{"id":6987,"date":"2015-03-30T19:08:42","date_gmt":"2015-03-31T00:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=6987"},"modified":"2015-03-30T19:08:42","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T00:08:42","slug":"fred-singer-recalls-silly-attack-on-consensus-and-naomi-oreskes-by-klaus-martin-schulte-lord-moncktons-endocrinologist-front-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=6987","title":{"rendered":"Fred Singer Recalls Silly Attack On Consensus And Naomi Oreskes By Klaus-Martin Schulte, Lord Monckton’s Endocrinologist Front Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fred Singer Recalls Silly Attack On Consensus And Naomi Oreskes By Klaus-Martin Schulte, Lord Monckton’s Endocrinologist Front Man<\/a><\/h3>\n

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\u00a0Merchants of Doubt<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0 they developed superb marketing tactics copied by others, including the fossil fuel industry and allies.<\/em><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0Fred Singer<\/a>\u00a0recently 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\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

UC<\/span>\u00a0San Diego<\/a>\u00a0geoscientist and science historian Naomi Oreskes’\u00a02004\u00a0Science<\/em>essay<\/a>\u00a0had 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The result had been ineptly attacked in 2005 by\u00a0Benny Peiser.<\/a>\u00a0His claims of 34 contradictions were demolished by Tim Lambert and others in\u00a0Peiser\u2019s 34 abstracts<\/a>,\u00a0Peiser watch<\/a>,\u00a0Peiser admits to making a mistake<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Peiser admits he was 97% wrong<\/a>. 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.\u00a0By March 2006 he entirely withdrew his complaint.\u00a0<\/strong>Peiser’s attack was demonstrated inept at best, but not a barrier to his later job prospects at the\u00a0Global Warming Policy Foundation\u00a0<\/a>(GWPF<\/span>).\u00a0 He never apologized, but his \u201cwork\u201d resurfaced in 2007, the main topic here.<\/span><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0Merchants of Doubt,\u00a0 they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[4531,4534,141,4527,3124,4533,4529,4530,4535,4528,705,4532],"class_list":["post-6987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-benny-peiser","tag-big-tobacco","tag-climate-change","tag-fred-singer","tag-global-warming-policy-foundation","tag-gwpf","tag-klaus-martin-schulte","tag-lord-monckton","tag-merchants-of-doubt","tag-naomi-oreskes","tag-science","tag-tim-lambert"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6987"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6988,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6987\/revisions\/6988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}