Fred Singer Recalls Silly Attack On Consensus And Naomi Oreskes By Klaus-Martin Schulte, Lord Monckton’s Endocrinologist Front Man
By the 1950s, smoking’s cause of disease had risen to strong scientific consensus, but Big Tobacco needed an illusion of scientific controversy to keep the public in doubt. As seen in the new film Merchants of Doubt, they developed superb marketing tactics copied by others, including the fossil fuel industry and allies.
The scientific consensus on human causation of climate change is just as strong as that on smoking, so the same tactics are used against it, plus Internet-amplified harassment of scientists. Fred Singer recently tried to revive a nearly-forgotten 2007 attack on climate consensus, one of the silliest and least competent, entangled with plagiarism and falsification. A revisit of this episode may be instructive, as consensus (not unanimity) is important enough that people keep challenging it.
UC San Diego geoscientist and science historian Naomi Oreskes’ 2004 Scienceessay had examined 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed science papers and happened to find none that clearly rejected the consensus. She stated the well-known fact that real rejections would say so, whereas people rarely bother to reaffirm mainstream science in the limited text of abstracts.
The result had been ineptly attacked in 2005 by Benny Peiser. His claims of 34 contradictions were demolished by Tim Lambert and others in Peiser’s 34 abstracts, Peiser watch, Peiser admits to making a mistake and Peiser admits he was 97% wrong. Peiser used a slightly different database query, changed criteria and then misclassified many climate abstracts as rejects. It is easy for non-experts to misinterpret abstracts and assessing climate abstracts is a skill for which social (sports) anthropologists are rarely known. By March 2006 he entirely withdrew his complaint. Peiser’s attack was demonstrated inept at best, but not a barrier to his later job prospects at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). He never apologized, but his “work” resurfaced in 2007, the main topic here.
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