Naomi Oreskes on Merchants of Doubt

Thanks, Tim. I'm about half way through the video but now I have more insight into why the Australian ABC is being so ridiculous about 'balancing' Clive Hamilton's series with articles from deniers associated with the IPA and people like Nova.

And why some people mistakenly think uncertainty in a scientific sense means doubt which then means, Sergeant Schulz-style, 'we know nuzzing...nuzzing!'.

It takes a few years, but just like the pro-smoking campaigns, it delays but doesn't ultimately stop the facts from being accepted. We can only hope that this time it's not too long before these vile people are well and truly 'outed'. The ramifications for global warming are much greater than for smoking tobacco.

Yes. Pre-order the book. I've reviewed it, and she and Erik dug out some amazing details of past history , all the way back to the way the White House used Fred Singer to hijack acid rain recommendations.

The anti-science crowd has pursues asymmetric warfare against climate scientists, who are trying to do science, and do not have the time or skillset for studying their attackers.

On the other hand, it is a very bad idea to attack someone who is a published geoscientist, a meticulous science historian used to digging hard, and well-respected by senior folks at the AAAS. She only got really interested in this turf after she starting getting nasty emails and phone calls after her 2004 essay in Science.
Very, very bad mistake on their part. Wrong person to attack.

Iâve read more Oreskes than I really care to. Her effect on this debate has been pernicious. She has done a lot of harm.

-Tom Fuller

She only got really interested in this turf after she starting getting nasty emails and phone calls after her 2004 essay in Science. Very, very bad mistake on their part. Wrong person to attack.

I saw Naomi speak at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography a couple of years ago (it was Naomi's "American Denial of Global Warming" lecture that you can watch at ucsd.tv or on youtube). My impression of her is that in a debate with a male denier, she'd be the one leaving the room in possession of the pair of testicles. She's one tough cookie who won't take any s**t.

After the lecture, I mentioned to her that the local (San Diego) talk-radio hosts (Rick Roberts and Rodger Hedgecock) were constantly spewing global-warming denial talking-points and had invited "denier" guests to appear on their shows. I then asked her if she or any of the Scripps scientists had ever been contacted for interviews on those shows. All I can say is, it's a good thing that she wasn't sipping any coffee when I asked her that question!

Great video, cheers.

Former Skeptic: well, I've read enough Tom Fuller for one day. Michael Mann a fraud? Aren't we all past that yet? Oh. No. No, we're not.

p.s. I'm looking for some good links on this "Mann's method produces hockey stick from randomness" meme. Is that a McIntyre baby?

crossposting:

Iâve read more Oreskes than I really care to. Her effect on this debate has been pernicious. She has done a lot of harm.

this statement is simply false. this post by Tom (âGlobal warmingâundefeated, untied and unscored upon â), posted about a month ago, clearly demonstrates a massive lack of understanding of the Oreskes works.

http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-Environmental-Policy-Examiner~y2010m1…

Tom basically has not read anything on Oreskes. neither had he read Peiser, when he made the false claims that he wrote in that post.

i have given up on Tom Fuller. he does not correct the errors he makes. (another really dubious statement by him above. i only witnessed a single correction, among hundreds of errors)
neither is he anywhere near the middle of the topic, as he continues to claim.

Tom is just another person, trying to make money by spreading false claims about climate change.

Thanks for the heads-up, Tim. I'll go through the video after my lectures today.

@John Mashey #2:

I pre-ordered the book at the time you first brought it up, and have been waiting for May with a sense of anticipation I haven't felt since I was a kid who still liked presents at Christmas. I've actually had some success in reaching skeptics by loaning them Climate Cover-Up (and, to a lesser extent, Doubt Is Their Product; I suspect Oreskes may be even more powerful.

By the way, you mention "asymmetric warfare" coincidentally at the same time an article on skeptical double-standards is published. Not connected at all, just an amusing coincidence for me to find that in my feed reader shortly before reading your comment.

Sod (#5):

Good summary about Fuller. That's why I posted his quote above. If he says its bad, the opposite is almost certainly true.

BTW, I would not post his Examiner link anywhere on the interwebs. He thrives, nay, needs the faux controversy in his bog as a revenue stream source.

http://www.climate-resistance.org/2008/03/pesky-oreskes.html

Oh yeah.. She has no skeletons in her closet..

Ah, was this a peer reviewed lecture or a 'puff' for a forthcoming book.(LOL)

Dan Olner, that's actually from the Wikipedia discussion of the Hockey Stick affair.

s.lindsay - I know you didn't come here to be educated, but really, is a hack attack by ben pile the best you can do to attack Oreskes? The attack you link to contains no evidence, merely wilful misunderstanding of the plain language of Oreskes and the people she quotes.

I doubt if this will win me many friends here (although hi, Sod--I hope you are well), but my main complaint about Prof. Oreskes is that she prepared a strategy to fight the last war--against Big Tobacco, and she and those she influenced keep trying to cast the current struggle on global warming in that frame of reference.

This has the effect of you looking for Big Tobacco like influences under every bed, which is not only wrong, it's distracting from the merits of the case. Sure, Heartland and CEI got some energy funding at the beginning of all this, but nothing like what your side is getting from energy companies today. And the real opinion leaders--Watts, McIntyre--get no funding and no central direction.

There's an element of preparing to fight the last war here. That isn't really helping.

You get a sense of how effective Oreske is by the volume of unsubstantive attacks her work inspires from denialist.

To cap off Fuller and Ducky Andrews empty snipes, cue - lindsey's link which seems to be empty of valid critique. Lindsey can correct me if I'm wrong by presenting his/her favored strong points from the 'critique'.

I actually agree with tom fuller here, insofar as looking for tobacco connections is not enough of a strategy, and should only be used in passing as a small disposable part of our armoury. It is so easy to get stuck chasing after all the stuff showing how denialists are wrong, stupid and taking dodgy money, when the case to be made is much bigger.

Tom Fuller:

>*Sure, Heartland and CEI got some energy funding at the beginning of all this, but nothing like what your side is getting from energy companies today.*

PR and propaganda is cheap, science is expensive.

But if you want to talk big money, how much is delay of mitigation worth? Its estimated to be worth about [$1 billion each day of delay](http://anarchist606.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-much-is-global-warming-den…) to fossil fuel giants.
That's about $360 billion per year or about $3 trillion a decade.
That is US$3,000,000,000,000.00 per decade. In other words the rewards of delay (for an elite few) equal about the same as the revenue required for an Iraq type invasion/occupation every decade.

Tom, you got that all fundamentally wrong.

for a start, why don t you tell us what you have read from Oreskes? because the [link](http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-Environmental-Policy-Examiner~y2010m1…) i gave above, clearly demonstrates that you haven t understood what she did.

This has the effect of you looking for Big Tobacco like influences under every bed, which is not only wrong, it's distracting from the merits of the case. Sure, Heartland and CEI got some energy funding at the beginning of all this, but nothing like what your side is getting from energy companies today. And the real opinion leaders--Watts, McIntyre--get no funding and no central direction.

all of this is false. the "merchants of doubt" do NOT get, nor do they require massive funds. they didn t get billions from tobacco, nor do they get billions from oil now. pretty little money does the job quite well.

and they are extremely important for the bloggers. they give them an official aura. they make their papers appear like a scientific paper. the heartland conference gives the impression, that sceptics are doing real science.

they also form the vital link to right wing politicians.

Please post a link to the dino cartoon!

I actually agree with tom fuller here, insofar as looking for tobacco connections is not enough of a strategy, and should only be used in passing as a small disposable part of our armoury.

i mostly disagree. i agree, that the claim "it is a big oil conspiracy" is simplicistic and false.

but the connections are much more important, than we are made to believe they are.

i was a little surprised, when i did some research over the Santer piece on RC and ended up on [CA](http://climateaudit.org/2008/11/10/santer-refuses-data-request/), describing the FOIA request:

In order to help to determine my status for purposes of determining the applicability of any fees, you should know that I have 5 peer-reviewed publications on paleoclimate; that I was a reviewer for WG1; that I made a invited presentations in 2006 to the National Research Council Panel on Surface Temperature Reconstructions and two presentations to the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

invitations by those think tanks, right wing politicians and fake peer reviewed journals are used, to build a false reputation as a scientists.

without those, people would just be random bloggers.

>*looking for tobacco connections is not enough of a strategy, and should only be used in passing as a small disposable part of our armoury.*

To clarify guthrie, its obvious that unlike Fuller you don't want to ignore the pattern, just put it in perspective. Thus if the pattern is strong it should be [exposed as such](http://www.wunderground.com/education/ozone_skeptics.asp).

Naomi, with friends like this.....

Ben Pile (s.lindsay's link) is part of the [Spiked](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/04/spiked.php) crew. If Fuller and Spiked are both going after Oreskes, that's evidence that she's on the right track.

slightly off-topic, but take a look, how current temperature records are reported by Spencer and on [WUWT}(http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/05/february-uah-global-temperature-a…):

"February UAH global temperature anomaly â little change"

funny, little change, from the hottest january on record...

The global-average lower tropospheric temperature remained high, at +0.61 deg. C for February, 2010. This is about the same as January, which in our new Version 5.3 of the UAH dataset was +0.63 deg. C. February was second warmest in the 32-year record, behind Feb 1998 which was itself the second warmest of all months. The El Nino is still the dominant temperature signal; many people living in Northern Hemisphere temperate zones were still experiencing colder than average weather.

isn t it funny, how you can read over this and get away with the impression, that the globe was not extremely warm?

As discussed in our running technical comments last July, we have been looking at making an adjustment to the way the average seasonal cycle is removed from the newer AMSU instruments (since 1998) versus the older MSU instruments.

adjustments? this will be interesting!

2010 1 0.721 0.630
2010 2 0.740 0.613

oh, by chance the adjustments removed the 7 from the first digit of those latest numbers.

and a 7 as first digit can now only be found in february and april 1998.

>*i mostly disagree. i agree, that the claim "it is a big oil conspiracy" is simplicistic and false.*

Sod, where is this simplistic and false "claim"? Who makes it? Oreskes describes a pattern of well supported nuanced relationships and political ideologies with powerful connections. I wouldn't down play the support and vested interest from wealthiest corporations in history. Some financial support from Exxon has been found, and we should not be assume that this is the limit of financial support.

Not simplistic and not wrong.

Guthrie & jakerman:
See page 63 of this report. (Don't bother read the rest, as it will shortly be replaced by a much higher-quality, more complete version.)

But, in doing that research, I wasn't particularly looking for tobacco, it just kept jumping out at me as I studied the various thinkt anks, to the point that I added the row in that table to show it. I expected to find Scaife, Koch, et al, and ExxonMobil, and I certainly knew about {Seitz, Singer, Morano, heartland, etc}, but I was surprised how often tobacco connections popped up elsewhere.

In Sarah Scaife Foundation and Carthage Foundation (both = Richard Mellon Scaife), see pp.35-36:
it was no surprise finding Chevron, given Gulf Oil history). It was slightly surprising to find a lot more ExxonMobil stock.

The real surprise that between SSF+Carthage, tobacco stocks outweighed oil stocks $29.3M to $28.4M. I just ran across that in wading through "990 forms".

This may not apply elsewhere, but in the the USA, I think it's really hard to understand the role of various think tanks and other entities in anti-science without understanding the role of tobacco. It often funds more general anti-science efforts so it can "hide in the crowd."
TASSC was a fine example, and really gave Steve Milloy a fine boost, and he was there for that fine GCSCT project sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute.

BTW: a question for Australians: is there a website that lists charitable/nonprofit entities & their info? I know the websites for US, Canada, and UK. Some have interesting data.

It is clearly not just Big Oil. Look at p623-65 of that report I mentioned in #25.

One can find:
1) Identifiable contributions from:
a) ExxonMobil Educ. Foundattion.
b) Wealthy family foundations

2) Then, one can look at the fundees' "990" forms, see how much money came in compared to those. I did that for GMI, p.45. In their case, that left (very roughly) 40% of their income.

4) In general, the other income might be:
a) ExxonMobil directly
b) Other oil co's, directly.
c) EM and others via the American Petroleum Institute, or PR agencies, or through other foundations or think tnaks. [For example, if this were Heartland, exactly who pay for those big conferences, and by what route?]
d) Coal cos, either directly, or indirectly through trade associations, or other think tanks.
e) Cigarette companies, certainly a factor fro some.
f) Others, including in GMI's case, quite possibly aerospace companies (they might be unusual in that.)

The real puzzle to me has long been: why did EM use a Foundation whose records are public? They spent a lot more money on lobbying, but of course, thinktanks that are nonprofit (501(c)3 here would lose that status, but I'd think it would have been easy enough to funnel money via various service contracts. "Come in and give us a seminar on current science." "Sure, only $50,000." "What, so cheap?"

By the way, do people recall:

*[SOO2003] Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, âProxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years,â Climate Research Vol. 23:89-110, 2003. Submitted: 04/11/02; Accepted: 08/29/02; Published 01/31/03. this (poor) paper eventually resulted in mass resignations, because the publisher would not let Editor-in-Chief von Storch repudiate it. First sponsor was API:
âAcknowledgements. This work was supported by funds from the American Petroleum Institute (01-0000-4579) (and others)⦠We thank John Daly, ... Craig and Keith Idso for their unselfish contributions to the references. â

Well, doesn't it strike anybody here as funny that CRU was hitting up Big Oil and energy companies for repeated funding? That Exxon gave $100 million to Stanford for Environmental Studies?

The paradigm is wrong and is obstructing the view.

>*That Exxon gave $100 million to Stanford for Environmental Studies?*

Trying to buy influence and establish funding models to their favor has a long and ugly trend. It is becoming more pervasive and the same "think tanks" who bat for tobbaco and big oil, also push for funding models that put science as subordinate and begging to corporations.

John Mashey, that is [great digging](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/naomi_oreskes_on_merchants_of.p…). I've got some reading in front of me.

Fred Singer got $143K for the NIPCC report

Baliunas got $52K from the Marshall Institute in the same year the OISM report came out. OISM got an extra $200K that year

Soon and Baliunas got $300K from 2005 to 2007 from Exxon

Singer got $20K (he was working cheap) for writing a report which pooh-poohed the danger of environmental smoke.

and that's without Eli spending a lot of time tracing this stuff.

I think one of your team actually tried to size the market for funding for skeptics and came up with a figure of $23 million since 1988--a fair chunk of change until you consider how many people were recipients. Quite a bit of that includes money that was given to multi-purpose institutions that took the conservative side of many issues including global warming.

A lot of people have started trying to do the same for funding your side, but have essentially foundered on definitional issues as well--it's a bit silly to count U.S. government funding of the satellite programs, as it is to count private $5 donations to Greenpeace, although that hasn't stopped some skeptics from trying. But there doesn't seem to be much question that energy companies have contributed heavily to environmental organisations with an activist agenda on global warming--enough to dwarf their contributions to skeptics.

jakerman:

1) Big companies are complicated. I used to work for Bell labs, i.e., AT&T, at the time a 1M+ person company. Sometimes the left hand and the right hand don't work together in big companies.

EM funds GCEP @ Stanford (some of the money goes elsewhere). I've met lots of the people from GCEP, multiple times, I attend their big yearly public-can-sign-up 3-day conferences, and it is good research. I see a lot of VC friends there looking for ideas.

One can speculate as to why EM funded GCEP:

a) Somebody in EM worries about the problems. At least one of the EM guys who apparently helped set it up has been involved with IPCC.

b) Get early visibility into research. [Stanford runs all sorts of things like this, where industry sponsors something, has no control over the micro-funding decisions, but gets to know the people and see research results. I've been the SGI rep to computing entities like that. If done well, it can be very, very effective for everybody.]

c) Or, it could just be marketing cover: "See, we fund research." Given how long research takes, no research is going to put them out of business any time soon.

I make zero claim about which (or which combination) of these is reality, or whether it is something else. Having some experience with huge companies, anything is possible.

Of course, the portion of the EM think tank funding I listed is clear. What is unclear is exactly what EM thought it was getting, and what sort of documentation went from think tanks each year. This is why I'd love to hahve the equivalent of the Tobacco Archives, in which one can find the equivalents of "We have these skills- pleae fund us! or This is what we did for you last year! or We could do such-and-such..."

Tom Fuller:

That isn't really helping.

Love the concern trolling.

Tom Fuller says

Well, doesn't it strike anybody here as funny that CRU was hitting up Big Oil and energy companies for repeated funding? That Exxon gave $100 million to Stanford for Environmental Studies?

Only if you accept a caricature of Oreskes argument.

Is it likely that all the senior management of the fossil fuel companies believe that global warming is a crock? Or that the executives of tobacco companies are not aware of the health effects of cigarette smoking? Or DuPont scientists were not aware of the effect of CFCs on the ozone layer? Or that industrial scientists were not aware of the cause of acid rain?

Perhaps we can speculate that some process rendered well educated and in many cases scientifically trained individuals selectively stupid.

The more likely explanation is that they accept some of the science but believe that by "manufacturing doubt" through funding of the contrarians, they can reduce and defer effective action. Meanwhile profits continue to flow while they develop "clean coal", "biofuels", "smokeless cigarettes" etc.

These delaying tactics are not at all inconsistent with portraying themselves as "green and clean".

Oreske points out in her lecture that DuPont dropped their objections to the banning of CFCs once their researchers had developed replacements.

jakerman's link @ 16 points out profitable delaying tactics are.

Of course this is an over generalisation - some individuals are idealogically motivated and immune to the science, some are just plain greedy and some deniers really have been wacked with the stupid stick.

John Mashey @ 25
I do not know the answer to your question but Clive Hamilton discusses think tank funding [here](http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2828195.htm).

Over at his own blog, Fuller comes up with a list of people he wants to silence:

>Your spokespeople--Joe Romm, Tim Lambert, Al Gore, James Hansen--drive people away every time they open their mouths or put pen to paper. If I want a sermon I'll go to church.

I'm honoured -- this is almost as good as winning an Oscar.

No, Tim, I don't want to silence you. Nobody wants to silence you. Your fans love you. The skeptics love you. And the rest of the world doesn't care. You just keep on writing. Nobody wants to silence you. The same is true for the rest of the boys in the band--I don't want to silence you at all. I don't want to read you, either.

in the same way, as you did not read Oreskes? but keep making comments about her?

Tom, do you even notice how you are exposing your way of "work"?

But there doesn't seem to be much question that energy companies have contributed heavily to environmental organisations with an activist agenda on global warming--enough to dwarf their contributions to skeptics.

this claim is, of course, false.

but i am really looking forward to your links, that show how exxon is funding the greenpeace campaign to reduce greenhouse gases?!?

Tom:

After your last try at misrepresenting climate science, Mike Tobis was dead right about you:

Tom Fuller is among the people lacking much clue about science, but who is happy to write about it and to try to attract an audience. This is irresponsible, especially because he does not appear to be learning anything, and has not offered to explain how he chooses whom to trust.

Tom Fuller is part of the problem.

I have advised him to write about stuff he is better equipped to write about. He thinks this is insulting but it's intended as honest and thoughtful and even kind advice. Perhaps with reading skills like he displays he ought not to be writing at all.

Keep on believing you are as relevant as the people you smear or misrepresent -- I sure as hell would like to see how deep the hole you're digging gets. :)

Fuller doesn't want to read Deltoid and yet, somehow, he does. Seems he's addicted to Deltoid. Perhaps he should join Deltoidaholics Anonymous?

Brilliant!

Within a few posts this 'discussion' had descended into a tussle over Oreskes bona fides and useless minutiae about who funds who and is therefore tainted.

Doubt! Doubt! Doubt!

The key message from Oreskes was ... ????????????

Not that doubt is the product! But that the science needs to be communicated differently and better ... in light of opposing tactics! FFS

I don't want to read you, either.

Irony? Cognitive dissonance? Conflicted addiction (as our esteemed blogmeister wonders)?

Or overweening narcissism coupled with feigned outrage?

Fuller, you seem to be suffering from a problem with appropriate word selection.

You might bluster and splutter about the poor treatment you receive with regard to your take on science, but for anyone with a passable high school education you are patently misrepresenting the truth.

You may be many things, but scientifically clued-in and morally robust are two qualities I would not accuse you of.

Hope that works for you. Sooner or later your reputation will paint you into a very unsalable corner, even amongst the Denialati - as I [said recently](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/the_australians_war_on_science_…), hiding from the truth does not change the existence of the truth.

Good luck with that.

jakerman #20 - exactly, put it in perspective. What the denialists lack is perspective, and spend their time nit-picking, just like a really bad auditor. I've been audited under ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, and the bad auditors try and find things that aren't right, the good auditors agree they are here to help you improve things and act differently. And are much more effective at improving how things work.

Tom Fuller is among the people lacking much clue about science, but who is happy to write about it and to try to attract an audience.

We don't have to look very far to see a perfect example of that, e.g.

warming since 1995 is at a rather modest pace--about 1.2 degrees Celsius per century. This is much lower than the 2 degrees per century rate observed between 1975 and 1998.

This means that there are only nine decades left to achieve the rather melodramatic temperature rises predicted by some scientists for this century

that 15 year period is too short to be statistically significant when talking about century long trends. But we're getting close.

As they say, not even close.

He seems to have forgotten or never knew at all that climate sensitivity estimation needs a LOT more than 15 years of observations, even a lot more than 35 years worth to get a modestly accurate estimate for climate sensitivity. James Annan's paper cites an estimate based on whole of 20th century warming that gives a 95% confidence interval for climate sensitivity of 1ºC to 10ºC per CO2 doubling.

Of course, having a flawing understanding of the science doesn't stop him pontificating on what we should do about it.

Please join this new Facebook group if you are frustrated by Canada's lack of action to combat Climate Change.

[Canadians Against Climate Change Inaction](http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=346257176985)

Tim Labert: "Ben Pile (s.lindsay's link) is part of the Spiked crew. If Fuller and Spiked are both going after Oreskes, that's evidence that she's on the right track."

Be careful with that idea, Tim... If you could really determine scientific truth by taking the opposite of what people you didn't like said, there would be no need for any scientific research. You could just ask George Bush, or something.

Ben Pile:

If you could really determine scientific truth by taking the opposite of what people you didn't like said, there would be no need for any scientific research. You could just ask George Bush

And your point is?

Tom Fuller's assertion that polluting industries give money to environmental groups and university departments is pure window dressing. This is the classic 'good cop, bad cop' strategy that was perfected by PR firms plugging the pro-corporate, anti-environmental line (Hill-Knowlton comes to mind).

Basically, the strategy is simple: in order to silence your opponents, give them some money. By doing so, they will be reluctant to criticize you. Co-option in other words. Greenwashing. Its a tried and trusted trick. At the same time, give the anti-environmental groups and think tanks 10 times as much money or even more. The strategy is also great PR for the polluting industries, because they can boldly say that they fund environmental NGOs while supporting groups battling behind the scenes to weaken or eviscerate regulations protecting the environment.

That Tom Fuller digs up this lame turkey says all I need to know about his intellectual contribution to this debate.

I would just like to point out that [Jason W.](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/naomi_oreskes_on_merchants_of.p…) petition-spamming above is not the same JasonW (myself) posting here from time to time. ;)

Eli Rabett,

This didn't seem to get through the last time I posted it, but the sums you mention pale into insignificance when compared to the 500k Mann got for production of a discredited hockey stick!

Jeff Harvey,

You sure you haven't got a persecution complex? Everyone is out to get you, people only ever do anything for venal motives, I Jeff Harvey only know the truth.

How sad.

Dave Andrews,

Science costs, PR and lies are cheap in comparison.

And, WTF are you babbling with your JH obsession?. You are incoherent and projecting like a cinema.

jakerman,

I haven't got a JH obsession, I'm just concerned that he seems to think that he, alone, knows what is right and that the rest of us (by that I mean the world) are in some kind of conspiracy against him.

Perhaps he needs treatment :-)

Shorter Dave Andrews:

>Guy in the street tells scientist where he is wrong in his field of study.

Or

>Blog commenter knows more about ecology and the scientific process without practicing either.

Tom Fuller said:

That Exxon gave $100 million to Stanford for Environmental Studies?

Are you referring to the Global Climate and Energy Project? This has very little do to with environmental research but is aimed at "cornering the market" in low carbon energy technologies.

You are being disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst by suggesting that they are interested in the environmental aspects of climate science.

For more information on the Global Climate and Energy Project see here:

http://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/gcep_brochure.pdf

jackerman,

Sometimes people who are very bound up in their work cannot see the wood for the trees.

Dave,

More glib platitudes? Typical and empty.

Ian Forrester,

I thought you would support research to develop "low carbon energy technologies"

But no its just a ploy to increase profits, and even though it could lead to environmental benefits you are against it because an oil company is involved.

Like jackerman you seem to live on a different planet.

Andrews you are a blatant lying fool and stupid to boot.

Where did I say I don't support low carbon technologies?
Why do you keep on showing your ignorance and hatred for people who understand the seriousness of climate change?

What I did day was that the money was not for environmental studies related to climate science, completely different to what you are implying.

Do you ever look in a mirror? What sort of a monster do you see there? I can tell you, you are a very ignorant, rude, arrogant and selfish person who isn't even very honest. Did I miss anything out in your character description?

You are a pathetic denier troll.

Ian Forrester,

Your continual ad homs, as I think I have said to you before, are tiresome and also self demeaning.

Andrews shows his ignorance of the English (Latin?) language once again. Andrews, look in a mirror and you will see that my comments are not "ad homs" but are a reflection of the truth about you and how you behave on the internet.

You are a pathetic denier troll.

Ian Forrester,

How disappointing for you. You wake up every morning, look in the mirror and then project what you see in it on to others. Unfortunately, the next day your mirror shows you exactly the same reflection.

How sad!

Andrews, you are a pathetic troll who shows no compassion for your fellow beings. It must be very lonely for you if you treat everyone you meet with the arrogance, insults and lies that you inflict people with on this blog. I suspect that you are a very lonely and troubled person but it should be obvious (look in a mirror) as to why that is happening.

You are a pathetic denier troll.

I wonder what her source is for claiming that "There is no such thing as a free lunch" is Keynes. I couldn't find any such attribution online.

Slightly more to the point, I think that introducing Oreskes as "courageous" is odd. Taking the science establishment's position is playing it safe. In fact, she is quite obviously benefiting (in terms of promoting her career) by taking this position. It does not seem like she is taking any risks.

Even more to the point, I think Oreskes's arguments regarding "trust" are somewhat naive. For example, she doesn't address the question of why we should believe the scientific establishment's position on matters of climate while we can safely dismiss it on matters of economics (including climate economics). Her analogy to hospital management does noting to add to the force of her argument. It is quite clear that hospitals are often managed (and doctors often act) in self-serving ways.

(All this, of course, should not be taken to mean that the scientific establishment is wrong on anthropogenic climate change - I, for one, believe it is right.)

It's attributable to Friedman. This point has been picked up before. Perhaps no one has informed her.

> It's attributable to Friedman.

I've read somewhere on the web that although Friedman (Milton, that is) used the phrase it predates him.

> This point has been picked up before. Perhaps no one has informed her.

A bit careless given the circumstances, I think.

[TANSTAAFL](http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2009_03/arts_quotations.html)

Note the editorial was written within two years of the printing of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Perhaps Oreskes knows something we don't.

Taking the science establishment's position is playing it safe.

I'm not entirely sure that is true. There are plenty of (generally scientifically uneducated) people out there who are dead sure that scientists have been engaged in a giant conspiracy to con and defraud the general public, and worse...and a non-trivial portion of them are prepared to act on it in various ways.