I get emails asking why I haven’t reported on this or than nose count survey of climate scientists, or such and such declaring himself a skeptic, or whatever.  Someone in Senator Inofe’s office constantly spams me with that stuff.

The answer is that I don’t think headcounts are a particularly relevent or interesting way to conduct science.  Interestingly, Russel Roberts answered a similar but different question in much the same way I would have:

A number of people have asked why my name was missing from the petition against the spending package [which appeared as an ad in the NY Times].  The simple answer is that I didn’t know about it. But I probably wouldn’t have signed it anyway. I decided a while back not to sign these kind of petitions. First, there’s usually something I don’t agree with in the text, and second, the whole thing is a little weird about the whole thing–the idea that people should care that there are a bunch of economists who feel this way, especially given that there are a bunch of economists on the other side of the political spectrum who feel the exact opposite. So is the idea that we have more Nobel Laureates than they do? But what if it’s fewer?