Link to the original article, strangely absent from this piece: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09959-4.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09959-4.pdf</a><p>They include politicians and business people in their analysis, and though they do acknowledge it as a shortcoming, they don't really do anything substantial to mitigate it.<p>Also, their analysis is really all over the place. It's not clear exactly how they're testing their hypothesis, they're just gathering a bunch of data and creating a bunch of pretty figures. Their "contrarian" list is kept private, so it's hard to know what they're really measuring. They put a ton of emphasis on using citations as a measure of scientific authority, but are using a dataset where they put politicians and business people in one group and exclusively scientists in the other group. There are plenty of climate change advocates who aren't scientists, why couldn't they match the two groups?<p>This is a perfect example of an increasing trend where it seems like the headline of the popsci article covering the research was written first, then a "scientific study" was performed in order to generate the headline desired.