A few months ago a good friend sent me a link to an op-ed in the Times by Naomi Oreskes and Jonathan Renouf. Having studied the development of climate science for my doctoral dissertation in the early 1990s, I read the op-ed with initial interest, but quickly concluded that it was nonsense. I replied to my friend that is was silly conspiracy-theory stuff, and thought no more of it. It turns out that the Times op-ed, and the academic paper that it is based on, are full of misstatements and untruths. What is it about the climate change debate that causes previously excellent scholars to go absolutely insane and disregard all standards of research integrity?

In the Time op-ed Oreskes and Renouf make the following shocking claim about how Ronald Reagan, in collaboration with William Nierenberg, conspired to throw the world off track in responding to climate change by cleverly stacking an advisory committee with willing rubes, and then writing a report far out of step with the emerging scientific consensus:

In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president. He was pro-business and pro-America. He knew the country was already in the environmental dog house because of acid rain. If global warming turned into a big issue, there was only going to be one bad guy. The US was by far the biggest producer of greenhouse gases in the world. If the president wasn’t careful, global warming could become a stick to beat America with.

So Reagan commissioned a third report about global warming from Bill Nierenberg, who had made his name working on the Manhattan Project developing America’s atom bomb. . .

It was this report, chaired by Bill Nierenberg, that Oreskes and colleagues claim to be the starting point of the highly successful skeptics movement on climate change. A single man’s efforts in the early 1980s derailed climate policy for decades. A great story to be sure. But it is fiction.

It turns out that the report was requested by a Democratic Congress while Jimmy Carter was President, and Nierenberg was chosen by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to be its chair well before Ronald Reagan was elected. Well, that sure doesn’t fit with the conspiracy theory, nor with what Oreskes and Renouf claimed breathlessly in the Times.

After having this inconvenient fact pointed out to them, the Times ran this correction several months later:

An article on climate change (News Review, September 7) stated that Ronald Reagan had commissioned a report about global warming from William Nierenberg, the distinguished American scientist. This was incorrect: the US Congress requested the report from the National Academy of Sciences before Reagan’s election.

In other words, Nevermind!

And this is just one of many problems with Oreskes and colleagues work that formed the basis for the op-ed and which was published online by the London School of Economics — the Oreskes et al. paper can be found here in PDF. Nicolas Nierenberg, son of the late William Nierenberg, took some issue with seeing his father’s name slandered with mistruths, understandably, and with colleagues wrote a rebuttal to Oreskes et al. (here in PDF).

Like so much on the climate issue, sorting through the he said-she said can be a large task. I have read Oreskes et al. closely as well as the Nierenberg et al. rebuttal, and I am in full agreement with Nierenberg et al.’s conclusions (and if you read them both, I have no doubt that you’ll come to the same conclusion):

In our opinion, the paper by Oreskes et al. represents irresponsibly bad scholarship at best, and a dishonest, almost libelous hatchet-job at worst. . . The dishonest revision of his history by three authors masquerading as scholars is an affront to his memory. The paper by Oreskes et al. brings only shame, not credit on the authors, and only clouds the understanding of the history of the science of climate change.

William Connolley, formerly of Real Climate fame, has looked into this a bit and has concluded of how Oreskes et al. have represented the Nierenberg report,

“its becoming more and more clear that Oreskes has simply misrepresented it.”

Perhaps showing my nerdiness, I actually have the Nierenberg et al. 1983 report on my shelf (likely some of the leftover detritus from my NCAR days) and I concur with Connolley when he says that,

the 1983 report is just run-of-the-mill for the times.

To be sure, many years after the 1983 report was released Nierenberg was indeed skeptical of many aspects of climate science and policy. He also was closely associated with conservative groups with a strong political agenda on climate change. He also wielded some considerable influence in the public debate over climate change, becoming something of a lightening rod. For those looking for a scholarly sound but still critical view of Nierenberg and his cohort, Myanna Lahsen has written in a much more nuanced fashion about the evolution of the skeptic community (e.g., here in PDF).

However, simply because someone holds unpopular or skeptical views on climate change does not mean that it is OK to suspend basic standards of scholarship when critiquing their work, or writing about them. But that is exactly what has happened here, and in too many other cases as well.