By Ron Arnold (from his blog Left exposed)
Naomi Oreskes Warps History
Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes is best known to climate realists by her 2010 book,Merchants of Doubt and its scurrilous demonization of climate skeptics as paid hacks parroting the fossil-fuel industry’s self-serving opposition to the “consensus view” of man-made climate catastrophe, but that screed doesn’t reveal the flaws in her work. [See this review of Merchants of Doubt by Dr. S. Fred Singer.]
A short, obscure, error-riddled essay titled, “My Science is Better than Your Science,” that she wrote in 2011 is more significant. It was a chapter in a book titled, How Well Do Facts Travel? The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge, and examined the 1991 origin of the “skeptics are paid industry shills” narrative supposedly found in a legendary set of “leaked Western Fuels memos.”
That short chapter is important because Oreskes totally misinterprets the “memos” as Big Coal’s plan for a vast national campaign with paid climate scientists that created the lasting public doubt about global warming. That’s the very same interpretation repeated endlessly by climate alarmists including Al Gore, Ross Gelbspan (1997’s The Heat Is On), Canadian public relations flak James Hoggan ’s attack website DeSmogBlog, and many others.
Appallingly, nobody in this parade of critics did any fact checking of the memos, not even historian Naomi Oreskes, which is a serious lapse for a historian. In fact, Oreskes and the others were using a garbled conglomeration of nearly a dozen different memos from different sources that were collected by Greenpeace and posted unsorted and in no rational order on one of its websites – because they never checked who they really came from.
Critics had no idea what they were looking at in the hundred-or-so pages of “Western Fuels memos.” They simply took the pieces that made skeptics look the worst and patched them together into an assumption-laden fairy-tale, historian Oreskes most unseemly of all.
Had Oreskes, the renowned Harvard Professor of the History of Science, bothered to interview any of the clearly identified sources of the “Western Fuels memos,” she would have discovered that less than one-third of the jumbled “memos” involved Western Fuels Association at all.
It’s ironic that the “Western Fuels memos” became known as “Orders from Big Coal” because Western Fuels Association is actually just the opposite of what the alarmist critics thought: It’s a small, not-for-profit, member-owned co-op serving 24 consumer-owned rural and small municipal electric cooperatives and other public power systems from Wyoming to Kansas. Oreskes never mentions that, probably because she never researched her sources well enough to know it.
Read the entire essay here, it is well worth your time. – Anthony
What was it they used to say in the old Soviet Union?
The future is fixed, it’s the past that keeps changing.
Oreskes is in good company.
“Merchants of Doubt” was an attempt to explain the total lack of public interest in climate, by creating bogeymen promoting the malaise. This means that without public support, new territory has to be established by the environmental movement to implement authoritarian rules shoved on the people. We shall see how far they get before there is a reaction that will be unpleasant for them. Essentially, nothing interesting is going on with climate, the whole issue is irrelevant, and people know it. People don’t care about models and predictions. They react to reality. The reality is more of the same for the climate.
“Research”?
We don’t need no stinking research.
Climatology thrives for lack of research.
If the activists actually researched the material they would be out of work.
Unprecedented warming,just like 3 other periods in our short temperature records.
Unprecedented …weather just like grandma described…
The “data” horrendously massaged, removes the medieval warm period and the roman era from historic temperatures..
Naomi has to be incapable of research or she would not be printing the rubbish pedalled in her name.
My understanding of history is what caused me to doubt the Al Gore BS, the examination of the science came second.
Well I say”the science” but I must concede,science supporting the Consensus cause is mighty hard to find.
When we finally shut down this mass hysteria,the study of our climate will probably have to be reset to the work of Hubert Lamb.
From the URL, this appears to be a screenshot of an original photo.
Lunatic. Her book Merchants of Doubt essentially claims three dead scientists (Seitz, Jastrow & Nierenberg) hypnotized tens of thousands of living scientists to doubt catastrophic man-made global warming. She should see a psychiatrist or an exorcist. Her ignorance of science and incompetence in history are minor issues compared to mental health.
Here is a quote from Oreskes in a talk in Perth (oz) in 2012:
(the bolding is mine)
Well, no. Absolutely not. No. Totally failing to grasp reality. For this poor guy, burdened with a Ph.D. in geology, and growing up in a labour-voting family in UK, it’s ALL about the science. As it is for many of those who hang out at WUWT. (that is, pre-Blair labour of course)
And for most of the right-wing contingent who base scepticism on a philosophical stance, I think it’s that political agendas dressed up as environmentalism are the enemy of free-market capitalism. They are also the enemy of democracy and any form of government and economy that has evolved in a democratic environment.
It’s very clever, this way of setting up your enemies as straw men so you can knock them over, and it probably goes over well with the general public. It probably inoculates them against any kind of rebuttal of cli-sci factoids. Very clever. And very hard to counter with scientific arguments. That’s why these people are winning. They’ve managed to paint scientific debate as a thoughtcrime.
The short article the quote came from (quite anti alarmist and a good 3-minute read) is here:
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2012/08/queen-of-consensus/
I had come across her published work on the Olympic Dam copper-gold-uranium-rare-earth mine in South Australia before, and wondered how she managed to go from doing real science into being a professor of History of Science and a climate activist. BTW Olympic Dam is the largest underground mine in the world, with a total resource of about 9 billion tonnes; it has the largest single uranium resource and among the top three resources of both copper and gold. The rare earths are light and they mostly produce lanthanum. It’s also very enigmatic and its origin is a matter of debate. She also did some good work on the El Laco iron deposits in Chile, which are even more enigmatic than the Olympic Dam orebody.
It’s just so hard to visualize someone who is obviously very bright and capable of doing real research, getting so taken in by what are obviously rather weak climate-science arguments. And it’s even harder to visualize it for geologists, who actually learned about the earth’s history; who can’t fail to be aware that the “climate” has been up and down like a toilet seat, especially during the current ice age (this point already made by others further up the thread). How do you convince yourself that natural climate change suddenly stopped in 1970?
I think that I’m not so much angry at the betrayal of reason, as sad at the waste of an intellect.
I know it’s a bit cruel, but all I can think of whenever I see Dr Oreskes, is this part from a Fawlty Towers episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJAmE3TRpsk
Appallingly, nobody in this parade of critics did any fact checking of the memos, not even historian Naomi Oreskes, which is a serious lapse for a historian.
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The fallacy named ‘the rakes progress’.
Naomi hyperventilating.
I read the comments. Most amusing.
And can’t historical ‘scholarly’ articles be retracted? Surely something more than a blog post would seem appropriate.