Sep 11 2008
WTF Oreskes: More on the Nierenberg NAS Report
In From Chicken Little to Dr. Pangloss: William Nierenberg, Global Warming, and the Social Deconstruction of Scientific Knowledge, Oreskes et al, “quote” Dr. Revelle as saying the following in Chapter 8 of “Changing Climate”:
“Disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would have … far-reaching consequence,” Revelle concluded
What did Revelle actually write?
Disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would have such far-reaching consequences that both the possibility of its occurrence and the rate at which disintegration might proceed should be carefully researched. [emphasis added]
Talk about changing someone’s conclusion by selective quoting.
Of course, she’s trying to imply that Nieremberg deliberately watered down the synthesis report on the potential collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. I haven’t got to chapter 8 yet, but let’s compare her version of chapter 8 with what I’ve just read from the synthesis.
She writes:
The chapters written by the natural scientists were consistent with what natural scientists had already said. No one challenged the basic claim that warming would occur, with serious physical and biological ramifications. Revelle’s chapter on sea level rise, for example, noted that “[a] collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would release about 2 million km3 of ice before the remaining half of the ice sheet began to float. The resulting worldwide rise in sea level would be between 5 and 6 m[eters].”102 As a result, “[t]he oceans would flood all existing port facilities and other low-lying coastal structures, extensive sections of the heavily farmed and densely populated river deltas of the world, major portions of the state[s] of Florida and Louisiana, and large areas of many of the world’s major cities.”103 Florida could be expected to lose 24% of its total area, Louisiana 27%. The last time sea level was that high was 125,000 years ago, and the world was a very different place. “Disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would have … far-reaching consequence,” Revelle concluded.104 Even without that, thermal expansion alone would produce 70 cm of rise — a not insignificant figure.
So, what was actually said in the synthesis?
Of even greater uncertainty is the potential disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, most of which now rests on bedrock below sea level. This could cause further sea-level rise of 5 to 6 m in the next several hundred years.
West of the Transantarctic Mountains (approximately from the Meridian of Greenwich, across the Antarctic Peninsula to 180W), most of the Antarctic Ice Sheet rests on bedrock below sea level, some of it more than 1000m beneath the sea surface. In its present configuration, this “marine ice sheet” is believed to be inherently unstable; it may be subject to rapid shrinkage and disintegration under the impact of a CO2-induced climate change (Mercer, 1978). Events in the fairly recent geologic past suggest that rapid disappearance of West Antarctic ice has occurred before. However, evidence from radar soundings of flow lines extending across the Ross Ice Shelf indicates that the remaining West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been relatively stable for the last 1000-2000 years. Indeed, various lines of evidence suggest that the mass balance of the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet may be positive, i.e., ice may be accumulating.
If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were to “collapse” (slide into the sea), it would release about 2 million cubic kilometers of ice before the remaining half of the ice sheet began to float.
The rate at which the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could disappear under the impact of a CO2-induced warming has recently been examined by Bentley (1983). He concluded that rates of discharges and removal of icebergs might make disappearance barely possible, although unlikely, in 200 years, but only after removal of the ice shelves.
If the time required for the ice shelves to disappear is 100 years, Bentley’s analysis would not be incompatible with a minimum time of 300 years for disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The corresponding average rate of rise of sea level would be slightly less that 2 m/100 years, beginning about the middle of the next century. Bentley’s “preferred” minimum time of about 500 years would give a rate of sea-level rise of 1.1 m/100 years, which is, as pointed out earlier, about the mean rate for the last 15,000 years. To either of these figures we must add a rise of 70 +/- 18 cm between 1980 and 2080, which Revelle has shown is likely to result from ocean warming and ice ablation in Greenland and Antarctica, plus a possible retreat of alpine glaciers. These processes may well continue in later centuries.
In chapter 8, Revelle spends a little more that 3 pages discussing the possible collapse of the WAIS. In the synthesis, there is 1 page. For comparison, the entire synthesis is 75 pages, and the rest of the report (not counting the synthesis or chapter 8 ) is 384 pages.
I’ve tried to scan portions of the report. However, my scanner seems to be in a permanent non-working stage. 
(2 votes, average: 1 out of 5)
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18 Responses to “WTF Oreskes: More on the Nierenberg NAS Report”
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Oreskes is not implying that Nierenberg watered down the science.
i.e.
“Nor did Nierenberg attempt to deny the legitimacy of the existing science. Rather, he accepted the scientific facts while adopting a conceptual framework in which those facts were irrelevant. The essence of the report is the reframing of climate change as something that policymakers and politicians should ignore, which in the United States at least, for the next two decades, they largely did.”
[Reply: I'm reading the report, and see no evidence of that. Even if it did, I submit that it may have been perfectly legitimate given the scientific level of understanding of the potential adverse impacts due to climate change of that time. Have a looksee at the discussion/conclusion of Hansen, et al. (1981). At that time, there was no global warming "signal" in the surface mean temperature time-series.]
Talk about changing someone’s conclusion by selective quoting.
How so?
Revelle concluded that because of the possibility of the WAIS collapse, more research was needed. Oreskes’ Revelle conclusion makes it seem like Revelle was concluding that the possibility of the WAIS collapse was immanent, solutions needed to be enacted, and no more research on the subject was needed.
Please try to find the text and read the entire thing yourself instead of relying on my, or Oreskes, interpretation of it.
FWIW, I’m half way through the synthesis and haven’t found anything spectacularly wrong with it yet.
I’m with TB on this one. I don’t see that ellipsis as misrepresenting meaning, though it does change the stress.
“Even though I’m madly in love with my wife, I don’t much care for her parents” is a statement about my in-laws, but it contains a clear statement about my wife which it does me no injustice to quote, and which changes no meaning.
“Please try to find the text and read the entire thing yourself instead of relying on my, or Oreskes, interpretation of it.
FWIW, I’m half way through the synthesis and haven’t found anything spectacularly wrong with it yet.”
That’s as may be, but it doesn’t back up your claim about changing meaning by selective quoting. Perhaps you could find the section where Oreskes opposes further research, etc. The text you quote from Oreskes here doesn’t strike me as skewed or spun.
Also, the difference between imminence and immanence is a pet peeve of mine which you have let out of its cage.
regards
mt
How about an outright lie. From the Oreskes preprint, “In an interview with Time magazine in 1956, for example, Revelle stressed that sea level rise from melting ice could one day cause “salt water to flow in the streets of New York and London.”11″ Fortunately, she provides a link to the article in question.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,937403,00.html
Here is the last paragraph,”Dr. Revelle has not reached the stage of warning against this catastrophe, but he and other geophysicists intend to keep watching and recording. During the International Geophysical Year (1957-58), teams of scientists will take inventory of the earth’s CO2 and observe how it shifts between air and sea. They will try to find out whether the CO2 blanket has been growing thicker, and what the effect has been. When all their data have been studied, they may be able to predict whether man’s factory chimneys and auto exhausts will eventually cause salt water to flow in the streets of New York and London.”
In fact, look at this from the same Time article,”This will be only 2% of the total carbon dioxide, but if it is more than can be dissolved by the oceans or absorbed by plants or minerals, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will tend to increase. The greenhouse effect will be intensified. Some scientists believe that this is the cause of recent warming of the earth’s climate. Dr. Revelle has his doubts.” Bold mine.
Please go to the Time article, it is short, I would not want to be accused of selective quoting.
To be fair, there was 27 years between that article and the NAS report.
Argh. This discussion is spread amongst half a dozen threads across multiple blogs, and this one in particular is missing the forest for one or two branches on a tree. So, I will go through and show where the branches really were, so people can get back to thinking about whether the main points of the article make any sense or not.
Following is excerpted/slightly updated from my post yesterday at Stoat:
0) I was wrong to say that “commission” was wrong. Reviewing the real paper, of which many pages are condensed to one sentence, and considering the various meanings of the word commission, it’s *quite* accurate, although there might be less ambiguous phrasings. But if people are going to argue about one word, I’ll argue that the most typical meaning is just fine.
1) But, first read the Chicken Little paper, either the published paper, or the almost-identical
working version, which is freely available.
I side-by-side compared them, and there were one or two footnotes fixed, some made into Ibids, a few quote marks changed. Anyway, I’ll refer to the free version. The TimesOnLine article is a brief summary.
2) The complaint is about the sentence:
“So Reagan commissioned a third report about global warming from Bill Nierenberg…”
One might complain about the use of “Reagan”, as it is unclear whether this was Reagan himself, or people in his administration. However, people often use X for convenience, rather than saying “some members of the X administration” or “advisors of X”, so I will also.
It did *not* say that Reagan appointed Nierenberg. He didn’t.
It did *not* say that Carter appointed Nierenberg. He didn’t either.
It didn’t say that Carter/Congress had *not* commissioned a report. *They did* commission one, but the report that finally came out was *not* what they’d commissioned, it was what Reagan commissioned later…
Why is the word “commission” limited to who first allocated funds for something? When used in the specifying work-for-hire sense, it usually has connotations that the customer has some idea of the product they want. If you commission a scupture, you’d be surprised to get a painting.
Suppose a town council has gotten reports that there may be pollution problems if a local refinery is expanded. They commission a planning group to do a more extensive scientific study. The planning group selects a lead who believes pollution regulations get in the way of business. He selects a team that includes several refinery employees. Meanwhile, the town council is replaced by a new one that is very pro-refinery, the team lead works for that council on other tasks, and six months later, the planning group gets its official charge. The team lead bookends the science with the work by the refinery employees, and guess what: the bottom line is that the refinery should be expanded. So who commissioned the report that finally happened?
So, I think there were at least 2 (A & D), but maybe 4 (A-D) “commissions”:
3) COMMISSION A, June 1980 CONGERSS -> NAS for Report
When someone commissions the National Academy for a report, they expect certain kinds of things by default, i.e., that there will be world-class review of science, that the pieces will be synthesized, disagreements resolved or at least highlighted, a summary that reflects the contents, and peer-reviewed. I.e., they expect the quality they’d generally gotten as the best available estimates.
See page 21, about Ribicoff’s amendment, which *commissioned* the Academy to do some specific things, and one would assume at the normal quality level expected of NAS. Carter signed this June 1980.
That’s Commission A.
4) COMMISSION B, between June 1980 and October 1980, NAS ->Nierenberg
page 22-.
Nierenberg believed “CO2 was nothing to be particularly worried about” (p15), i.e., a different view from JASON and Charney reports.
p 22-24 Nierenberg had been lobbying for a new, integrated assessment, not just the (normal) review, as per Perry (p.23), and had been lobbying for the job of running the new committee (p.24).
“Academy records do not reveal how or why Nierenberg was chosen for the job…overall stature and his well-known conservative politics would have been viewed as assets.”
Some people have been confused by this. Given that this report would include serious policy findings, would you bet that Carter was going to be reelected? Maybe, but see below. While polls were close for a while, I sure recall how unpopular Carter was. It’s a plus if someone might have influence with the more likely incoming administration, although I wouldn’t think it was the major factor.
Hence, it seems like the *Academy* commissioned Nierenberg to do the job he’d lobbied for, i.e., a well-integrated assessment, but of the calibre of normal NAS reports. Call that Commission B. At that point (sometime between June and October), Nierenberg was picked, and would select the committee.
Obviously Oreskes & co couldn’t find the details, so let me speculate. Nierenberg had deservedly-serious stature and really wanted to do it. Maybe no one else wanted to do it, or maybe there was fierce politicking for the job. [I've seen plenty of this, as described later.]
But I’d be surprised if between June and October, Carter and his administration spent one second on this, or even had any real input. Carter was unpopular, and had a bruising primary with Ted Kennedy (August 1980 convention), and then a fierce fight with Reagan.
(”Hey, we propose Nierenberg for this climate study.” “OK, sounds good.” is probably the limit.)
Hence, Commission B was the *Academy* picking Nierenberg, who wanted the job.
Not Carter, Not Reagan.
5. COMMISSION C, no later than October 1980
Nierenberg selected his committee and did so in such a way as to yield a particular end *policy* result. (see p.24-28 for details).
“While the formal charge to the new committee was not formulated until June of the following year, a committee was already in place by October 1980, with Nierenberg as its chair.
6. COMMISSION D, June 1981
Formal charge to the committee. Of course, during early 1981, Nierenberg was on Reagan’s transition team, recommending people. (p.22).
I’m not sure who made the formal charge, but certainly, by then, Reagan was in office, the Senate was Republican for the first time in many years, and Nierenberg had been *part* of the administration, and it was pretty clear what was wanted. (p.43-45).
7. RESULT
As described in ChickenLittle, the science sections were there, but they just didn’t matter. What mattered were the summary & synopsis, and the article describes how they were written. Why does anyone think the science sectiosn actually mattered?
I would say, COMMISSION D was the result, and it was commissioned by Reagan (administration), because it in no way was the kind of study Ribicoff commissioned. COMMISSION A never happened.
In addition, it was a NAS report that was peer-reviewed by the (very senior) Alvin Weinberg (p.59-63), and he *savaged* it. I’d love to see that scanned in and put on the net
The peer review was ignored. A clear REJECT on a NAS report … and it was ignored. Utterly shameful.
8. EXPERIENCE, SUMMARIES-vs-DETAILS
I sometimes was troubleshooter for a later Bell labs President (and some other savvy senior managers). I’ve also spent years as a corporate executive, chief scientist-type, or doing due dilgience for venture capitalists. Why is that relevant?
Inside Bell Labs, there were all sorts of formal and informal reviews of projects, proposed projects, or assessments, usually across divisions. So, for example, somebody might write a 200-page report about project status and possible redirection, and it would have an executive summary, and a bunch of individual sections. (Sound familiar?)
This would come across to our Executive Director (manages ~500-800 people, so busy), and then to my Director (150 people, also busy), who’d take a quick look, smell something funny, and then it might come to me (a mere supervisor) with an order “look hard at this”. Some reports would make coherent sense, and the executive summary would integrate the pieces, and I might recommend “Fund”.
But some would have a nice rosy executive summary, looking for funding … but if one studied the details, one would find that the summarizer had simply glossed over serious problems buried in the details. There were some real doozies. I remember one where the summary confidently predicted a major product on a certain date. One software head thought that was barely possible, but only if he were allowed to steal most of the diagnostics programmers from other projects. Another thought the schedule was chancey because it claimed to have 300 people working on one thing, and he’d never seen more than 200 at once. And then, the hardware head complained that he hadn’t even gotten requirements yet. Thumbs down.
Of course, occasionally people were able to defy this kind of review, or avoid it, or something, usually with catastrophic results. Big egos, really sure of themselves, disaster.
Savvy top managers (this was Bell Labs) were pretty good at looking quickly at huge report, and smelling trouble, even if they weren’t exactly sure why.
Of course, it is a common trick in many organizations to write a summary that you expect policy-makers to read, and as CYA, bury all the details so that one can always say “See, I said that.” This can be especially deadly in intelligence applications where one is indeed giving assessments of complex circumstances with partial information. (I used to deal with NSA, CIA, DSD, GCHQ, so I heard stories).
Later on, I did similar reviews in other companies, and of course, when one does due diligence for venture capitalists, one is specifically paid to dig around for uncomfortable details.
NAS reports are usually the first kind above, well-integrated work done by top people, with summaries that match the contents. The Nierenberg report was clearly the second kind. Just reread Alvin Weinberg… Anyone experienced in this can recognize games…
So, IMHO, all this babble about the *science* in this report is simply irrelevant. The science was window dressing, because the bottom line was guaranteed to be “Do nothing”, exactly as Nierenberg and Reagan wished.
Surely people here read enough NAS reports to know what they look like, and that they’re normally signed off by the committee.
Do people not recognize a process hijack? Have people never seen one of those before?
8. CONCLUSION
It makes no sense to try to obfuscate Nierenberg’s relationship with the Reagan administration, and after all, in 1984, Nierenberg went on to cofound the George C. Marshall Institute… and I’m sure people here are familiar with it … but if not, I’m sure we’ll see some dandy papers on it.
Remember, Nierenberg’s (& Schelling’s) solution for any global warming was for people to migrate. It will be interesting to see who welcomes those from Mexico and the US Southwest if the expected droughts happen.
Likewise, watching videos of Texas, I noticed people using lots of cars to get away. The US is rich, so we can do this better than Bangladesh. I do wonder how well that will work when we’re far down the slope after Peak Oil, even if sea level stays where it is.
A critique of Oreskes et al 2008 has been posted at http://www.nicolasnierenberg.com. The direct link is http://www.weebly.com/uploads/1/1/6/6/1166378/oreskes_2008_critique.pdf
Re: Revelle’s doubts.
This is the second sentence of the Time article:
“In 50 years or so this process, says Director Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, may have a violent effect on the earth’s climate.”
That was 52 years ago. Temperatures don’t begin to diverge from natural variability until the ’70s.
Re: melting
If calculated climate sensitivity is correct, then any business as usual scenario inevitably results in the disintegration of Greenland and West Antarctica. The real question is how long it takes. The only inaccurate quote presented in this thread is Oreskes attributing the “salt water in streets of New York” quote directly to Revelle.
Re: Nierenberg
The Executive Summary lists a lot of potential dangers, but then says this in one of three recommendations:
“We do not believe, however, that the evidence at hand about CO2-induced climate change would support steps to change current fuel-use patterns away from fossil fuels. Such steps may be necessary or desirable at some time in the future, and ew should certainly think carefully about costs and benefits of such steps; but the very near futurewould be better spent improving our knowledge (including knowledge of energy and other processes leading to creation of greenhouse gases) than in changing fuel mix or use.”
In other words, the old skeptic credo, “More research is necessary.” More research is *always* necessary, but neither this report nor the Charney report challenged the ~3 degree climate sensitivity. Telling policymakers to ignore the scientific evidence presented in your own report because it might be wrong, when there is little to no evidence presented that shows that it is wrong, is a strange recommendation. A more rational recommendation is to take the necessary first steps based on the assumptions that the reports are correct, not wrong.
The 1977 “Energy and Climate” report is also a bit wishy-washy in places, but it is also pre-Charney report. It does however recognize this point which should be drilled into the heads of all policymakers:
“In the face of so much uncertainty regarding climatic change, it might be argued that the wisest attitude would be laissez-faire. Unfortunately, it will take a millennium for the effects of a century of use of fossil fuels to dissipate. If the decision is postponed until the impact of man-made climate changes has been felt, then, for all practical purposes, the die will already have been cast.”
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12024
I’m not an expert on the history of renewable energy in the US, but I know that Reagan canned support for wind, and CAFE standards stalled in the ’80s for no other reason than foreign oil became cheap again (a lot of blame to go around, there). In the mean time, many billions were dumped into “Star Wars” which never had any scientific backing other than people like Neirenberg.
“Even though I’m madly in love with my wife, I don’t much care for her parents” is a statement about my in-laws, but it contains a clear statement about my wife which it does me no injustice to quote, and which changes no meaning.
try
I’m madly in love with my wife, but her parents have made it impossible for us to live together
or
I’m madly in love with my wife, which is why I killed her when I found her with another man.
Your sentence is anodyne - the second clause has no bearing on the meaning of the first. My sentences have a second clause deliberately constructed to introduce uncertainty concerning the first.
The question is which type of sentence was Oreskes dealing with.
Atmoz,
To be fair, she put quotation marks around, “salt water to flow in the streets of New York and London.”, the words of the journalist and ascribed them to Dr. Revelle.
1) For context, it’s useful to read the earlier discussion at Rabett Run, specifically go read the papers mentioned there.
Study the website of the The George C. Marshall Institute, which was founded by Nierenberg, Seitz, and Jastrow. note that the CEO was an executive at the American Petroleum Institute. It’s located on K-Street in Washington, DC.
Study the website of Fred Singer, SEPP, of which Nierenberg was a director.
Form an opinion whether these entities do science, or anti-science lobbying. Have either of these entities done actual science?
2) In addition, see Naomi’s lecture at Scripps The American Denial of Global Warming. Note her comments that everyone is entitled to argue for their ideological beliefs, but not to distort science in doing so (or words to that effect).
3) I’ve *never* heard anyone deny that William Nierenberg was a *great* scientist. I certainly think he was. Oreskes certainly says so.
4) But even great scientists sometimes “go wrong”, especially later in life. One thinks of Shockley or (less damaging) Pauling.
Bill Niereneberg was one of the founders of the George C. Marshall Institute, whose motto might well be described as “great scientists do anti-science marketing in the service of no-regulation ideology.” He signed the Leipzig Declaration, and was a Director of Fred Singer’s SEPP.
Given the big disconnect between climate science and the perception thereof, Oreskes & co have been trying to backtrack the history of climate contrarianism/denialism, whatever you call it.
Historians tend to dig out obscure details to understand, in this case, how, why, and when a brilliant scientist starts bending science or obfuscating it in favor of ideology, and that’s what this is all about. The description in this paper lines up quite consistently with the later tactics of GM, starting in 1984, teh next year after the NAS report.
Of course, some people would prefer to keep those obscure details hidden. It is quite understandable that William’s son (Nicolas) his daughter (Victoria Tschinkel), and her husband (Waler Tschinkel) would want to passionately support him, and it would be quite unsurprising if they weren’t completely objective.
How else can one explain, from the Critique:
“Nierenberg believed deeply that science should serve the public interest…He served the American public intelligently, enthusiastically and responsibly to the best of his amazing ability.”
I think that’s a fair opinion through the 1970s, but certainly, I cannot imagine how an objective person could apply that to GMI (1984), support of SEPP (1990), the Leipzig Declaration (1995), etc, etc. Somehow, those elephants in the living room got ignored in the Critque … unless the authors really believe that GMI was serving the American public. It certainly served the conservative family foundations who funded it.
And I think Oreskes, et al, make a very plausible case that this started earlier.
The Critque’s authors know how to publish scientific literature in peer-reviewed journals, so they ought to try to do that with this piece.
5) In reduce this to popular terms, one might think of Anakin Skywalker->Darth Vader. Historians might care how that happened in real life, especially when someone is truly great, with a long record of worthy accomplishment, employs his great gifts in opposition to the very things he’d help create. It would be very interesting to see Nierenberg biographies written around 2050, when America is struggling with the downslope of Peak Oil, as sea levels are starting to rise, and continued droughts in the Southwest.
Dr. Mashey, you are losing the point here. Virtually nothing in our critique has to do with the period beyond 1983, just as almost nothing in Oreskes et al. has to do with that period. When and if a paper comes out discussing that period we will review it to see if it fairly accounts for Dr. Nierenberg’s statements and if it does that will be fine, even if it is unflattering. If you would like to publish a paper about the later years then feel free, but don’t just make a bunch of generalizations without presenting any facts.
Oreskes et al 2008 is nothing like that. It misquotes papers, makes statements without evidence, and essentially just does whatever it wants. That is what we wrote about in our critique, and in an incredibly long post you didn’t cite a single example where we are wrong. You just go off making a claim of bias.
Atmoz actually caught another partial quote example that we didn’t. I’m sure there are others. And the point of the partial quote was to cleanse Dr. Revelle of the “more research is needed stigma.” The point is that the whole committee felt that way at the time.
Look maybe the policy recommendations were too “conservative” in the CDAC report. But that is an incredibly small part of a large scientific report. It is a small part of the synthesis and a small part of the executive summary. The evidence is virtually complete that this was the consensus view of that committee and not just my father. There is no documented dissent from the period. No letters to the chairman. Nothing is in the minutes. No letters to the editor of the NY Times after the executive summary was published there.
I also find disturbing the quote that you used from the paper. It has really nothing to do with the core of our argument and you know it. By the way why do you pick 1970? Dr. Nierenberg was a co-author of the JASON report which you and Dr. Oreskes seem to think was very good (even though it contains no policy recommendations . Seems like you should at least give him credit through then.
As to whether we want this hidden, we are certainly doing anything but that. We would love to have every document, including the full CDAC report scanned and available. And we may get to that ourselves. One of the issues here is that virtually none of the documents cited by Oreskes et al are available on line. This includes private correspondence, which as we point out in our paper she selectively quoted from. The only way we know that is because we got a copy through a different channel.
Dr. Oreskes testimony to the US congress was false. Her statements in the Times article were false. Both were false even if you base your information on her paper.
If you want to critique our paper then go ahead, and be specific. We will change it if you find something that is not correct. Don’t fall back on the “peer reviewed” sawhorse. Dr. Oreskes had a non-peer reviewed paper posted on the internet for months prior to her paper’s publication. In addition this is not a science paper, but a history paper. The facts speak for themselves.
Again for those who don’t want Dr. Mashey to make their mind up for them our critique is available at http://www.nicolasnierenberg.com along with blog where you can give us pertinent feedback so we can improve and correct our paper. We would encourage anyone interested in this debate to read both the Oreskes paper and our critique.
cce,
Dr. Revelle was on the CDAC committee. As Atmoz points out the West Antarctic issue was discussed extensively in the synthesis of the “Changing Climate” report it wasn’t in any way buried or played down. I suspect that you haven’t run out to get a copy to see if that is true. Just as I suspect that Dr. Mashey doesn’t have a copy either.
You keep focusing on one piece of the policy recommendations. If the argument is that those were too “conservative” based on the scientific evidence then I will leave that to your opinion. As our critique states we aren’t taking a position on that. If you state that Dr. Nierenberg wrote that by himself to change the outcome of the report then I would like you to present facts to that effect. Oreskes et al 2008 fail to do that as we cover extensively in our critique.
Oreskes sounds biased.
“Study the website of the The George C. Marshall Institute, which was founded by Nierenberg, Seitz, and Jastrow. note that the CEO was an executive at the American Petroleum Institute. It’s located on K-Street in Washington, DC.
Study the website of Fred Singer, SEPP, of which Nierenberg was a director.”
Can someone please write a “Godwin’s Law (1)” for BigOil? *sigh*
(1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
[...] Naomi Oreskes has misrepresented the late William Nierenberg’s work is taking place at Atmoz, Deltoid, and Stoat. If nothing else, this discussion confirms the obvious- John Mashey really [...]
Thank you John Mashey, again, in particular for sorting out the many strands leading up to
> COMMISSION D was the result, and it was commissioned by
> Reagan (administration), because it in no way was the kind of
> study Ribicoff commissioned. COMMISSION A never happened.