Oreskes New Book

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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.