too close and small for its own good.

Sixth, by your very own criteria, almost everybody who worked on polar bears in your bibliography are not even experts.

Seventh, there are many kinds of expertise, and many theories of expertise. Without having to claim any expertise on expertise, I can cite the work of Harry Collins and Robert Evans. They created a hierarchy or a classification of expertise, the two ones important here are interactional expertise and contributory expertise:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactional_expertise

The main difference is between being able to do things and being able to talk about things. Harry Collins learned to talk particle physics, but he can't claim being able to conduct experiments.

Your criteria is stricter than Collins & Evans' concept of contributory expertise. Being able to contribute in a field is certainly not the same as having a track record of many published contributions.

Eight, claiming that one is an expert is not the same thing as being portrayed as an expert. The distinction matters here: your paper mentions Heartland Institute's blurb, not what SusanC says about herself. Which is a good thing, as in her request for retraction, she explicitly says never having claimed having field expertise on polar bears. So even she agrees with you in a way, depending on how far you are willing to push your fishing club thing.

Ninth, you talk about requiring to publish. I agree that it's an administrative requirement: professors are expected to publish, at least when they get grants to do so. What happens when they don't? Many professors don't publish, the vast majority of them in fact. Sure, there are a few conference papers here and there, but that doesn't count, does it? They take less time to write than the number of hours I've spent in this thread alone.

Does that mean that most (if not all) professors in all the universities in the world are teaching courses in which they can't claim any expertise? I hope not.

Tenth, your "peer reviewed" lichurchur requirement excludes one of the most important discovery of the 20th century: Grigori Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture by putting an article on ArXiV. According to your criteria, GrigoriP is a passable expert in geometry, and only because he published less than ten papers in secondary journals.

As for the question of whether [SusanC] is getting too much attention here, [contrarians] have a very thin bench.

I agree about the size of the bench, and said so already. See above. I don’t think the size of the bench [favors] personalization. On the contrary, personalization works better when targetting institutions. Allow me to clarify. Consider the pigeonhole principle. You have pigeons and holes. If you put one pigeon per hole, either you end up with exactly one pigeon per hole (p is equal to h), more pigeons (p is bigger than h) or more holes (p is smaller than h).

Replace pigeons and holes with contrarians C and orthodox scientists O. The number of Cs is lower of Os. But see what happens when you personalize. “Orthodox polar bear scientist” becomes (say) Amstrup. “Dendro/paleo scientist” becomes MikeM. “Cognitive scientist interested in AGW” becomes Lew. See where this leads? A one-one correspondence: SusanC c. Amstrup, teh Auditor c. MikeM, Richie c. Lew.

The Contrarian Matrix can even look bigger than the orthodox position with enough personalization. Take this episode. Tony’s piling on. It’s all over PaulM’s. BartV’s submerged. Very few will come out and defend H17 against the contrarian onslaught. Contrarians looking like an enormous horde while a bunch of online scientists are ratiocinating over expertise conditions. JeffH, Lew, and MikeM can now leave the ClimateBall field. Who cares about their well poisoning and us ClimateBall players wasting time defending their crap?

They published a paper. Mission accomplished.

How to break the reduction created by personalization? Simple. Variety and connections. If all people hear about are MikeM and Lew and a few other talking heads, the consensus looks smaller than it is, and the contrarian matrix looks bigger than it is. We need to hear about other people than Lew and MikeM. Nobody voted them Kings of ClimateBall. I would take most contrarians on my team before taking them. (I’d take Ragnaar and Moshpit for sure; sorry, Richie, but your circularity argument makes you look worse than Lew.) If 97% of scientists agree that AGW carries risks, should be easy to offer some variety, no?

As to connections, again, look at the citations. The best way to see that SusanC’s alone behind her contrarian megaphone is to see who she cites favorably. Almost nobody. Look who cites her favorably: the Contrarian Matrix. I mean, it’s the freaking point of H17! Basic social network analysis. No, make that college-level reading comprehension skill.

Suppose you want to continue piling on SusanC. What to do? Here’s what not to do. Amstrup went and told [this to] Motherboard [about] SusanC:

You don’t have to read far in her material to see that it is full of unsubstantiated statements and personal attacks on scientists, using names like eco-terrorists, fraudsters, green terrorists and scammers https://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2017/11/29/there-once-was-a-polar-bear-science-vs-the-blogosphere/#comment-38998

I doubt this is the case. Amstrup should have checked first. Another scientist who has no idea how contrarians react to that kind of thing. Some ecologist we have there.

Nevertheless, consider the first part of Amstrup claim: unsubstantiated statements, personal attacks. Scratch the personal attacks. (Don’t ask why, I’m not in the mood.) We have unsubstantiated statements.

WHAT UNSUBSTANTIATED STATEMENTS?

This would be gold. Find some. Show they’re unsubstantiated. Two birds with one stone: SusanC’s credibility, moar science.

Our planet slides inexorably into the abyss, and all we got is poorly performed ClimateBall by guys who should know better by now. Worse – who are paid to do so.