Nicolas Nierenberg

The BBC Part 3

2010-07-21T09:55:00.000-07:00

The BBC have published this correction on their web site. I am generally fine with the result, although it is annoying that they failed to engage on the question of how they characterized the report in general. They are sticking with the idea that the report coincided with Reagan's policy interests solely on the fact that it didn't recommend immediate changes in the fuel mix. This boils down a five hundred page detailed report on an issue to part of one recommendation. Hardly historically or scientifically accurate, but this is the BBC.

Our Peer Reviewed Paper is Published

2010-07-03T09:23:00.000-07:00

I have just been notified that our peer reviewed paper on the 1983 NAS report "Changing Climate" has been published. This paper completely refutes the claims of the "Chicken Little" paper by Oreskes et al. published in 2008. It has been a long but very rewarding process for me.

We initially submitted a paper that was a straight rebuttal of the Oreskes paper. We received an encouraging reply, but we were informed that either it would have to be greatly shortened and published as a reply, or it would have to be rewritten as an original paper. At first I found this discouraging, but I took the challenge and went back to review all the source materials available in the SIO archives, as well as a much broader selection of the existing literature. This allowed me to see the entire context of the story and how the publication of "Changing Climate" had actually occurred. In my particular case the peer review process was a strong positive, and made the result much better than my original idea.

The story actually starts with the Carter administrations push for synthetic fuels, and concern that this would exacerbate a problem that people were already starting to worry about. Ironically by the time "Changing Climate" was completed the synthetic fuels program had collapsed.

One thing that is still absolutely clear from all of this is that Oreskes got the story wrong.

I hope you enjoy reading about this piece of history. If anyone is interested in any of the underlying source documents I have images of all of them.

The paper is presented here by permission of the UC Press. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 40, Number 3, pps. 318–349. ISSN 1939-1811, electronic
ISSN 1939-182X. © 2010 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

Merchants of Doubt and Conspiracy

2010-06-07T10:46:00.000-07:00

Oreskes devotes pages 197-213 to the "IPCC Chapter 8 Controversy." This was, in my opinion, a tempest in a teapot over the revision history of the 1995 IPCC chapter on attribution. The whole thing comes down to a few editorials in the Wall Street Journal, as well letters in the Journal of the American Meteorological Association.

According to Oreskes the attacks on the IPCC were an important event, and part of a long time conspiracy by a few scientists to distort the science on warming.

Interestingly Myanna Lahsen, who Oreskes references,wrote an entire paper on the Chapter 8 issue. Unlike Oreskes, Lahsen saw it as evidence of group thinking on all sides of the issue. She also felt that in the end it wasn't at all clear whether IPCC procedures were followed or not, but that in her opinion it didn't seem to change the meaning all that much. Also the attacks on the IPCC had little or no policy impact.

But the most interesting thing Lahsen wrote was the following. Which she clearly meant in a neutral way. Perhaps Oreskes should have read the whole thing rather than selectively quoting.

"Whether meant seriously or simply used as means [sic] of achieving political gain, attributions of conspiracy are unhelpful for constructive discussion about the state of scientific knowledge about climate change and about possible 'no-regrets' policy action (policy responses related to energy consumption that have environmental and economic benefits aside from reducing the potential risk of global warming). The vilification inherent in such attributions of sinister motives rarely resonates with the self-perceptions and intents of the accused, and hence further polarizes the groups involved in this already frequently antagonistic debate. One lesson to draw from this case study is the care with which charges of conspiracy must be received and their factual basis examined for assumptions of sinister plotting applied to a reality of much more complexity and much less coherence. Charges and suggestions of conspiracy spread with little resistance among sympathetic audiences in a social and scientific context characterized by uncertainty, fragmentation, complexity, and competing interests; who was who, and who said or provoked what and with what authority and expertise, is not always easily established. As a result most controversies around human-induced climate change--including this one concerning Chapter 8--remain unresolved, competing claims rarely verified but allowed to fester with the general effect of reinforcing preconceived suspicions and positions."
(Myana Lahsen, "Direction and Attribution of Conspiracies" )

Truer words were never spoken.

Oreskes New Book

2010-05-31T13:10:00.000-07:00

So now Oreskes along with Conway have published a book called "Merchants of Doubt." (A name perhaps unfortunately similar to Merchant of Venice given that all the people she attacks are Jewish.) Anyway I just ordered a copy but it seems unlikely that this will be more factual than her peer reviewed work. In fact her non peer reviewed article in the Sunday Times was even more of a fabrication than her article, as was the BBC segment based on her work. So I have a feeling this is going to be horrible.

I knew how to respond to a bad paper, publish a correct paper. I also knew how to respond to an fabricated story in the media, get a correction published. But I have no idea how to respond to this book. All I have come up with so far is to put up a review on Amazon. Doesn't seem like much.

It just occurred to me that I never figured out how to respond to her inaccurate Congressional testimony either. She has this great soap box and the imprimatur of the university that makes correcting the history a real uphill battle.

The BBC Part 2

2010-05-24T20:51:00.000-07:00

Well it took a long time, but the BBC sent me an email acknowledging that their program "Climate Wars" had significant errors in its coverage of my father, and the 1983 NAS report Changing Climate. Specifically the admitted that my father was not appointed by Ronald Reagan, and that the tone of their show would mislead a viewer in their understanding of the report and the role of the administration.

They made a kind of weak argument that since the 1980 election had been on the horizon that ties to Reagan might have influenced the NAS in the selection of my father. They also say that the television show accepted that the NAS report predicted "some warming." They also said that using the phrase "Nierenberg called in the experts" they had made it clear it wasn't his work alone.

I wrote back explaining that my father was appointed to the relevant position more than a year before Reagan's election. That the members of the panel weren't appointed by Nierenberg, but by the NAS. In addition the scientific conclusions were almost identical to the 2007 IPCC report, and have stood the test of time. Finally I pointed out that they needed to say that this was a product of the National Academy and not the Reagan Administration.

So now they are back reviewing what they think about that.

The BBC

2010-01-24T11:10:00.000-08:00

I was in the UK over Christmas and it turns out that the BBC is still running their program "Climate Wars" from time to time. Anyway I watched the initial episode on the web and its portrayal of my father was based on the same erroneous facts as the Oreskes story in the Times On Line. Gee I'm so surprised that Oreskes didn't call up the BBC to correct this when she was forced to admit to the Times that they needed to print a correction to their story.

The BBC picks right up on the false claim the Reagan had appointed my father to produce a politically motivated report on CO2. They have a caricature of his career focused on his work on the Manhattan project. The whole segment falls apart if they would correctly state that the report was actually from the National Academy of Sciences, and that he had been appointed by the Academy prior to Reagan being elected. Maybe if the "scientist" who narrates the program had taken five minutes to actually read "Changing Climate" he would have been unwilling to read that kind of slander.

Anyway I have filed a complaint with the BBC. This took the usual couple of tries. My first attempt got the response asking me for when the show had aired. I replied by sending them a link from their own web site.

The latest reply said that they are looking into it, but that it may take some time due to the high volume of complaints recently. My goal is for the BBC to either not show that episode any longer, or for them to edit and correct the portion having to do with my father.

Oreskes is Wrong

2008-11-28T15:12:00.000-08:00

That is the final conclusion of William Connelly after reviewing all the material. His concluding blog entry on the topic can be found here. I previously posted about Atmoz view.

Roger Pielke Jr. also blogged about "Chicken Little" in Lies posing as history.

So far no blogger has concluded that there is anything worthwhile about Oreskes et al 2008.

That includes Eli Rabett who pretty much was ready to go with Oreskes about anything, but didn't try to defend this one. Of course he didn't retract his blog entry about the Times article which Oreskes admitted was false.

So, in my view this phase of the battle is done. Oreskes posted a paper on the Internet, and now the people who have reviewed that paper as well as our criticism have concluded that it was worthless.

Oreskes wrote an article for the Times, and the Times was forced to print a correction.

On to the published paper which must be dealt with differently.

The Times Finally Corrects Their Article

2008-11-01T02:37:00.000-07:00

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.

It Just Keeps Getting Better

2008-10-09T15:30:00.000-07:00

I have been going through the process of updating our critique to match the published version of Oreskes et al. ("Chicken Little"). As I was reading the paper I came across a story about Fred Koomanoff.

After relating the story about Koomanoff telling Keeling that his funding would be cut off. (Of course without mentioning that Nierenberg was the one who saved the funding.) They continue with this "The problem got worse when Democrats in congress held hearings on the climate research program. Koomanoff was a key witness, and he emphasized model uncertainty." This is uncited although the entire paragraph cites testimony of "Friends of the Earth". I don't think Koomanoff would have testified with that particular group.

In the next paragraph. "Koomanoff's testimony unsettled the climate scientists, but the difficulty went further. In a meeting with the Academy, he made it clear that the administration exprected the scientists to toe the line. 'Those who must make decisions...deserve better than to hear divergent voices from the scientific community.'" This cites a letter from John Perry to the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee

Now I didn't really think too much about this for a couple of reasons. First I had heard the story about Koomanoff and Keeling, so I could imagine him taking a hard line. Second it didn't directly involve the central themes of our critique. Or so I thought.

Then I considered the fact that there wasn't a single case where I had gone to a source document and found that is was consistent with what Chicken Little had said. There was always something wrong. In some cases, as I have documented in this blog, it has been pretty ridiculous. So just for fun I decided to get a copy of the Perry letter from the Scripps archives.

Well we can score another hit for Oreskes reporting something different than what is in the source document. And the cool part is that they cited from this letter three times, and they are wrong every time.

Let's start with the Koomanoff quote, as this one is pretty easy. There are two problems. First Koomanoff didn't say it. While Perry says that Koomanoff, and James Kane made introductory remarks this remark was clearly made by Kane. The second problem is that Koomanoff and Kane defined consensus "as 'sufficient agreement to form a basis for action.'" So other than the fact that Oreskes et al. attributed the remark to the wrong person, and changed the meaning completely they were right on the money.

Now let's look at another quote that they claim to pull from the same letter. "In meetings with the Climate Research Board, Energy Department officials told Academy members that they 'did not approve of...sepculative, alarmist, 'wolf-crying' scendarios." This quote can't be found anywhere in the letter at all. Maybe it is just an incorrect footnote since the next sentence references the fourth session of the CDAC in September 1981. The only person who mentions "wolf crying" in the cited Perrry letter is Mancur Olson from the University of Maryland. "Here fanaticism, wolf crying, and a multitude of dissenting views may unnecessarily slow the acceptance of information and the adoption of sensible adjustments to it."

Finally they 'quote' Tom Pesorius. "Moreover, there was no need for alarm, the new senior policy analyst at White House Office of Science and Technology, Tom Pesorius insisted, because 'technology will ultimately be the answer to the problems of providing energy and protecting the environment.'" Well, the last portion of this is correct. But Pesorius doesn't say that there was "no need for alarm", let alone "insist" on it. After a discussion of issues dealing with reaching a consensus Perry ends this paragraph with "Concluding, he expressed the belief that technology will ultimately the [sic] answer to the problems of providing energy and protecting the environment."

Now this last statement doesn't seem controversial to me. Solar, nuclear, sequestration, high mileage vehicles are all examples of technology. It only gets that way when Oreskes pumps it up with things like "no need for alarm" and "insists."

So there you go. My rule is intact, if you follow any reference from Oreskes et al. 2008 you find something completely different than what they say.

If you want to see the Perry letter here it is.

"OCS is Nonsense"

2008-09-29T21:49:00.000-07:00

OCS is what William Connolley calls Oreskes et al. And he has decided it is nonsense. I have to say that I appreciate the time he and Atmoz have spent looking at it.

In the course of their postings they have alerted me to some stuff that I missed when we wrote our critique. We are updating it now to referenced the published version of Oreskes et al., and we will look at using their ideas.

More on Oreskes et al 2008 ("Chicken Little")

2008-09-21T15:14:00.000-07:00

One of the interesting things that has happened as a result of blog discussions of the Times article is that errors and misrepresentations from Oreskes et al 2008 keep popping up. It almost as if you can look at any page in that paper and find something wrong.

A frequent subject of our criticism was the tendency of the "Chicken Little" paper to edit and paraphrase quotes in order to change the meaning. Well I'm sorry to say that I missed a good one that Atmoz discusses here. They use an elipsis to leave out a word, and then just cut the quote in mid sentence to completely change the meaning of what Dr. Revelle wrote regarding the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. (I may add that to our paper prior to submitting it for publication.)

There is this ironic point made here by Atmoz that the synthesis emphasized the issue of sea level rise more than the Revelle chapter. Just the opposite of the conclusions reached by Oreskes et al 2008.

On the post normal times web site Sylvia Tognetti quotes from "Chicken Little" to make a point about Nordhaus and Yohe. However I found it amusing that even in that short quotation there are two errors. First the Nordhaus and Yohe chapter is not chapter one of the report but chapter two. Second Jesse Ausubel is listed as an author of the chapter, but he was in fact not an author of that chapter. The first point is trivial I admit, but it does show a lack of care. The inclusion of Ausubel seems to me to be a little more deliberate since he wouldn't be perceived as an expert on that subject.

I think you can find a mistake or deliberate falsehood in that paper just by throwing a dart at it.

Oreskes blows a gasket

2008-09-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

Something quite strange just happened. I recounted in my earlier post that Dr. Oreskes had promised to notify me when her paper was accepted for publication. Here is that email;

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Dear Mr. Nierenberg,

Thank you for your detailed communication. I appreciate your concern for your father's legacy and your loyalty to him.

I have tried to explain the basis for my views to you; obviously we have a difference of interpretation here.

I believe that what I said in my senate testimony, as an expert witness, was a fair interpretation of the documentary evidence, which includes the minutes of the committee meetings, the report itself, the peer reviews of it, and its reception in the scientific community and the Reagan White House. You are, of course, entitled to a different interpretation.

The evidence for my reading of the historical record is provided in full in a paper I am currently preparing for publication, which is based on extensive archival research here at SIO and in the archives of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Once the paper has completed peer-review and is accepted for publication, I would be happy to share a copy with you. If you still feel my interpretation is faulty or incomplete, I would encourage you to write a discussion in the journal.

Yours truly,

Naomi Oreskes
-----------------------------------------

I have only corresponded with her a couple of times since then, here is the full chain.

When I found out independently that her paper had been posted on line without any notification to me. So I wrote her the following on February 14th.

----------------------------------
Can I assume that the paper that I have listed in the subject, which is the one that you referring to in December?

Regards,

Nicolas Nierenberg
-------------------------------------

I received the following reply on February 15th indirectly from a Julia Partrdige

--------------------------------------

Yes but it is not yet published.

Naomi Oreskes

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This was my response sent the same day

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Perhaps, but it is now posted to the internet. If one desired to have a response posted is that available on the same site?

Nicolas Nierenberg

-----------------------------------------

There was no correspondence between then and when I found out that her paper had been published without notification to me. I was not happy to find that out and wrote the following on September 7th.

------------------------------------------

I am sure that you have some wonderful explanation for why you didn't inform me that your paper on my father was accepted for publication, and is now in print. Your previous explanation was that the web site you published to was not a peer reviewed site, but I don't believe that was true in this case. One might almost believe that you were concerned about the journal seeing the response.

Nicolas Nierenberg

-----------------------------------------

This is the bizarre response I just received from Shannon Sloan.

------------------------------------------

Mr. Nierenberg,
Given the hostile and threatening tone of your previous correspondence,
Dr. Oreskes saw no reason to further any conversation with you and now
formally requests that you cease and desist any further contact. Thank
you.

Shannon Sloan
Public Relations/Assistant to the Provost
Sixth College Business/Provost Office
ssloan@ucsd.edu
-----------------------------------------------------------------

It appears that Dr. Oreskes' altering of the historical record is now not just limited to my father.

I should point out that her paper was published months before either this site was created, or I responded to the erroneous story in the Times on line on some blogs. So her failure to notify me, as she had promised to do, had nothing to do with that.

Nierenberg and Oreskes

2008-09-13T22:11:00.000-07:00

I first noticed the activities of Dr. Naomi Oreskes when I was doing research for the Nierenberg prize at the Scrippps Instititution of Oceanography. We were awarding the prize to Dr. James Hansen and I was looking for some historical information on my father Dr. William A. Nierenberg. What I found was very surprising.

In congressional testimony on December 6th 2006 Dr. Oreskes testified that

"In 1983 the National Academy formed a committee chaired by physicist William Nierenberg to look in greater detail to look at the issues raised by the Jason and Charney reports. The Nierenberg committee accepted their scientific conclusions , but declined to view global warming as a problem, predicting that many adverse effects would be adequately remedied by technological innovation driven by market forces."

I knew that my father had been critical over the years of the certainty expressed by many climate scientists, but I had never heard about this issue, so I decided to get a copy of the report. I initially found an article in the NY Times that had been printed the day after the report was published, and in reading that article it didn't seem to be in line with the comments in Oreskes' testimony.

The 1983 report "Changing Climate" is not available on line, but I was able to get a copy from the SIO library. After reviewing the report I was unable to find any justification for Oreskes' remarks to congress. Also the committee was clearly not formed in 1983, but rather in 1980 at the request of the US congress under then president Jimmy Carter.

UPDATE: May 2010, "Changing Climate" is available on line now so you can see for yourself.

I wrote Dr. Oreskes to get clarification of the basis of her remarks. She was unable to point me to anything specific in the report, but rather made vague references to technology being mentioned. She also said that she had other source materials and was working on a paper on the topic.

I asked Dr. Oreskes whether she would let me review a copy of the paper prior to publication, but she declined. She offered to let me know when the paper would be published, so that I could ask that a rebuttal be printed in the same edition.

Several months later I discovered that Dr. Oreskes had published a non peer reviewed paper at a web site for "working papers." I asked her whether this was the paper she was referring to in her earlier emails, and her response was "yes but it is not yet published." I considered this an inadequate response since in the modern era posting something on the internet is certainly publishing it. In any event I expected her therefore to let me know when it was "published."

Meanwhile I, along with Victoria Tschinkel, and Walter Tschinkel began working on a response to the internet published paper. This took quit a bit of time since virutally all of the source material that Oreskes et al use is not available on line and had to be retrieved from archives. I was quite shocked to discover that much of the material had been paraphrased in ways that changed the meaning, or which misrepresented the original document. I can only assume that the authors didn't think anyone would get access to the original material.

In the mean time two things happened. The Oreskes et al article was published, without Dr. Oreskes ever notifying me. When I recently wrote her an email asking abou this she chose not to reply. Second an article in the London Times online was published. This article was bylined by Dr. Oreskes, but it was factually completely incorrect.

"So Reagan commissioned a third report about global warming from Bill Nierenberg, who had made his name working on the Manhattan Project developing America’s atom bomb."

(As a side note although my father was proud of the work he did on the Manhattan project prior to receiving his PhD, I don't think any historian credits him with "developing" the atom bomb.)

But Dr. Oreskes own paper Oreskes et al stated that the Carbon Dioxide Research committee was formed by the National Academy in October of 1980. This is prior to Reagan being elected president. And other facts in her own paper make it clear that work on putting this committee together had proceeded for some time. So much like her congressional testimony, and I would argue her paper, Dr. Oreskes chose to ignore the facts that she already knew, in order to paint a misleading picture.

We asked the site that published Oreskes et al on the internet for the opportunity to publish a response, but they said that they didn't allow that. So we decided to publish the paper here for now.

UPDATE: May 2010, As you will see later on my blog, the Sunday Times published a correction to their story. Also the BBC is in the process of publishing a set of corrections to a segment of "Climate Wars" that they based on information from Oreskes.

Link to my web site containing the Oreskes et al 2008 critique