The Times Finally Corrects Their Article

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Scott Langham at the British Press Complaints Commision the Sunday Times is finally correcting the story written by Naomi Oreskes and Jonathan Renouf. It was a very long time until the Times even responded, and finally when they checked with Dr. Oreskes she admitted that the statement that Changing Climate had been commissioned by Reagan was incorrect. Her excuse was that it was a long story and that this somehow made it simpler.

Well obviously it didn't make the article simpler. What it did was make the story much more sensational. You had the excitement of the shadowy JASON organization, and then a conspiracy by Reagan to hush up this awful global warming stuff. Of course none of that is true, and Dr. Oreskes knew it when she wrote it.

We also got got the opportunity to write a rebuttal to the rest of the story. The rebuttal that we wrote can be found here. The Times wanted to remove essentially all direct mention of Dr. Oreskes, and pretend like the article wrote itself. So that language is what you will find on the Times site. We are still happy with the result.

Work on a rebuttal to the published version of Dr. Oreskes paper is essentially complete. I think that it came out much better than the original rebuttal to the on line version of "Chicken Little", with a lot of new material, and a few things reorganized.