Naomi Oreskes’ Tale of Meeting Dr S Fred Singer, Part 1 – Watts Up With That?

From the GelbspanFiles.com

Russell Cook

As I’ve detailed at my “Summary for Policymakers” about Oreskes, she – at minimum – appears to have a credibility problem; the assortment of narratives she offers about her own role in the climate issue all have inconsistencies.

One I haven’t covered before is her tale of the late Dr S Fred Singer supposedly confronting her in 2005 back when he was still very much alive. I don’t have all the answers to this particular situation yet, but since she is on retainer with the law firm putting out the most “ExxonKnew” lawsuits, and since these lawsuits are now coming under review by judges as to whether they should proceed to trial (e.g. currently Charleston v Brabham Oil), it would be best to have the basic backstory on hand here, in case the scene in fictional courtroom TV dramas ends up to be a real-life situation:

Energy company defendant attorney: “… then we have the contradiction between evidence-provider Naomi Oreskes’ statements where ….”
Plaintiffs’ attorney: “Objection! Relevance?”
Energy company defendant attorney, to the Judge: “Goes to credibility.”

For the situation here, we have Naomi Oreskes’ own words from a February 10, 2021 interview of her at the otherwise ironically named “Disinformation Chronicles” website:

DiChron’s Paul Thacker: So, you gave a conference talk, and there was a slide talking about climate change. And that led to the 2004 scientific paper that found there was a consensus that manmade climate change was happening?

Oreskes: Correct. After the talk, the only thing that anybody wanted to ask about was that one slide. Many scientists had no idea that there was a consensus on climate change, because they were reading all these misleading things written by journalists, present company excepted, that was presenting climate change as a big debate.

I went home and realized I needed to publish this. As my 2004 article in Science Magazine came out, I started getting hate mail, threatening phone calls. The whole kit and caboodle.

DiChron: You got phone calls at your office or at your home?

Oreskes: No, at work. It wasn’t as easy to look up people’s home numbers. A couple of months after that, I met Erik Conway, at an obscure academic conference. By this point, Fred Singer had started attacking me. I mentioned to Erik what was going on, and Fred Singer by name. Erik had been working on a book and he said, “Well, that’s the same guy who attacked Sherry Rowland over the ozone hole.” …

… DiChron: So, he had all this stuff about Fred Singer, in the process of collecting information for his book?

Oreskes: Correct. So, Erik tells me about Singer and I thought, “OK, this isn’t about me. It’s something much, much bigger.” Erik had this folder of materials on the ozone story. …

… Erik sent me this material and it became the book we wrote called “Merchants of Doubt” because all the key players were there—Fred Singer, Fred Seitz …

… I started digging a bit more and that’s when I hit the tobacco connection. I already knew Robert Proctor and the work he was doing on the history of tobacco. I called him up and I said, “Have you ever heard of Fred Seitz?” It went from there. … They hadn’t just denied climate change, they had denied the scientific evidence on a set of environmental and public health issues going back to tobacco. …

The interview veers into a lengthy irrelevant tangent about the tobacco industry and alleged ‘science denial.’ It later picks up with:

DiChron: You write about a guy named Fred Singer. I wrote an obituary on him when he recently died, because I had followed him in the tobacco documents and for years after while was quoted in the media as some type of expert. He was a particularly nasty person. Particularly what he did to a grad student, threatening him with a lawsuit to scare him. And I know that Singer came at you a couple of times. I got the sense that you were a little bit afraid of him.

Oreskes: Well, I wouldn’t say I was afraid of him, but I did see him as a dangerous person. I’m not afraid of snakes, but I recognize that snakes can be dangerous. I was worried about him pretty early on, because the first time I met him . . . he was a very dishonest person. And because he was so litigious, you had to be super careful what you said.

Now that he’s passed, we can be honest about him. He had a reputation for threatening people. And as you said, he was a very mean person. Bill Nierenberg, for example, he wasn’t mean. He was egotistical, and opinionated, and a bully, but he wasn’t mean. Singer was mean.

Fred Singer called me when the American Meteorological Society was meeting in San Diego … some time in the mid-2000s, before I knew who he was. He called me up at home and says he’s a scientist and he’s in town for the meeting. And he says he’s a good friend of Walter Munk and that he would like to talk to me about my op-ed in The Washington Post, where I wrote about the consensus on climate change.

We met and then he started being really, really odd. “Well, why did I write that op-ed piece? And who was the editor that I worked with? Did they reach out to you?”

At a certain point, I started realizing, “Why is he asking all these questions, and why does he want to know who the editor was?” That’s not a normal thing for a scientist to ask a fellow scientist. And it started getting creepy. I just said, “You know, I think we’re done here.”

But I remember one thing very clearly. He says to me, “Well, good luck!” And he said it in this really nasty way.

And I said, “Oh, I don’t need a luck.”

And he goes, “Oh, yes, you do.”

I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget the look on his face. So, I called Walter about this really extraordinary exchange, with his friend named Fred Singer. And Walter says, “Fred Singer is no friend of mine.”

… Walter proceeded to tell me the whole story of Justin Lancaster, the grad student who I think you were referring to.

DiChron: Yes. In Fred Singer’s obituary, I wrote about what he did to Justin Lancaster, because I felt people should know how Singer behaved. Who he really was.

Oreskes: So, then I was on high alert about Singer. And very soon after I discovered his role in “Merchants of Doubt.”

Right. A very compelling story. So long as nobody questions a solitary word about it, including what so-called ‘investigative journalist’ interviewer Thacker said.

Where does this story start to fall apart? Let me count the ways:

1) Right out of the gate, as I detailed back in late 2017 regarding Oreskes’ tale of her ‘obscure science conference’ encounter with her future “Merchants of Doubt” book co-author Erik Conway — there’s no physical way her meetup with Conway could have happened the way she describes it. Her paper was published on December 3, 2004; attacks against it followed; she meets Conway who informs her who the ‘attackers’ is – again, singular – whereupon she figures out who Dr Singer is. But the one-and-only conference where Oreskes and Conway are both documented attendees was a July 2004 conference. Conway would’ve needed to travel back in time to warn her who her future attacker was.

2) I already covered this here — Dr Singer never denied the health effects of cigarette smoking, he said outright that it was not healthy. But he railed against the misapplication of science when the Environmental Protection Agency labeled second-hand smoke as a Class A carcinogen when it was not proven to be that kind of carcinogen. When anyone goes beyond that in their accusations, it is nothing more than deliberate disinformation about the man.

3) Contrary to what supposedly ‘objective journalist’ Paul Thacker attempts to portray about himself, the obituary he wrote on Dr Singer actually said he regretted not taking the opportunity to directly assault Dr Singer. As for Thacker’s claims of what Dr Singer supposedly ‘did’ to Justin Lancaster — he has it backwards; it was what Dr Lancaster did to Dr Singer, namely libelous / slanderous action in which Dr Singer ultimately prevailed in a defamation court case. Dr Singer was litigious because so many were saying utterly false things about him in efforts to impugn his scientific integrity. When you don’t tell the truth about somebody, of course you have to be careful what you say. My impression of Oreskes is that she can be inexplicably careless about what she says.

4) The AMS meeting in San Diego … some time in the mid-2000s would have to be the Jan 8-14, 2005 one, and her op-ed in the Washington Post was “Undeniable Global Warming” (full text here). Having written a similar theme article for the LA Times in October 2003, is it really plausible that she had no idea who one of the most prominent critics of the issue, Dr S Fred Singer, was?

5) “It wasn’t as easy to look up people’s home numbers … Fred Singer called me when the American Meteorological Society was meeting in San Diego … He called me up at home and says he’s a scientist and he’s in town for the meeting…” Wouldn’t she get personal hateful calls at her home phone number, and calls for a professional meeting at her college office?

6) “We met and then he started being really, really odd. Met … where?? At her home or at the AMS conference? Meanwhile, the questions she said he asked are ones which even an ordinary private citizen like myself would ask — how is it possible that a history professor with no discernible climate science expertise would be offered an opportunity to write an op-ed in one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers, in which she offers dire pronouncements about the certainty of ‘settled climate science’? As Dr Singer himself pointed out months before her Dec 2004 ‘consensus study’ was published, the idea that a “show of hands” validating a science conclusion was ludicrous. MIT’s Dr Richard Lindzen said the same days before Oreskes’ study was published.

7) “And very soon after I discovered his role in ‘Merchants of Doubt.’”

Wait.

In her other narratives, Eric Conway or Dr Ben Santer had already discovered who Dr Singer was, and told her.

When as many of her personal narratives don’t line up right, more questions need to be asked if anything in her claims about Dr Singer visiting / directly threatening her in some hostile way has any veracity.

Considering the manner in which she gained her major fame in the climate issue in December 2004 / January 2005, it’s easy to see why she viewed Dr Singer as a major brick wall in the path of her new career direction. Dr Singer’s Feb. 12, 2005 The Week That Was newsletter featured the following from Dr David Demming:

In 1975, Newsweek magazine warned us that climate scientists were unanimous in their view that imminent global cooling would produce catastrophic famines. Thirty years later, the prophets of doom are still with us, but now the culprit is global warming.

… In a 26 December op-ed published in the Washington Post, Oreskes said that “we need to stop repeating nonsense about the uncertainty of global warming.” But the man who invented the scientific method, Francis Bacon, said “if we begin in certainty, we will end in doubts.”It is perplexing that the lessons of history seem to be lost on an historian.

Two months later, Dr Singer himself aimed a spotlight at a larger problem, in The Week That Was April 16, 2005, Item 8 —Thou Shalt Not Question the Orthodoxy of the Consensus:

… the myth that there is a “consensus” about the science backing catastrophic global warming. This myth has been given some credence by Naomi Oreskes (Science Dec 3, 2004). Based on her “analysis” of 934 abstracts, she claims there is not a single one that doubts the GW story. Anyone can falsify her conclusion by examining the same public database. The real scandal is not so much Oreskes’ biased analysis but that, so far, Science has refused to publish such a correction.

If you want your agenda about saving the ozone layer, you must kill the critic who says the ‘ozone depletion’ crisis is not a crisis.

If you want the news that your college professor recanted his views about global warming, you must kill the co-author who reported this, by doing all you can to impugn his credibility to anybody who will listen.

If you want to keep your agenda switch from ozone depletion to global warming going, you must kill the opposition.

If you want to keep your ‘journalism stolen valor’ fatal problem out of the news spotlight, you must kill the messenger who alerted the news media about that problem by impugning his character any way you can.

If you want your undefendable anti-science logic fallacy about consensus validating science conclusions to go unquestioned (thus ensuring your second career based on it continues), you must wipe out your main critic.

Via every avenue at your disposal.
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If additional info becomes available proving or disproving Naomi Oreskes’ tale about meeting Dr Singer, that will be continued in Part 2

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