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The Database

The database holds four categories of information:

People: scientists and others who have expressed some form of climate contrarianism
Publications: scientific and other publications that contradict some aspect of climate orthodoxy
Declarations: public declarations requesting authorities and leaders to re-examine climate policy
Quotations: various expressions of climate contrarian views

The Data

Data are garnered from various online sources, and this is an ongoing activity. The database likely doesn’t include all the scientists and others who have ever expressed contrarian views on climate change but it does, however, tend to be more complete and up to date than the downloadable documents. Likewise, the database is unlikely ever to include all published contrarian climate science or quotations. Details of scientists are as per the original source, and checking credentials, qualifications, etc. is an ongoing activity: the ‘Checked’ field in the Scientist Details panel indicates whether the selected individual has been checked, in which case you can be reasonably assured that the qualifications quoted for them are correct. University professors are the easiest for us to check, as they tend to have more readily available online biographical details. In some cases, individuals may have qualifications or titles that are not in the database. The ‘Published’ field indicates whether the individual is known to have published peer-reviewed climate science, but please note that if this box is not ticked, it does not necessarily mean that the individual has not published such material, merely that we have not yet discovered it! The ‘Rating’ field is a five-star rating system that is an attempt to rank individuals on the basis of their academic and climate credentials.

The Web App

The web app provides an online front end that shows four lists, one for each of the above information categories, and enables users to query the database in various ways and examine the relationships between the categories.

Launch the web app

Configuration

The configuration panel at the top controls the behaviour of the app:

Choose the list to focus on controls which list is the ‘master’ view. When set to something other than ‘None’, the other lists become ‘detail’ views, and only show information related to the currently selected row in the master view. For example, if the master view is ‘Scientists’, you can see the publications (‘Science’) which the selected person (‘Scientist’) has authored, the declarations they have signed, and quotations attributed to them. Similarly, by focusing on ‘Science’, you can see the authors of a publication, and by focusing on ‘Declarations’, you can see the signatories of the selected declaration, and so on. In some cases, certain detail lists are disabled as there is no master—detail relationship (for example, there are no scientific publications directly associated with declarations or quotations).

Show toolbars shows or hides a toolbar for each list.

The Filter field allows you to search for text anywhere in the associated list. The search is case-insensitive and the search text is matched against all fields in that list (not just those shown in columns). For example, the image above shows how you might search for all university professors. Pressing the Escape key or clicking the X icon on the right clears the search string and restores the full, unfiltered list.

On the right of each toolbar are two buttons. Clicking the Download button displays a popup menu that allows you to download the contents of the list in either tab-separated CSV format (for import into, for example, a spreadsheet) or as a standalone PDF document. Your browser will take care of the download in the normal way.

The Reload button reloads the current page, which is useful if the database is being updated while you are using the app.

Lists

All lists have the same basic structure, but different columns. The section containing a list may be collapsed/expanded by clicking the up/down arrow at the top right. There are five lists, one for each of the information categories People/Scientists, Publications /Science, Declarations and Quotations; the Statistics list at the bottom shows useful statistics about the contents of the database.

Sorting

Lists can be sorted by any one of their columns, in either ascending or descending order as indicated by an up- or down-arrow to the right of the column label. Text fields are sorted alphabetically, number and boolean fields such as Rating and Published are sorted numerically, and date fields are sorted temporally. Change the sort order by clicking on a column header; for example, the following shows the list being sorted in ascending order of last name:

Pagination

Lists have a paginator to allow you to navigate the results one page at a time. Items per page allows you to set the maximum number of records displayed per page, which can be 5, 10, 20, 50 or 100. Next is shown which record numbers are displayed on the current page, together with the total number. If a filter is active, the numbers reflect only the records which match the filter. Finally, there are four arrow buttons for navigating the results: clicking the first or last button will display the first or last page of results respectively, and clicking the middle two will display the previous or next page. The navigation buttons are automatically enabled and disabled as appropriate.

Selection

Clicking anywhere in a list row selects that row. Here, Dr. Khabibullo Abdussamatov is selected:

Details

The details section of each list may be expanded/collapsed by clicking the down/up arrow at the bottom right. When expanded the section shows further details for the selected row: