Feb 07 2008
A history of the climate change conspiracy by Naomi Oreskes
Beware, the video is an hour long. It’s a good presentation though.
Summary: Naomi Oreskes documents the history of climate science from the work of John Tyndall in the 19th Century. She then presents a history of the George C. Marshall Institute which was started in 1984 to defend the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Since the end of the Cold War, the Marshall Institute has turned to the issue of global warming. It’s main tactic is to attack the scientific consensus through the use of the mass media. Wikipedia links these persons to the Marshall Institute: Sallie Baliunas, Frederick Seitz, Patrick Michaels, Stephen McIntyre, Willie Soon, Ross McKitrick, and Richard Lindzen.
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9 Responses to “A history of the climate change conspiracy by Naomi Oreskes”
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Highly recommended, Naomi knows her stuff and is a lively presenter. I herd an earlier version a year ago at Stanford, and this version (at Scripps) is even better.
For her work documenting consensus, and this presentation, she has gotten to be “The Wicked Witch of the West” in the view of denialists, and they’ve been out to discredit her for years, including last year’s silly Monckton / Schulte / Ferguson / Morano attack, which if you didn’t see in progress, I documented in detail at:
http://www.zerocarbonnow.org/wordpress//uploads/monckton_schulte_oreskes1.pdf
I was fortunate to see that lecture in person. (It was held at the Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography). Dr. Oreskes spoke to a packed house (folks without reservations had to wait outside on “standby”).
After the lecture, I asked Dr. Oreskes if Scripps scientists were ever invited to appear on the local conservative talk-radio shows (i.e. Rick Roberts and Rodger Hedgecock). She laughed and replied with an emphatic “no”.
The reason that I asked her that question was that Scripps had widely publicized the willingness of its scientists to be interviewed by the media (even giving names/points-of-contact). And I wanted to find out if our local right-wing radio hosts (who have repeatedly scoffed at global-warming) had any interest in hearing what some real experts had to say. Well, Dr. Oreskes made it quite clear that the local conservatives aren’t interested in hearing anything the Scripps folks might have to say regarding the matter.
The fact that even an organization as prestigious as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography cannot get a fair hearing on its own home-town conservative talk-radio shows tells you all you need to know what conservatives think of scientific expertise these days…
The only times I ever heard Scripps scientists being interviewed on a local radio station was when the (now defunct) “progressive talk” radio station KLSD was on the air.
The fact that we rely on school kids to measure the severity of of the urban heat island effect might well suggest that there is a reason why they think of scientists in this fashion.
It is not that conservatives are rejecting science for political reasons, but that science has been politicized. If climate science was actual science rather than Gaia worship, we would not be getting the GISS data checked and corrected by volunteers from outside official science.
Recall that not so long ago, the GISS data went a major and radical silent adjustment as a result of criticisms from outside the official truth of official science, an adjustment that had fairly major impact on reported global warming, an adjustment that was never acknowledged, instead the past was adjusted Soviet style, as if the previous claims about drastic global warming had never been made. It looks like more major adjustments are coming up. If official science was actually science, this would not be happening. If global warming was normal science the corrections would have been made openly, and would have been openly admitted, and would have been made as a result of the work of official scientists, instead of as a furtive concession to the criticisms made by unofficial science, instead of a furtive unadmitted retreat to a more defensible position.
James: did you *study* Naomi’s talk?
“President Bush announced today that the United States has agreed with other industrialized nations that stabilization of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions should be achieved as soon as possible. The United States also agreed that it is timely to investigate quantitative targets to limit or reduce carbon dioxide emissions. ”
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=17765 (the full page is worth reading).
Of course, that was 1989, and George H. W. Bush, BEFORE climate science got politicized by cold-war scientists and political hacks who found it a useful partisan issue in the early 1990s. Before that, it was *not* a partisan political issue.
“Before that, it was *not* a partisan political issue.”
Anthropogenic global warming was political from the beginning, just as Nuclear Winter was political.
Just as “coming of age in Samoa” was conscious myth making, an effort to change our culture from the begininning, so was global warming consciousness of man supposedly doing wrong to Gaia.
None of which is not evidence that it is false, or even an argument that it is false, but is evidence and argument that anthropogenic global warming science should be subjected to special and severe scrutiny - that, for example, statistical methods that are notorious for yielding whatever correlation one desires, and computer models with one too many ad hoc adjustable parameters should not be acceptable, that poor quality data should not be statistically adjusted into silk purses.
Because anthropogenic global warming is something that some people very, very, very much want to believe, we need exceptionally high, rather than exceptionally low, standards for what constitutes data - and the GISS and the hockey stick are exceptionally low - which is not to say that all data is similarly low quality, but it is disturbing that that such worthless data only gets examined from outside official science.
I’m trying to get confirmation of caerbannog’s assertion above (that the local (San Diego) right wing talk radio stations have not invited Scripps researchers to appear on their shows) because, if accurate, it speaks volumes.
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